After fours years in the wilderness, Donald Trump's restoration presidency also threatens to be a retribution presidency.
In January 2017, when Donald Trump delivered his first inaugural address, passages read like a declaration of war on Washington.
"Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another," he intoned, as his insurgent presidential campaign reached its triumphant fruition, "we are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the American people." From the outset, however, there was the suspicion that America's 45th president wanted power to be vested primarily in an American personage: Donald J. Trump. His boast, after all, at the 2016 Republican convention had been: "I alone can fix it."
In the planning of those inaugural festivities, Trump had revealed a penchant for authoritarian flourishes. "Make it look like North Korea," he reportedly declared at one of the planning sessions, "tanks and choppers." Afterwards, he tried to create the false sense that record-breaking crowds had listened to his inaugural address, even though aerial photographs showed Barack Obama had attracted a larger throng. When these outlandish boasts blew up into the first controversy of his fledging presidency, White House aide Kellyanne Conway talked of "alternative facts," an ominously Orwellian-sounding phrase.
Immediately after entering the Oval Office in 2017, Trump signalled power would flow through the tip of his Sharpie pen by signing executive orders intended to bypass Congress — a device at his disposal commonly used by his predecessors. Quickly, however, Trump realised that the swamp, as he referred to the nation's capital, was not so easy to drain. When the courts repeatedly blocked what become known as "the Muslim ban", a series of executive orders restricting entry into America from predominantly Muslim countries, Trump launched a verbal assault on the federal judiciary. Much to his annoyance, Congress failed to repeal Obamacare, the signature achievement of his predecessor's presidency, even though Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. White House aides, and other federal officials, often did not carry out his orders, sometimes in the hope, we later learnt from fly-on-the-wall memoirs, that he would forget ever having issued them. Repeatedly, then, Trump was thwarted and frustrated, something he is determined to avoid when he makes his return to the White House on January 20, 2025.
Senior former administration officials, who sought to restrain Trump during his first term in office, have placed on the public record concerns over his autocratic leanings. Retired general Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the legendary Washington Post journalist, Bob Woodward, that Trump was "fascist to the core" and "the most dangerous person to this country". Another former general, John Kelly, Trump's one-time White House chief of staff, said his former boss fitted into "the general definition of fascist", and "certainly prefers the dictator approach to government". This time, however, these kind of figures who were labelled the "grown-ups in the room" will not be such a constraining presence. It's a key reason why Trump 2.0 could have more authoritarian overtones than Trump 1.0.
Loyalists will staff his White House. Trump has promised to as he put in on his social media platform Truth Social, by purging the civil service of career officials and experts whose thinking does not align with MAGA orthodoxy. A detailed directory of disloyal government officials already exists from the first Trump administration, according to reporting from Axios, which could become a second term "you're fired" list.
To that end, Trump has promised to revive what has been called "Schedule F", an executive order from his first administration, later rescinded by Joe Biden, which made it easier to sack officials that he refers to as "deep staters."
Whereas Trump himself appeared shocked by his victory in 2016, and prepared little in the way of detailed policy, this time Trumpian think tanks have produced blueprints. The Heritage Foundation has published its Project 2025 which calls for the entire federal bureaucracy to be placed under the direct of the president — although its 900-page manifesto gained such notoriety during the campaign that Trump sought to distance himself from it. The lesser-known, but more influential, America First Policy Institute has already prepared some 300 executive orders for the president to consider signing. Like Project 2025, its focus has been on radically reshaping the federal government to banish civil servants deemed liberal, left-wing or not sufficiently Trumpian.
Trump's restoration presidency also threatens to be a retribution presidency. A fear is that he will weaponise the Justice Department by staffing it with hardline Trump loyalists ready to override career employees in deciding who to target with federal prosecutions. Back in June, Reuters reported, these would be "staunch conservatives unlikely to say 'no' to controversial orders from the White House".
Hours after Trump was declared president-elect, Politico published a potential enemies list. It includes Joe Biden, who Trump said in June should be "arrested for treason," Kamala Harris, who he argued should be "arrested" for allowing an "invasion" at the southern border, and Nancy Pelosi, who he suggested "could've gone to jail" for theatrically ripping up his speech, as she stood behind him on the dais of the House of Representatives at the conclusion of his 2020 State of the Union address.
The former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who led the investigation into the January 6 insurrection, has good reason to fear Trump's vengeance. She "should go to jail", he said, because she is "guilty of treason." Then there is the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, who litigated the case which made Trump a convicted felon. The "prosecutor should be prosecuted," said Trump during the trial. Trump's bark is often worse is his bite, but never before has an incoming president spoken so flagrantly about targeting his political opponents.
Eviscerating the firewall which has long existed between the White House and the Justice Department would mark a radical departure for an arm of the federal bureaucracy whose mission statement asserts "independence and impartiality". It would also mark a dramatic reversal of fortune for Trump. Jack Smith, the special counsel who has launched two federal prosecutions against Trump over his mishandling of classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 federal election, has already asked for a pause in the filing deadlines, a clear sign he is winding down these cases. Should they still be pending when Trump takes office, the Justice Department — his Justice Department — would instantly make them go away. Last month, Trump promised to "fire" Smith on his first day back in the White House — even though the special counsel is not a presidential appointee — and called for him to be "thrown out of the country."
