I’m not here today to say Donald Trump has finally arrived as a full-blown dictator. I’m not a fear-mongerer, gentle reader, although many people are saying they like fear-mongerers.
I’m here to tell you what Trump had to say on the matter recently in responding to those who have opposed his decision to send National Guard troops to D.C. and his threats to send them to other blue cities, usually with Black mayors, in blue states:
“They say, ‘We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’”
Trump then caught himself, adding, “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
And in case you thought that was a Trumpian one-off, he added in a Cabinet meeting the very next day: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ “
“But I’m not a dictator,” he continued, “I just know how to stop crime.”
In fact, he says that since he sent the Guard into Washington, buttressed by units from six red states, that D.C. is now safe.
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Does anyone actually believe Trump has stopped crime by sending in Guard troops who are often seen hanging around the Washington Mall?
As one friend who lives in Washington told me, “We’re just the same as we were before Trump sent in the troops and we’ll be just the same after the troops leave.”
Allow me to read between the lines here: Trump, days after praising his buddy Vladimir Putin, was last seen praising the vile North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, while in talks with the South Korean president. We know Trump has a thing about dictators. He doesn’t try to hide the fact.
And so Trump says that although he doesn’t want to be a dictator, many people like dictators and Trump is loath to deny what many people like — especially his people, his base.
He then says of his critics: “When I see what’s happening to our cities and then you send in troops, instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”
Of course, he had to send in the troops. After all, Trump has told us repeatedly that only he can fix it, whatever it is, including Trump’s fake emergency that D.C. was the unsafest city in the country and maybe the world.
Here’s what’s really sick: Trump made this very claim — that D.C. was “the most unsafe place anywhere” — during his White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who could only look on stunned as he sat silently and tried to imagine how Trump could think Washington could be less safe than, say, anywhere in his war-torn Ukraine.
Look, I don’t think Trump is a full-blown dictator.
Maybe half-blown. Five-eighths blown? But certainly a wannabe dictator.
However you measure it, I do think democracy is under assault and that the water in the pot is starting to bubble, and it’s time for someone to tell the frogs what’s going on.
Look, anyone who has said, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” as Trump once wrote on social media, basically gives away the plot. The quote is often attributed to Napoleon, who, you’ll remember from high school history, crowned himself emperor.
I doubt if Trump can quote the original French. I certainly doubt he would want a crown if he thought it would mess up his Moebius combover.
But I believed he meant what he said.
And I believe him today because the evidence keeps springing up wherever you look.
It was Trump himself who told his supporters that he was their retribution. But it’s his own retribution that he’s worried about. Let’s see — with a hat tip to David Corn and his Our Land column — how that looks:
One minute Donald Trump is sending troops to D.C., the next he’s threatening to send them to Chicago, Baltimore and New York, too.
One minute he’s firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting low job numbers, the next he’s firing — or at least threatening to fire, because there’s every chance he can’t do it legally — Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for her votes opposing lowering interest rates.
One minute the FBI is raiding John Bolton’s house — Bolton, as you know, was once Trump’s national security adviser and is now among his chief critics — and the next Trump’s former lawyer, Ty Cobb, now another Trump critic, is asked for his reaction to the Bolton raid and responds thusly: “Well, I’m going down to lock the door.”
One minute Trump is telling Texas to do a mid-decade gerrymander to pick up five House seats, the next the DOJ is looking into California for passing a redistricting law meant to counter Texas’s law.
You want more?
Trump’s DOJ is threatening to investigate — or, in some cases, has already begun investigating — Barack Obama, former special counsel Jack Smith, former FBI chief Jim Comey and other intelligence chiefs like former CIA leader John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
New York AG Letitia James and California Sen. Adam Schiff are being investigated for mortgage fraud, of all things. So, for that matter, is Cook, the Fed governor. You see any Republicans being investigated?
Trump, in his dictatorial style, routinely takes unprecedented steps to satisfy his whims. As just one example, Trump is now attempting to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia again, this time to Uganda. Abrego Garcia had, of course, objected to Trump sending him to the torture prison in El Salvador despite a judge’s ruling that he couldn’t. That made him a Trump enemy, whose team calls Abrego Garcia a “monster” while Trump claims his tattoos are MS-13 signage. And now Abrego Garcia has been charged with human smuggling.
Trump attacks our national parks, our museums, our universities, the media, the First Amendment.
But the most worrying thing, in my view, that Trump has done is to turn the military into another arm of domestic law enforcement, one controlled by Trump. It started with L.A., when Trump sent in the National Guard and the Marines over the governor’s and mayor’s objections, to quell a several-block-wide protest. The Guard then moved on to D.C.
And now Trump has issued an executive order that “each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard (must be) resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State and local law enforcement . . . whenever the circumstances necessitate.”
Even worse, in that same order, Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense, has been put in charge of forming “a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”
Does a quick-reaction force smell just the least bit like Trump’s personal storm troopers?
Does it sound like Trump could move on from cities like Chicago, New York and Baltimore to cities closer to home, like, say, Denver? Remember when Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said — and then backed down from saying — that he would meet the troops at the city border? Will he get a second chance?
Are you thinking it’s a conspiracy theory that Trump might send troops into swing states during the critical 2026 midterm elections to coerce voters? I don’t know. I know what it seems like — that Trump could be acclimating the nation to seeing troops in any city of his choice.
But I don’t know where all this ends. And I don’t want to be a fear-mongerer. I just wanted to warn my fellow frogs that, whatever else happens, it’s going to get scorching hot in this pot.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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