When I started “The Insurrationalizers,” a series about conservative critics of Donald Trump who nonetheless justify voting for him, perhaps the prototypical figure I had in mind was Rich Lowry. The National Review editor-in-chief oversaw a famous effort to stop Trump in 2016, mostly justified or ignored Trump’s offenses throughout his presidency, then harshly condemned the January 6 insurrection before slowly working his way back onside. After a spell of hoping in vain for Ron DeSantis to co-opt Trump, Lowry is now almost frenetically promoting Trump’s candidacy.
Lowry’s newest column contains many of the familiar elements of the anti-anti-Trump genre. He concedes up front that yes, Donald Trump was a very bad boy after the 2020 election. He sets up a series of false equivalences between Trump’s authoritarian campaigns and behavior by Democrats. Maybe Trump was wrong to try to seize power after losing in 2020, but “Democrats never really accepted his victory in 2016,” he claims. (In fact, Hillary Clinton conceded the election immediately and made no effort to overturn the result.)
And sure, he allows, maybe Trump should knock off his obsession with locking up all the Democrats. But “politicized investigations and prosecutions of his opponents” are happening against him, too. (In fact, Joe Biden’s Justice Department is also investigating or charging multiple Democrats, including the president’s son, making it rather different than Trump’s plan to allow his cronies to commit all the crimes they want wall locking up everybody who angers him.)
And in another common anti-anti-Trump refrain, Lowry insists that because many of Trump’s wildest impulses were checked by his own staff during his first term, we can rest assured that any new authoritarian plans he devises next time will be similarly frustrated. (This ignores the fact Trump and numerous allies are planning to stack the next Trump administration with loyalists specifically so they can avoid this occurring again.)
Most of Lowry’s argument is consumed with considering the bluntest possible ways Trump could attack democracy. Lowry asks, “Would he, say, cancel the midterms?” The reader will be relieved to learn that no, Trump will not be able to cancel the midterms. Of course Russia just held an election, a fact that might suggest that there’s more to democracy than voting.
Likewise, he insists it would be impossible for Trump to extend his presidency past one more term:
Could he simply stay in office despite the expiration of his term? Whether Trump continued to occupy the White House past January 20, 2029, or not, he’d no longer be president after that date. Also, any intimation that this was his intention beforehand would, of course, create a massive firestorm, and institutional Washington — most importantly, the U.S. military — would shun him and recognize his duly elected successor.
I agree that it’s highly unlikely Trump would be able to remain president past January 2029. But it’s not impossible. More importantly, the reasons Lowry cites for why it couldn’t happen aren’t terribly reassuring or persuasive. He insists the U.S. military is going to be the force that prevents an additional Trump term. Of course Trump is deeply aware that the military frustrated some of his bloodiest schemes during the last term — using the Insurrection Act to suppress protests, for instance — and is determined to put loyalists in charge.
If Trump did seek to hold power after one more term, he would probably do it by using a pliable figure as a stand-in. (Anybody could very easily evade the 22nd Amendment by having a family member run for office while promising to wield power behind the scenes.)
The most important piece of Lowry’s denial that Trump might threaten democracy is its lack of imagination. The presidency is an extremely powerful job. What restrains its powers are norms as much as formal limits. As the Founders noted when they designed the Constitution, a figure of sufficiently bad character could turns its powers into a vehicle for dictatorship.
The main reason to keep these powers out of Trump’s hands is that he has displayed a lust for abusing it. He admires dictators. He does not abide by or even conceptually grasp the rule of law. A long list of his own appointees have called him dangerous and unfit. He is repeatedly lionizing and promising to pardon the right-wing paramilitary loyalists who tried to hand him an unelected second term, sending a clear message that political violence on his behalf is welcome.
Running through an abridged list of ways Trump tried and failed to make American democracy more like Russian “democracy” hardly exhausts the dangerous possibilities. A president of authoritarian inclinations will probably find new ways to abuse power — ways he didn’t try last time. This is an incredibly obvious risk that could only be missed by any halfway intelligent person if they are trying very hard not to understand it. The trait that comes through in Lowry’s pseudo-earnest efforts to deny the risks of a second Trump term is a kind of frantic intentional stupidity.