The FBI, an agency which brought successful prosecutions against those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, might also have its wings clipped. Here the intention is to allot some of its workload to other federal agencies.
Clearly, Trump intends to use his executive authority to the full, which raises concerns over abuse of power. The United States is about to learn more about the authority of the presidency. Critics of the new Trump administration fear a government ethics lesson from hell.
The founding fathers prescribed the powers of the presidency with George Washington, the country's first leader, very much in mind. That partly explains why the office was so expansive and ill-defined. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, the design of Congress took up more time. When it came to the presidency, the most protracted discussions centred on how to elect and how to impeach a president, a punishment meted out by the House of Representatives only four times in history, two of which were against Donald Trump.
In delineating the separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary, the framers of the constitution believed the military commander who had surrendered his sword at the end of the Revolutionary War would exercise the same self-restraint as president. Put another way, Washington would be his own check and balance.
Originally, Congress was supposed to exercise more power than the presidency. Nonetheless, the framers granted George Washington a panoply of prerogatives. As well as making the former general the commander-in-chief of the army and navy, he could veto legislation, appoint ministers, ambassadors and Supreme Court justices, pardon those found guilty by the federal judiciary and make treaties, so long as two-thirds of senators concurred.
The framers of the constitution had the foresight to imagine a world without the father of the nation. The maxim "in Washington we trust" only went so far. Checks and balances, placed in the hands of Congress and the courts, made sure presidential power would never become untrammelled and that America would never have its own iteration of an autocratic monarch. Yet even though Washington was not given constitutional carte blanche, a paradox of the new republic was that the new American head of state had considerably more power than the old British king.
The debate over the job title for this new role underscored its exulted status. "His Elective Highness" and "His Highness the President of the United States of America, and "Protector of their Liberties" were early contenders. His Supremacy, His Mightiness, His Magistracy and even His Majesty were considered. George Washington, however, favoured a job description which sounded republican rather than regal: the President of the United States of America.
Even so, the founders had created an "imperial presidency", a term popularised by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon's lawlessness first came to light. But Schlesinger was referring not just to Nixon but the awesome powers vested in the presidency from the start.
This made presidential power open to abuse. As the Harvard academics Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note in their seminal 2018 study, How Democracies Die: "The Constitution is virtually silent on the president's authority to act unilaterally, via decrees or executive orders, and it does not define the limits of executive power during crises." There are gaps and loopholes in the US constitution that presidents can exploit.
One such omission is in what, if any, circumstances should a president enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution. That is why the Supreme Court this year considered the case docketed Trump v. United States, which stemmed from the federal case brought against the former president in relation to the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. In a landmark ruling, the justices granted presidential immunity from criminal prosecution in all of a president's "official acts". The decision, in which the court broke 6-3 along ideological lines, provoked outrage. Firstly, it slowed the wheels of justice, so that the federal case against Trump did not reach trial before the 2024 election. More momentously, it appeared to place the presidency above the law by granting immunity from prosecution when it came to "official acts", an ambiguous term. As Samuel Breidbart of the Brennan Center for Justice complained at the time: "This practically invites future presidents to use the levers of the federal government to commit crimes." Now that Trump will return to the White House, with vengeance on his mind, the ruling from the conservative-dominated court potentially hands him a constitutional cudgel.
An irony here is that back in 2022, while pushing the "big lie" about being cheated out of victory in the 2020 election, Trump called for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution". But even before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on presidential immunity, the constitution granted awesome and sometimes inadequately defined powers. Again, we could be about to discover just how far a president can and can't go. Like his first four years in office, Trump 2.0 will likely test the limits of the constitution.
What makes Donald Trump's victory so weighty is not just its magnitude. Not since George W. Bush 20 years ago has a Republican won a majority of the nationwide popular vote. It is that some 72 million Americans, more than of half of the electorate, have clicked on the terms and conditions of a second Trump term after witnessing what happened at the end of his first. They watched January 6 unfold. Some are doubtless aware that Trump is alleged to have expressed support for the MAGA mob when chants broke out of "hang Mike Pence," his then vice-president. Trump has been charged in four separate cases, and already been found guilty on all 34 counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels. Yet now, tacitly or explicitly, Trump's anti-democratic behaviour has been validated democratically. His personal victory is almost certain to be emboldening. Victory could be interpreted as a mandate granting him more authority to be authoritarian.
This would not mark a dramatic break with US history. The country has had authoritarian presidents in the past. American strongmen, moreover, have often been placed on plinths and pedestals. George Washington could easily have abused his high office, given he was the subject of so much idolatry. Yet this American Cincinnatus never encouraged hero worship and was circumspect in his use of presidential power.
