In 2016, Donald Trump did not expect to win the US presidential election. The casting of his administration was less sinister masterplan, more frantic improvisation. But this time the preparations are thorough, public and—to many—genuinely frightening. This extends well beyond Trump’s own talk of being his followers’ “retribution” and ruling as “dictator”, if only on day one. At his back, he has the intellectual resources of a host of well-funded thinktanks, who have produced detailed plans. One, Project 2025, lays out ways to “rescue the country from the grip of the rad- ical Left”—partly through policy, but also through transforming the executive branch. The would-be insurrection of 6th January 2021 forced those around Trump to choose whether they were willing to stick around; those who remain are hardcore loyalists. The more mainstream figures who exercised restraint last time are long gone, and unlikely to return.
So there are now real fears, even on his own side, that if Trump wins this time, he will set about establishing an autocracy. The conservative McCain Institute warns of the risk that the US’s “democratic system” could collapse “under the assault of neo-fascist actors”. William Cohen, a former Republican senator, fears that Trump is “a clear and present danger to our democracy”. Three of Trump’s former White House staffers went on TV together to say the same thing. But what exactly is the Trump camp proposing to do? And what steps are his opponents taking to stop them?
Old-school tyrants tended not to worry about legality. That’s why, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are “no longer any laws”. But today’s aspiring Big Brothers take a subtler approach, finding technically legal means to circumvent restraints and concentrate their power. One prospect that US pro-democracy groups fear is that Trump could seek to deploy the military to crush dissent. As Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago Law School points out, this may jar with US democratic tradition, associated with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. But through the 1807 Insurrection Act, it is legally possible.