Author:
Eric Brody
Eight years ago I posted the following words on Facebook:
Tomorrow, upon taking the oath of office, the next president of the United States will begin his term.
The inauguration will follow a shocking election in which an individual lacking the essential qualities for the office – temperament, judgment, aptitude and even the barest inclination to promote the general welfare – elevated a flimsy hot air balloon of a candidacy with empty populist promises, appeals to socioeconomic resentments and ugly, deceitful demagoguery.
The individual who will vow to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” has demonstrated his utter contempt for a crucial pillar of that Constitution, the First Amendment.
The individual who will vow to “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” is preserving abundant conflicts of interest that enable him to exploit the office to enrich himself.
And this individual has nominated a rogue’s gallery of accomplices who overwhelmingly display some combination of unpreparedness for their responsibilities and opposition to the mission of the departments and agencies they will head.
Some among my friends and acquaintances who support the president-elect – you know who you are! – will disagree with these assessments. I look forward to conversations with you as this travesty unfolds.
His conduct during the past eight years has further substantiated my assessment of his deficits in temperament, judgment, aptitude and of his disinclination to promote the interests of anyone but himself. His having attempted a coup so as to remain in office following the voters’ rejection of him in 2020 ought alone to have rendered impossible his 2024 reelection. Alas, a plurality of those who voted – distributed as necessary to succeed in the Electoral College – thought otherwise, and so we again find ourselves in a predicament that is dire.
Only more so.
His sequel presidential campaign was even more wretched than the original in its promotion of empty populist promises, socioeconomic resentments, and ugly deceitful demagoguery. It additionally and significantly featured vows to persecute his political opponents, as NPR reported this past October:
A review of Trump’s rally speeches, press conferences, interviews and social media posts shows that the former president has repeatedly indicated that he would use federal law enforcement as part of a campaign to exact “retribution.”
[…]
When right-wing radio host Glenn Beck asked Trump if he would lock up his opponents in a second term, Trump responded, “The answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.”
Legal experts said that there are few guardrails preventing Trump from pursuing his plans to prosecute opponents and noted that Trump pressured the Department of Justice to investigate rivals during his first term. In about a dozen cases, the Justice Department followed through and initiated investigations, according to one analysis.
If Trump follows through on his stated plans in a second term, these experts said, his actions could endanger Americans’ civil liberties and cause a chilling effect on criticism of the president. The threats he’s made have already led some of his targets to prepare for the worst by saving money and considering whether to leave the country if Trump wins the election.
In a piece it published last November, Protect Democracy shared a pattern of disturbing pronouncements on this same theme from the once and future president:
When former President Trump pointed an armed mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, he also told them “we got to get rid of” what he called “the Liz Cheneys of the world.” And this June, he reposted a message that falsely proclaimed “ELIZABETH LYNNE CHENEY IS GUILTY OF TREASON” so “RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS”.
Since 2022, Trump has threatened more than 100 times to investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his critics. He’s encouraged “PUBLIC MILITARY TRIBUNALS” against former President Obama and suggested jailing President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He’s called for jailing the prosecutors and judges who seek to hold him accountable, advocated jailing the heroic police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol, and even said his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed.
Trump has also suggested that the government should jail every other member of the bipartisan January 6th Select Committee, as well as senior Congressional leaders such as Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell.
It would be folly to dismiss Trump’s comments as cheap talk or wishful thinking.
The president-elect made a down payment on his commitment to weaponize the government against his adversaries when he named Kash Patel as his choice for FBI director. In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel spoke of a supposed “deep state,” which he characterized as “a cabal of unelected tyrants” and “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” In the book’s Appendix B, Patel presented a list of 60 people who purportedly are “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State” and therefore deserving of persecution. Consistent with the outlandish campaign of falsehoods about the 2020 election that he and the president-elect and others have been spewing since even before it took place, Patel asserted in a December 2023 podcast:
We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.
All of this, of course, goes as well to the threat that the then- and tomorrow-again-president has and will pose to what eight years ago I referred to as “a crucial pillar of that Constitution” – the First Amendment. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explored this at some length in a post last month.
In January 2021, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released a report detailing the astonishing depth and breadth of the 45th president’s corruption. Some of this material also appeared in the compendium that the organization released the previous October of President Trump’s worst offenses. The section headings of this report bear inspection (including the one that echoes a phrase I used eight years ago: “Rogues Gallery”):
- Use of Government to Hold Onto Power
- Using Government Office for Personal Financial Benefit
- Cronyism and Patronage
- The Trump Rogues Gallery
- Attacks on the Rule of Law
- Industry Influence
- Unprecedented Transparency Failures
By the standard that will be set over the next four years – particularly in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, which presumes a president to be largely immune from criminal liability for acts colorable as “official” – the offenses of the first term are likely to seem quaint. Additionally dangerous will be the next president’s implementation at the beginning of his term (rather than at the end, as was the case last time) of his Schedule F scheme to replace professional civil servants with a cadre of loyalists (see Protect Democracy’s explanation of this here).
One year ago, Protect Democracy published The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025. Below as elaborated in even greater detail are the dangerous behaviors we can expect and some countermeasures we ought take.
- Pardons to License Lawbreaking
- Directing Investigations Against Critics and Rivals
- Regulatory Retaliation
- Federal Law Enforcement Overreach
- Domestic Deployment of the Military
- The Autocrat Won’t Leave
That last section – Recommendations – is vital and urgent, and we will return to it often in the coming weeks and months.
Reprinted from Substack
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