Cooper is the author of “ How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t. ”
If Donald Trump wins the presidential election, many worry that America will descend into dark times.
Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor, for example, detailed myriad ways he thinks Trump would subvert American democracy:
“As my colleagues have reported over the past year, Trump has made clear his stark, authoritarian vision for a potential second term. He would embark on a wholesale purge of the federal bureaucracy, weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents (something he claims is being done to him), stack government agencies across the board with political appointees prescreened as ideological Trump loyalists, and dole out pardons to myriad officials and apparatchiks as incentives to do his bidding or stay loyal.”
These concerns don’t withstand scrutiny. If Trump wins, American democracy will undergo a severe stress test. Yet again. But it won’t plunge into dictatorship, authoritarianism or fascism. These are coherent governmental structures. Instead, if Trump wins, America will have an incoherent and volatile mix of some government institutions that function democratically and some that don’t.
The fundamental problem with predictions like Tharoor’s is that Trump can’t actually accomplish these things. The federal bureaucracy can’t be “purged” by the sitting president. Valid federal legislation authorizes and funds government agencies — so the courts won’t allow them to be gutted by executive order. Republican presidents have long tried to shrink the administrative state. They’ve failed every time. Even if the federal bureaucracy were halved it would still be huge.
The Justice Department, moreover, didn’t go after Trump’s enemies while he was president. To the contrary, DOJ lawyers rejected Trump’s demands to prosecute Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and others. The DOJ did, however, prosecute many of Trump's friends, like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort and Tom Barrack. And of course the Justice Department brought two major cases against Trump himself. To imprison his enemies, as Tharoor warns about, Trump would need grand juries to indict on his command, courts to illicitly rule in his favor and juries to render his chosen verdicts. There’s no reason to think any of those things could happen.
The Senate, furthermore, still has to confirm all executive-level presidential appointments. And pardons only apply to specific acts and offer no protection under state law or for future activity. Just look at Bannon, who was first pardoned by Trump for one thing and then later convicted of something else.
Moreover, Trump wouldn’t control most government activity — at the federal, state or local level. If the Democrats take the House in November, they will oppose Trump at every turn. We should expect Trump’s third impeachment — for something or other — to commence promptly. Democratic-run state and local governments likewise would fight back against Trump's initiatives, just like they did previously.
The most serious domestic risk America faces if Trump wins is that the military starts doing his bidding. But there’s no reason to expect this to happen. He has long had strained relations with military leaders, including secretaries of defense (John Mattis and Mark Esper) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. The military has steadfastly refused to obey Trump’s improper orders.
This isn’t to say a second Trump presidency wouldn’t be dangerous. It would be. But the biggest concerns would reside where the American electorate often doesn't bother to focus: international affairs. This is where American presidents have the fewest checks on their power and the most potential to do harm. The international community is desperate for sober and rational American leadership — the opposite of Trump-style diplomacy.
If Donald Trump wins the election there will be plenty to worry about, to be sure. But there will also be many doomful predictions that don’t come true.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.