The Scariest Thing About a Trump Presidency? How It Could End (Part II)

Part II: President Trump and the 2020 Election

How has America managed to stave off authoritarianism while other republics--from ancient Rome to modern-day Venezuela--have succumbed to it?  Is it because its constitutional checks and balances render it immune?  Or, rather, is it because the country has been blessed with a long line of presidents who possess the requisite restraint and commitment to liberal democratic ideals to put the republic above their egos and ambitions?

The 2020 election will shed light on these questions because it will feature a candidate with neither restraint nor a commitment to liberal democratic ideals, a man untethered by facts or evidence, unafraid to test legal checks and balances and flaunt political norms.  Of course, in those respects, 2020 will be no different than 2016.  In a little less than four years, Trump's astronomical ego will cause another total eclipse of civil discussion in America.  But 2020 promises to be an even darker year.  In 2016 Trump was an obnoxious backseat passenger on the world's biggest airplane, bragging that he could fly the plane upside-down and renegotiate the federal debt if he were in charge.  In 2020, Trump will be the pilot, and we will all be hoping he doesn't take the plane off autopilot.  

The 2020 election will therefore be American democracy's first major stress test of the 21st century.  It will test whether America can hold free and fair elections when governed by a man whose only idea of a free and fair election is one that he wins.  If Trump loses and launches another attack on the integrity of the electoral process, the country may find out how much it can withstand before its legitimacy erodes.

Elections are not an absolute cures to authoritarianism.  In fact, they are the modern-day authoritarian's favorite tool of propaganda.  North Korea, a country that makes 1984 look like Leave It To Beaver, holds elections.  In 2014, it had a spectacular 100% voter turnout.  Voters were asked to cast a vote for or against Kim Jong Un (no other name was on the ballot) in an open booth for everyone to see.  The vote--probably because voters didn't feel like having their entire families thrown into labor camps--was unanimous.  

Cuba, too, has elections; it boasts that they are the world's most democratic.  To run for one of the government's 12,589 municipal assembly seats, one only needs a nomination from a neighbor. But campaigning is not allowed: voters decide whom to elect based only on a publicly-displayed photo and biography that the government reserves the right to edit. One dissident was surprised to see that government officials had altered his biography to describe him as a "counter-revolutionary," which, in Cuba, is comparable to an American politician describing himself as a "terrorist."  Not surprisingly, no one has challenged the Castro regime's hold on power for five decades.

In Cuba and North Korea, of course, elections are not a check on authoritarian regimes because the processes themselves are total shams.  But even countries that have relatively open elections can devolve.  In 2007, a CBS News report described how Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had used elections to attain near-absolute control of his country:

Since first elected in 1998, Chávez has perfected the playbook of "democratic authoritarianism" - using a popular majority and relatively (although certainly contested) open democratic elections to consolidate his control.  Unlike a violent revolution, democratic authoritarianism is by definition a more gradual process. One only has to look to Putin's Russia to see another crafty ruler using swollen state revenues and the ostensible legitimacy of the ballot box to gradually but radically institutionalize his personal grip on power. If Fidel Castro was a hare during his sudden and total revolution in Cuba in 1959, Hugo Chávez is taking the tortoise approach in Venezuela in the 21st century. Different animals, perhaps, but the goal of absolute rule remains the same.

Chavez knew that the best way to boil a frog is by raising the water temperature bit by bit--paralyzing its reflexes--until it no longer has the ability to jump out of the pot.

This is not to say that Cuba, North Korea, or Venezuela are fair comparisons to 2016 America. Trump didn't use brute force and intimidation to come to power and, unless a wave of 9/11-esque nationalism sweeps the country it is hard to imagine that he will get the kind of popular support that Chavez used to mold the political system to his liking.  But Venezuela is nevertheless a cautionary tale.  A political system's place on the freedom spectrum is not fixed; democracy can wither if voters entrust power to a leader who has no regard for the principles of liberalism.

Americans can take some comfort in the checks and balances that prevent a sitting president from hijacking an election process.  Unlike Viktor Orban in Hungary, Trump probably won't be able to silence the press by loosening libel laws, nor will he be able to keep his 2020 opponents from advertising.  Unlike Vladimir Putin in Russia, he probably won't be so brash as to order the killing of journalists, even if he would like to.  