By contrast, America's seventh president, Andrew Jackson, another former general, had no such qualms. This master of the masses, a self-styled "peoples' president", rode roughshod over Congress, and rejected the orthodoxy that the legislative branch was superior to the executive. Vengeful and mean-spirited, Jackson bludgeoned opponents, frequently sacked cabinet members and carried out the vicious "Trail of Tears" forced displacement of thousands of Native Americans from their land. Even friendly historians have likened him to an "American Caesar".
So maybe it is cause for concern that Trump has come to regard the ultra-nationalist as something of a presidential kindred spirit, placing his portrait in the Oval Office and making a pilgrimage in 2017 to Jackson's former slave plantation, The Hermitage. "Inspirational visit," Trump commented afterwards, "I have to tell you, I'm a fan."
Yet it is also important to point out that Democrats have long venerated Jackson because of his role in the founding of their party. Only in the past decade have Democrats moved to rename their traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners, to distance the party from these slave-owning presidents. His portrait still adorns the $20 bill, demonstrating how authoritarians remain mainstream historical figures.
Other heroes of the American story have displayed despotic leanings. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln trashed the First Amendment by attacking free speech and suspended the legal protection of habeas corpus. During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was frequently assailed for being an American dictator after expanding the peacetime powers of the presidency and trying to pack an obstructionist Supreme Court with allies. In this era of national and international peril, when totalitarians were on the rise in Europe, FDR also cast aside the norm set by George Washington that presidents should serve only two terms. However, he won re-election three times, proving how Americans were prepared to repeatedly endorse a president operating at the limits of the constitution. This had been previewed at his inauguration in 1933, when the line from his speech which drew the loudest applause was his call for "broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe". Plaudits also came from the press. "For Dictatorship if Necessary" read the supportive headline the following morning in the New York Herald Tribune.
In the post-war years, it is also worth recalling the fate of Richard Nixon. As well as being the only occupant of the White House to resign from office, Nixon would likely have become the first presidential felon had his successor, President Gerald Ford, not conferred a pardon. Yet despite being the villain of the Watergate scandal and despite his other constitutional transgressions, including the secret war waged in Cambodia, Nixon was rehabilitated later in life and sanctified after his death. His funeral in 1994 was attended by the full complement of living presidents, Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton. For a former president once cast as cast as America's biggest political villain, these ceremonial rites felt like a posthumous reaffirmation of his pardon.
For Trump, the road back to the White House has not followed a path of redemption, largely because so many of his supporters do not look upon him as a presidential sinner. To many, the prosecutions mounted against him were a witch hunt. Trump's Democratic tormentors are the transgressors.
Even before Trump camp down that gleaming golden escalator in 2015, a body of polling data pointed to unexpectedly strong public support for presidents who trampled on the Constitution. Back in the mid-1990s, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship would be a "good" or "very good" thing. By 2014, it had risen to one in six. Survey data gathered between 2016 and 2017 found that almost a third of citizens believed that following the "will of the people" was more important than abiding by constitutional principles. Overall, almost a fifth of Americans were "highly disposed towards authoritarianism". Matthew C. MacWilliams, the academic who gathered much of the data, concluded: "Trump support is firmly rooted in American authoritarianism." More recently, in September 2022, a poll conducted by Axios-Ipsos found that half of Republicans preferred "strong, unelected leaders" over "weak elected ones."
So when Trump floated the idea during the 2020 campaign of "negotiating" a third term in office, liberal critics expressed outrage that he was violating the 22nd Amendment brought in after the death of FDR which limited presidents to two terms, but not his MAGA brethren. Likewise, his talk of terminating the constitution was not disqualifying. Quite the opposite. For many of Trump's MAGA diehards, the president-elect's authoritarian tendencies form part of his appeal.
The American political scientist Richard Hofstadter spoke in the 1960s of "a paranoid style" in American politics, which has become something of an analytical trope during what can now be called the Trump era. But there has also long been an authoritarian style in American politics.
With ample justification, Trump opponents believe he poses a threat to American democracy. His role on January 6, combined with his law-breaking and norm-busting, offers proof. Maybe he could preside over the descent into an American anocracy, a grey area between democracy and autocracy. Maybe the checks and balances of the US constitution, which are sure to face another Trumpian stress test, will not constrain him.
Sometimes in the past, when presidents overstepped the mark, it was their own party which restrained them. Nixon was told to resign by a delegation of senior Republican lawmakers, which made his position untenable. Democrats opposed FDR's effort to expand the Supreme Court. But political checks on Trump are likely no longer there. Prominent Republican critics, such as former congresswoman Liz Cheney, have been purged from the party. His vice-president-elect JD Vance is unlikely to offer much pushback (Vance is already on the record as saying he would not have certified the 2020 election had he been in Mike Pence's shoes on January 6). Trump's mandate, along with the fear of facing primary challenges if they go against the president, is likely to cow the Republican congressional caucuses.
When, in December last year, Trump was asked by his Fox News buddy Sean Hannity: "You're not going to be a dictator, are you?" Trump replied: "No, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator.'"
America and the wider world will be watching to see if he deviates from that pledge.
Credits
Words: Nick Bryant
Visuals: Lindsay Dunbar, Reuters
Editor: Leigh Tonkin
