Democracy Advocates Fear Trump Is Already Proving Their Warnings Correct

WASHINGTON — Just days into Donald Trump’s return to the White House, democracy advocates worry that their worst fears are already being confirmed.

Trump has declared immigration and energy “emergencies” to use extraordinary powers, even though illegal border crossings are down and U.S. energy production is at a record high. He has pardoned hundreds of domestic terrorists who assaulted police officers to advance his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. He has stripped federal security details from former aides who have criticized him, even though the foreign threat against them remains. He even suggested that he might try to prosecute his predecessor, Joe Biden, noting that he had foolishly failed to pardon himself.

All of this, and it hasn’t even been a full week since he took the oath of office last Monday.

“Anybody who’s surprised by these egregious actions, well, shame on them,” said Geoff Duncan, a former lieutenant governor of Georgia who, along with numerous other Republicans, endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris in the November election. “Donald Trump telegraphed them for the better part of two years.”

Trump, after a four-year hiatus, is essentially picking up where he left off in the final weeks of his first term, after he lost the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Duncan and others argue.

In those last days, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had months earlier preemptively stated that the military would not get involved in the presidential election. He fired Attorney General Bill Barr after he refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to invalidate the vote in states he had lost. He tried to install loyalist Kash Patel in a top CIA job, but backed off when Director Gina Haspel said she would resign in response. He considered, but ultimately opted against, declaring the Insurrection Act to help him remain in power. He even entertained an Oval Office meeting with advisers who encouraged him to declare martial law.

In that crucial two-month period between Trump’s election loss and his last-gasp attempt to coerce his own vice president, Mike Pence, into simply awarding him a second term at the Jan. 6 congressional certification ceremony, top White House and administration officials refused to carry out Trump’s schemes. When Trump floated the idea of appointing an ally willing to help overturn his election loss as the new attorney general, for example, top DOJ leadership threatened to resign en masse.

This time around, those institutionalists are gone, and Trump is surrounding himself with appointees deeply loyal to him personally, even if it means picking agency heads with dubious credentials.

Patel, best known in recent years for spreading Q-Anon-adjacent conspiracy theories as well as Trump’s continued lies about a “deep state” plot to bring him down, is slated to run the FBI, with broad power to initiate investigations into Americans. Patel is even coming prepared with an enemies list of dozens of Trump critics he believes need to be prosecuted.

During his first term, Trump selected James Mattis, a respected four-star retired Marine Corps general, to run the Defense Department. This time, he has picked friendly Fox News weekend anchor Pete Hegseth who, while he does have military experience in the Army National Guard, has no background running a large organization.

“He is intent on consolidating power and yielding power, because that is what authoritarians do,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former Republican aide in the Senate and now a researcher at the Protect Democracy nonprofit.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung dismissed Carpenter’s and other critics’ concerns: “Anyone making these unfounded claims and lying about President Trump are wrong and they are morons.”

Shock and awe by executive order

Just hours after taking office, Trump went on an executive action-signing spree that will, if the orders survive legal challenges, give him significantly more power.

The United States has never produced more oil and natural gas than it did in the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency. Trump nevertheless signed an order declaring an “energy emergency” that allows his agencies to approve new drilling and pipeline projects by weakening environmental protections.

Even more alarming to critics, he signed an “emergency” declaring an “invasion” at the Mexican border. That order could allow him to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and the 1807 Insurrection Act to use active-duty U.S. military troops inside the country – something that has not happened to any significant extent since the Civil War.

“His promise to be a ‘dictator on day one’ was not idle talk. Trump’s first day in office saw the declaration of an immigration and energy emergency, neither of which actually exist,” said Norm Eisen a former lawyer in President Barack Obama’s White House who worked with the House during Trump’s first impeachment in 2020.

“This is precisely how autocracies begin ― by seizing extraordinary powers under the guise of national crises. Once obtained those powers are seldom relinquished,” Eisen said.

Buried in a different executive order, “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” is language that appears to permit Trump to order retaliatory investigations into Biden administration officials. Trump was indicted by the Justice Department both for charges related to his coup attempt as well as his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving the White House. Prosecutors dismissed both cases after Trump won in November, citing DOJ guidelines prohibiting prosecution of a sitting president.

The new order appears to enable Trump to seek retribution against those who took part in his criminal prosecutions.