But to tilt the odds of winning the next election in his favor, Trump won't have to.  

Modern presidential races will almost always be close, thanks to the fact that party-affiliated voters will vote along their party's lines almost ninety-percent of the time, even when their candidate bucks the party's traditional platform.  When margins are so close, it only takes a sinister little nudge to gain the advantage.  2016 might be the case in point.  Although there is no way of knowing for sure, Russia may have tipped the balance in Trump's favor by leaking Democratic Party emails and helping to spread fake news on the internet.  In an age when misinformation can go viral, it doesn't take brownshirts or storm troopers to manipulate an election.

In 2020, Trump won't need Russian hackers to dig up dirt on his rivals because he will have the world's most sophisticated spy apparatus at his fingertips.  The expansion of federal surveillance capabilities has been a point of bipartisan apathy.  Over the past two decades, Congress, in a rare show of bipartisan apathy, has entrusted the executive branch with a National Security Agency with spy capabilities that would make a dictator salivate.    

Of course, there are supposed to be safeguards to prevent the executive from misusing the tools against American citizens, but they appear to be highly inadequate.  The FISA Court, for example, which is responsible for determining when the government can deploy spy tools against U.S. citizens, appears to be highly deferential to the executive.  Over 33 years the court was asked for a warrant about 34,000 times and said no only 11; either the court is a rubber stamp, or agencies have been laudably constrained.  It is difficult to assess how far-reaching the government's spy programs are because they are almost entirely opaque.  Voters must trust that their elected representatives to be on guard for abuse, but they have been lackadaisical watchdogs at best.  If something was amiss, they may be unwilling or unable to blow the whistle lest they disclose information that the executive branch has classified.  Indeed, what little the public knows about NSA spy activity came through improper channels:  Edward Snowden revealed that NSA employees had been intercepting the emails and phone calls of spouses and ex-lovers,  A more disturbing, but just as quickly forgotten revelation came a year ago when the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA had been monitoring conversations between congressional leaders and Israeli government officials.  

And that's just what we know about.  

Now imagine what a wholly unscrupulous president could do.  If Richard Nixon had these spy tools, there would have been no burglars to nab at the Watergate Complex.  America has allowed the Bush and Obama Administrations to broadly interpret their authority to use spy tools without a warrant under the assumption that both could be trusted to use them against its enemies.  But Trump, like many dictators, does not seem willing or capable of drawing a distinction between enemies of the American people and his own personal and political rivals; thus far he has welcomed Russian cyber-espionage and reserved some of his deepest vitriol for American journalists.  

Of course, if Trump didn't want to get his hands dirty by reaching into the NSA cookie jar, he could just sit on them and let Russia do what it does best.  Whether it is a supporter sucker-punching a protester at one of his rallies or a foreign government hacking a major political party, Trump never seems to mind foul play so long as the perpetrators are working on his behalf.  During the 2016 campaign, he openly joked about something that no political candidate should ever joke about: inviting Russia to hack and release Hillary Clinton's emails. Although all seventeen U.S. spy agencies agree that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 election, Trump continues to dismiss their conclusions as politically motivated.  A president has an obligation to protect elections from improper foreign influence, but Trump is pretending that the danger of such influence does not exist.

Unless he has a drastic change of attitude, running against Donald Trump in 2020 could be an embarrassing proposition.  Trump will have the ability to track down and intimidate journalists' private sources or bully protesters.  There could be another excess of transparency if pro-Trump hackers or spies are allowed to find embarrasing private information and publish it to the world. Transparency is generally a good thing, but when there are gross disparities in transparency between political candidates, voters must decide the fate of their country based on a slanted universe of facts. The 2020 election could be a contest between an incumbent president who will not publicly release his tax returns and a challenger whose private secrets will have been exposed for all the world to see.

