For many, the evidence is in: Donald Trump wants to be an autocrat. If you haven’t read an op-ed or heard a radio, TV or podcast commentator make that case, it’s probably because you’ve tried hard to avoid doing so. It would require virtually never watching cable news, including pro-Trump outlets, because there are few things Fox News and its imitators love more than running clips of MSNBC hosts and other “resistance” types, not to mention Democratic politicians, melting down over Trump’s “war on democracy,” “authoritarian power-grabs,” etc.
Move further to the right, and you’ll find populists who want Trump to be an autocrat. They use terms like “Red Caesarism,” or “neomonarchism,” while others pine for an American Pinochet or Francisco Franco or compare Trump to biblical figures like the Persian King Cyrus or ancient Israel’s King David. I can’t really blame anyone for taking these pathetic Bonapartists at their word.
In fairness, Trump recently said “I’m not a dictator.” Though he did add that as president he can do “whatever I want.” Still, I know it’s a lot to ask, but let’s put aside the question of whether Trump actually wants to be a dictator.
There’s a lesser charge that is much easier to prove. Trump very much wants people to talk about him like he’s a dictator. Whether it’s cosplaying, trolling or something more sinister, his posturing is a surefire way to guarantee that people will talk about him and his strength because his detractors and defenders alike cannot resist it.
For instance, consider Trump’s executive order “banning” flag-burning. Friendly media covered it as an authentic ban and so did hostile media. The Associated Press headline blared, “Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it.” Fans cheered sticking it to the hippies, foes fretted about yet another violation of the Constitution by executive fiat.
But if you actually read the executive order, it’s not a ban. It’s almost entirely vaporous twaddle. It flatly says that the Justice Department should prosecute flag burning to “the maximum extent permitted by the Constitution” and state laws. It doesn’t criminalize flag burning because the president can’t do that.
The order has several possible purposes. Trump hopes friends and foes alike will believe he’s banned flag burning when he hasn’t. Strength! I suspect he also hopes this will goad protesters into burning the flag, giving him greater political pretext to use the National Guard to crush the longhairs.
Last week, a federal court — rightly — ruled that Trump exceeded his authority to levy some of his sweeping tariffs. In response, Trump claimed that, “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America” and “our military would be instantly obliterated.”
Now this is obvious nonsense. But if Trump believed it, there’s a very easy remedy at his disposal. He could simply ask the unprecedentedly pliant and obsequious Republican-controlled Congress to impose the tariffs he wants, thus saving the country from total destruction.
For the same reason the court vacated his tariffs — that power belongs to Congress — they would undoubtedly uphold them if Congress ratified them.
But Trump’s shown no interest in doing that. Why? Because then they wouldn’t be his tariffs anymore. Asking Congress for permission looks weak. It underscores the bedrock constitutional principle that American presidents aren’t autocrats, a principle he doesn’t want to seem beholden to.
Politically (and characterologically), this preference for the appearance of strength is perhaps Trump’s greatest weakness, because it prevents him from actually having a much longer-lasting impact. All of the executive orders — some good, some not — that his superfans think demonstrate his strength and dominance have a shelf life that ends with the next president. If he truly wanted to lay the foundation for a new “golden age” he’d be pestering Speaker Mike Johnson to put them all on the law books. But that would come at the price of looking weak in his mind.
Trump’s power grabs are not as unprecedented as his amen corner or his chorus of Cassandras believe. FDR and Woodrow Wilson declared war on constitutional and democratic “norms” arguably as often as Trump did. Nixon was no piker either.
But what does make Trump different is his desire to brag about it. Traditionally presidents seek to assure the public they are careful stewards of their constitutional oath.
Even if I’m right, none of this settles the issue of where all of this is heading. One of the consequences of pretending to be something is that, after a while, you’ll come to believe it yourself. Worse, a lot of Americans might decide they desire the fiction to become fact.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
What Makes Trump’s Power Grab Different? was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is republished with permission.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.