Trump also made clear that crossing him could prove physically hazardous. When the government of Iran sought revenge against a number of U.S. officials involved in the 2020 assassination of military leader Qasem Soleimani, the Biden administration provided them government security, even though the killing was carried out under Trump.

Trump stripped his own former national security adviser, John Bolton, of Secret Service protection just hours after taking office. He ended State Department protection for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Pompeo’s top Iran adviser, Brian Hook, on Wednesday.

Bolton has been vocal with his criticism of Trump as an easily-manipulated and profoundly ignorant leader, including in a book he wrote about his time in Trump’s White House. Pompeo earned Trump’s wrath, according to two former Trump White House officials, merely by contemplating a 2024 presidential campaign against Trump.

“Pompeo flirted with running,” one told HuffPoston condition of anonymity.

It is unclear what Hook did to anger Trump, but it is possible his only offense was working for Pompeo. Trump posted on social media earlier this month that any person who worked for any one of a long list of his Republican critics would be banned from working in his administration.

“It would be helpful if you would not send, or recommend to us, people who worked with, or are endorsed by, Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, General(?) Mark Milley, James Mattis, Mark Yesper, or any of the other people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, more commonly known as TDS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Trump wrote.

Trump last week said he ended the security teams because they shouldn’t go on indefinitely. “Do you want to have a large detail of people guarding people for the rest of their lives? I mean, there’s risks to everything,” he told reporters.

L’etat c’est Trump

As he did in his first administration, Trump has continued behavior that experts associate with autocracies — using his position to enrich himself or engaging in quid-pro-quo arrangements that, prior to the Trump era, would have been universally criticized as open corruption.

In his first term, Trump owned a hotel five blocks from the White House that became the central gathering spot in the city for administration officials and both domestic and foreign lobbyists. Some international delegations took out large blocks of rooms during visits.

On the Friday before taking office, Trump launched a scheme that could dwarf what he made from the hotel: a cryptocurrency token. Like so many “investments” in the cryptocurrency landscape, it is entirely speculative, with many buyers hoping they can eventually sell it to someone else at an even higher price. Trump could potentially make billions of dollars, both from Trump supporters who genuinely value the token and from foreign interests who don’t care whether the “$TRUMP” coin retains value but just want to put money directly into his pocket.

Trump has also made clear that he is willing to base policy decisions on personal considerations. Current U.S. law requires that the Chinese social media app TikTok be shut down or sold to an American buyer — something Trump in his first term wanted to accomplish by executive order. Yet Trump flipped his position completely last year after meeting a GOP megadonor who holds a financial stake in the company. And on Monday, he said he gave the platform a 75-day reprieve because he believes that videos his campaign posted to it helped him win younger voters. “I have a warm spot for TikTok that I didn’t have originally,” he said.

Days later, he released from prison the creator of the notorious Silk Road web site, who had been convicted for narcotics trafficking and other crimes tied to the overdose deaths of six people. Trump, who while campaigning said that drug dealers should be executed, said he released Ross Ulbricht because libertarians wanted him freed and they supported him in November.

“Take his words very seriously. There’s still this illusion that he doesn’t mean what he says, that he’s not going to go through with it,” said Protect Democracy’s Carpenter, who has been warning for years of Trump’s potential abuse of the pardon power to get away with extralegal violence. “That is a farce.”

The most dramatic and potentially most worrisome action Trump took in his first week, though, was his swift release from prison of hundreds of his followers who had been convicted of violent attacks on police officers on Jan. 6, democracy advocates said.

Their actions that day — the use of violence or the threat of violence to effect a political outcome — meet the definition of terrorism. That Trump was willing to free people who had beaten officers with flagpoles, baseball bats, sticks and other objects, or attacked them with bear spray and tasers, sends a message to his followers that violence committed on his behalf will not be punished, New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said.

“Authoritarianism is the conversion of rule of law into rule by the lawless. He needs the people with those skill sets on his side,” she said.

Duncan, who prior to his party’s takeover by Trump had been considered a conservative, said the only way Trump can be stopped from further eroding American democracy is if Duncan’s former party mates turn on him for the sake of the country.

“Until Republicans grow a spine and hold him accountable, he’s going to keep doing it,” he said, adding that he is not particularly hopeful of that happening. “This has the possibility of being the longest four years in American history.”