Trump will play fair in 2020, but it will be "fair" according to his own subjective standard of fairness, a standard that looked pretty low in 2016.  There was no card too unconscionable for him to play during the election.  When he threatened to jail his political opponent (even after the Attorney General, the FBI Director, and the overwhelming consensus of legal experts said that he wouldn't have a legal basis for doing so), there was more than a whiff of Stalinist Russia in the air.  But in 2016 he was a child brandishing a toy gun.  In 2020 he will be fully armed.

Trump has yet to demonstrate that he will confine himself to the boundaries of legality while in office.  Before his presidency has even begun, Trump has adopted a the-law-doesn't-apply-to-me demeanor toward constitutional checks and balances.  Speaking from Trump's inner circle, Newt Gingrich recently shrugged off the conflicts of interest looming over Trump's billionaire-laden cabinet by pointing out that if they did something illegal, Trump could simply pardon them.  When questioned about how he will resolve his own conflicts of interests before becoming president, as the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution requires, Trump said: "The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely."  

These are echoes of a former president who famously said, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." That former president's name was Richard Nixon.

The lever of power Trump is most certain to misuse--and the one for which there is no legal defense--is the power of the pulpit.  Whereas Franklin Delano Roosevelt used eloquence and charisma to comfort and convert the American people to his cause, Trump's fireside chats will be erratically re-Tweeted fake news and conspiracy theories to rile and delude his supporters.  It would be comical if it were not so effective.  When it comes to persuading the American people, one can only wonder whether the power of truth is any longer a match for the power of celebrity. 

The disinformation campaign of 2020 will be far more effective than 2016's for no other reason than the unfortunate fact that people will be more inclined to believe Trump when he is president. In 2016, fact-checkers could easily debunk Trump's claims.  But fact-checkers can't debunk factual claims when classified evidence renders them unverifiable, so Trump's fountain of ignorance will flow more freely.  The president-elect has already mastered the art of clothing a lie in secret evidence that doesn't actually exist.  When he set out to discredit Obama's birthplace, he cited his own private investigators who "cannot believe what they are finding." An insinuation of illegality such as the one he made against Hillary Clinton, however unfounded, will carry more weight when it bears the presidential seal.  

As frightening as the 2020 campaign might be, what will happen if Trump loses is even more frightening.  When Trump refused to commit himself to accepting the results of the 2016 election, there was widespread angst from observers who wondered how much damage Trump could do to the legitimacy of the electoral process.  But the unrest that would have ensued had Trump lost in 2016 pales in comparison to what chaos awaits if the sitting president loses his bid for reelection in 2020 then refuses to concede.  In 2016 America asked whether there would be lawsuits or small riots if Trump lost. In 2020 the question could become whether the military will take orders from the old president or the new. 

Trump will not go away quietly if he loses in 2020.  His ego simply won't allow it.  Finding a pretext for ignoring unfavorable election results will come easily to a man who treats the truth like a piece of wet clay.  He might simply declare his opponent ineligible to take the office, a tactic that has already been through several dry runs.  Although every political candidate professes to be more qualified than his or her opponent, Trump's smear tactics go so far as to claim that his opponents are legally disqualified.  He claimed that Clinton could not be president because she belonged in jail.  Had he run against Barack Obama in 2012, he would have claimed that Obama could not be president because he was born outside the United States (an outright lie).  He threatened to file a lawsuit to disqualify Ted Cruz from the Republican Primary because Cruz was born in Canada. (Cruz was born a U.S. citizen by virtue of his parents, who were both U.S. citizens.)  What fabricated basis Trump will find for disqualifying his next political opponent is anyone's guess.

If Trump can't find an excuse to disqualify his opponent and declare himself the winner by default, he may simply treat the election itself as a sham.  Before his surprising win in 2016, Trump poised himself to do just that.  He called the election rigged when it looked like Clinton would win.  Even after he won the electoral college, he could not help but try to discredit Clinton's win of the popular vote by claiming, without any evidence whatsoever, that millions of votes had been cast for her illegally. 

How much chaos would ensue if Trump denied the legitimacy of the outcome in 2020 might depend on how far Trump will be willing to press the issue.  He could acquiesce after a little bluster or he could take the fight to the courts.  He could take a passive aggressive approach and refuse to help the new president-elect prepare for the transition, making it more difficult for them to take over the reigns of government.  He could simply refuse to leave until someone literally evicted him from the White House.  

