Trump’s Team Believes He Is an Elected Dictator

This isn’t a joke, unfortunately. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Illustration: @WhiteHouse/X

There’s understandably a lot of talk in the air about significant numbers of 2024 Trump voters feeling some buyer’s remorse as the 47th president’s actual agenda unfolds. Those who backed him because they wanted a return to economic normalcy, for example, are not going to be very happy with the price-inflating trade war he has launched or the public-sector austerity program he has undertaken to the detriment of popular federal programs and benefits. And swing voters surely did not think they were electing a dictator. Yet it is increasingly clear that Trump’s key advisers think of him exactly that way.

To some extent, people paying close attention knew that Team Trump had radical ideas about presidential power over the executive branch, as reflected in the “unitary executive” theory common among so-called conservatives these days. This theory holds that the president should have total control of federal-agency operations, even in cases where Congress has endowed agencies with independent status. But Trump 2.0 has already gone far beyond the executive branch in its claims of presidential authority, trampling the Constitutionally established powers of the legislative branch and now threatening the judicial branch as well. The former power grab is exemplified by DOGE’s reign of terror over the federal bureaucracy, threatening its ability to discharge its statutorily established responsibilities, and also by OMB Director Russell Vought’s belief in a virtually unlimited presidential right to “impound” (i.e., refuse to expend) congressional appropriations in defiance of Article I’s clear grant of the spending power to the national legislature. The latter is implicit in the ever-growing threats being issued by Trump and his supporters to federal judges who have the temerity to exercise the judicial-review authority they’ve enjoyed since 1803, when Marbury v. Madison was handed down.

But if you listen closely to some of Trump’s most important advisers, we may not have seen anything just yet: they recognize virtually no limits to presidential authority, based on the dangerously exotic idea that he was elected to carry out a literal revolution against the established order of things. Here’s how White House policy director Stephen Miller put it last month in what Fox News described as a “civics lesson:”

A president is elected by the whole American people. He’s the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation, right? Judges are appointed. Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level. The Constitution, Article II has a clause known as the Vesting Clause. And it says the executive power shall be vested in a president, singular. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president. That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.

Aside from Miller’s self-serving view that he, himself, is empowered to “impose the democratic will” on the entire federal government, the idea that the 49.9 percent of the electorate who voted for a particular presidential candidate intended (and are entitled!) to give him unlimited power is very much unprecedented. No wonder the people around the president have gone to such laughable lengths to exaggerate the size of his election victory and his alleged “mandate.” It should take a lot of votes to authorize a dictatorship.

Miller is hardly alone in believing Trump 2.0 represents something of an elected dictatorship. OMB’s Russ Vought, who occupies what he has called the “nerve center” of the federal government, has long argued that we are in a “post-constitutional” era in which drastic presidential measures are necessary to restore the limited government envisioned by the Founders. In an extensive review of Vought’s public utterances (particularly a 2022 essay he penned for The American Mind, the online publication of the notoriously radical Claremont Institute), Georgetown professor Thomas Zimmer sums up Vought’s rationale for a massive expansion of presidential power:

Vought is convinced that America is facing an existential threat – a situation he has likened to 1776 and 1860: (Counter-) Revolution and total war, that is what America must face if it is to survive. What gives Vought hope is his devotion to Donald Trump, “uniquely positioned to serve this role” as the leader of such a revolutionary counter-offensive against the evil forces of “unnatural” leftism. Literally, in Vought’s words, “a gift of God.”

It must seem like a “gift of God” to those who want a counterrevolutionary dictator that someone like Trump arrived on the scene. It’s not every year, or even every century, that you get a leader whose supreme narcissism stands out starkly in the narcissistic world of politics, and who openly claims that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” and believes that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump is the perfect vehicle for the authoritarians he has attracted to his banner.

From that perspective, all the high-speed norm-shattering power grabs we’ve seen in the past nine weeks make terrifying sense. As New York Times columnist and old-school conservative David French observes, the judiciary that Team Trump is clearly contemplating a collision with is the last barrier to total power:

Trumpists are ultimately hoping to replace the separation of powers with executive primacy, but if they hope to swallow the other branches, they’re right to identify the judiciary as their primary foe. Republicans in Congress exist to serve Trump. But the judiciary knows its role.

“The primary protection of individual liberty in our constitutional system comes from the separation of powers in the Constitution,” Brett Kavanaugh, argued in a speech at Notre Dame before his appointment to the Supreme Court, “the separation of the power to legislate from the power to enforce from the power to adjudicate.”

Let’s hope Kavanaugh remembers that when the administration’s claims of total power reach the Supreme Court.