Whatever he does, there are limited mechanisms to deal with it.  David Drabkin, a former GSA senior procurement executive speaking about the conflict of interest posed by Trump's private lease of a federally-owned D.C. hotel, recently lamented, "This is a horrible outcome that can only be resolved by the president doing the right thing, and I don't know how you force him to do the right thing if he doesn't choose to do it."  The same might be said about Trump in 2020 if he loses the election.  America will be like a parent with a defiant five hundred-pound baby: ostensibly the person in charge, but in fact helpless to make the baby do anything that it doesn't want to do.

If these scenarios seem far-fetched, it is only because they lack the proper context.  One must remember that in any closely contested election, about half of the population is not satisfied with the result.  2016 is far from an exception in that respect: if Barack Obama were to declare Hillary Clinton the victor because she won the popular vote, or because the vote was tainted by Russian interference, then a sizable portion of the population would have been perfectly content to abandon a constitutional outcome for the outcome that they wanted all along.  Even without a presidential nudge, seven of the 2016 electors--the most since 1808--went rogue by casting their vote against the will of their constituents.  No one has yet had to figure out what to do when those "faithless electors" hold the deciding votes.

If Trump loses in 2020 and uses his enigmatic power of persuasion to convince a sizable number of his supporters to pretend he didn't, then trouble will ensue.  A republic can withstand the disappointment of half its population after a close election, but bad things happen when voters stop acquiescing to outcomes that they don't like.  The last time that happened was in 1860.  That year, eleven states refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The bloodiest war in American history soon followed.

There has been so much wolf-crying about authoritarianism over the past four years that one can't blame Americans for not heeding the warning bells sounding against Donald Trump.  The far left called Bush a dictator, then the far right compared Obama to Hitler.  It was hyperbole of the laziest sort.  In the end, Bush and Obama proved the alarmists wrong by submitting to fair and free elections and abiding by the outcomes as their predecessors have done for centuries, even when the outcome meant handing power over to a rival political faction.  

Preserving the legitimacy of the American republic begins with a recognition that it is in danger, then remembering that the bedrock of our republic is not a person, a party, or a political agenda but a general consensus that the constitution supersedes them all.  This will require a return to religion for liberals as well a conservatives.  For the better part of a century, the Supreme Court--which has the constitutional task of law-interpreting, not lawmaking--has fashioned itself into a legislature of social issues and in so doing breached a time-honored separation of powers that separates the judicial and legislative branches.  Liberals have been willing to look past, even cheer, the judicial coup because it gave them a new road to advance their socially progressive agenda.

Now Trump is threatening to do to the executive branch what liberals did to the judicial. Republicans have long professed a holier-than-thou loyalty to the constitution when criticizing Democrats, but they can only truly prove their devotion if they refuse to use unconstitutional means to reach their party's ends.  In 2016, Republicans who got behind trump failed this test.  In 2020, a more consequential test awaits, and America will see whether the people who have a vested interest in Trump's success have the constitutional backbones to resist him.

For a different perspective: 

I was unable to find any good commentaries that argued Trump will not at least try to exercise the powers of presidency to the utmost extent, though other commentators are more optimistic that the other branches of government will be suitable checks.  An article in the National Review predicts that a Republican-controlled Congress will not be inclined to follow Trump's agenda.  Originalist legal scholars like John McGinnis are eager to have a Supreme Court pick who will have a commitment to interpreting the law over any political agenda or party.

Further Reading:

I would highly recommend that people brush up on spy tools and the checks and balances that prevent their abuse by following the links to the sources I cited above.

The Washington Post published an article listing some clues that might indicate that Trump is using secret surveillance tools.

Another weapon in Trump's arsenal, and one that prior presidents have used, is the power to revoke contracts from companies that don't follow his political agenda, something discussed in an article from Politico.

The Brookings Institution published an explanation of the Emoluments Clause and its applicability to President-elect Trump.

Historian Jeffrey Rosen published an article in the Wall Street Journal that traces the growth of executive power and attempts to restrain it.  Rosen is not optimistic that the trend will change with Trump.