Tsar Trump Thinks He’s the State

As he tries to wreck everything, a little history and hope to tide us over

“Long Live the King.”

Even George III and Louis XIV weren’t gauche enough to say that about themselves. Unlike Tsar Trump, they left it up to their supplicants (a French essayist, not King Louis, coined, “L’etat, c’est moi”). And even Julius Caesar refused to allow a diadem (crown) to be placed on his head, though his enemies in the Roman Senate thought he was declining it just for show.

The senate in those days included Caesar's allies (e.g., Brutus) with a greater faith in republican values than their Republican successors 2,069 years later. Their solution — stabbing Caesar, who had just a few weeks earlier declared himself dictator for life — was a tad shortsighted. It kicked off a civil war that ended the 500-year-old Roman Republic. But at least they hadn’t been cowed into silence.

One Caesar admirer was Napoleon Bonaparte, who, according to Balzac, said, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a line Trump stole on Truth Social last week. It reminds me of what Richard Nixon told the British interviewer David Frost after he left office: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

These are chilling comments, but at least Caesar, Napoleon, and Nixon claimed to be concerned about national security. So was Abraham Lincoln when he briefly imprisoned pro-Confederate activists without trial (before receiving approval from Congress); Harry Truman when he briefly nationalized steel mills during the Korean War; and George W. Bush when, after 9/11, he briefly sanctioned surveillance and torture. Note the “briefly.” Whatever the dubious constitutionality of these actions, they were temporary wartime measures, not structural changes in the balance of power.

By contrast, “King Donald,” as FBI Director Kash Patel calls him in his children’s books, is threatening democracy in peacetime, when the enemy, we’re told, is “from within.” Let’s make sure to distinguish between obnoxious trolling of critics and ominous trampling of institutions. The latter is what to focus on. By placing his January 6th-supporting putschists inside the DOD, DOJ, DHS, and White House, Trump is positioning himself to declare martial law if anti-Trump protests get too large and boisterous. We’ll see if General Dan (“Razin’) Caine, the newly-named chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who, against regulation, wore a MAGA cap when Trump first met him in Iraq in 2018), will carry out his orders, which one can imagine going further than shooting protesters in the legs, as Trump wanted in 2020. If Caine doesn’t obey the commander-in-chief, you can bet that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will fire him, as he did General C.Q. Brown, who was relieved of his command for failing to downplay that he is Black.

The only other time we have come this close to dictatorship was in early 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt became president at the depths of the Great Depression. As I explained in my first book, the word “dictator” had a positive connotation then; a car called “Studebaker Dictator” sold well until 1937. Mussolini was popular not just in Italy but in the United States. Hitler was new, only then settling in as chancellor of Germany after winning a legal election and convincing politicians that his fascist party should be invited to join the government, the same message Elon Musk and J.D. Vance recently delivered to Germans about the fascist-leaning AfD.

It’s hard to imagine, but both Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann, the most influential columnist of the time, advised FDR that a “mild species of dictatorship” might be necessary to fight the Depression.

Roosevelt considered it. He reviewed the script of a 1933 movie produced by William Randolph Hearst, Gabriel Over the White House, in which a president played by Walter Huston (Angelica’s grandfather) suffers a concussion in a car accident and becomes a good dictator who commandeers Congress, though he faces more opposition there than Trump does.

When doing research at the FDR Library in 2005, I found a document in which an unnamed aide offered suggestions for a radio address to the American Legion on the second day of his presidency. The draft includes the line: “As new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound, I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.”

“Command you in any phase”? This was dictator talk — essentially telling World War I veterans that they would be his black shirts (Mussolini’s private army) and he might order them to guard banks from bank runs, quell disturbances, or do anything else he wanted.

But the radio speech FDR delivered did not include this power grab. It was instead an abbreviated version of his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Inaugural Address from the day before when he said he would work with Congress to enact a broad agenda to fix the economy. Even his ill-fated court-packing scheme was a bill (that lost), not an executive order.

Like Trump, FDR began his term with a frenzy of activity in his famous first 100 days. That’s where the similarity ends. Where Roosevelt was creating programs to help Americans, Trump was destroying them — imposing a kind of anti-New Deal aimed at trashing the administrative state that FDR (with Congressional approval) did so much to establish.

Abroad, Trump’s unconscionable betrayal of Ukraine and our European allies will have far-reaching consequences. We may be headed for a new world order run by strongmen, a return to the norm in world history, where might makes right. “In the past 10 days, [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership,” the Financial Times mournfully concluded. “Those who thought America was a friend or ally, notably Ukraine and NATO, are dropping once safe assumptions to cope with a world in which America is an unabashed predator.”

Yes, FDR’s edifice of collective security will never be fully reassembled, but its destruction is not complete. The blowback against Trump, even from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, may yet force him to include Europe and Ukraine in peace talks. That’s cold comfort; he and Hegseth already sold out Ukraine. But it could make full capitulation to Putin more difficult.

Amid the carnage at home, it’s helpful to remember that the Justice Department has been politicized before, under Woodrow Wilson, whose attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, rounded up hundreds of innocent people, and during Watergate, when Nixon and his men committed a variety of hair-raising crimes. Patel’s transformation of the FBI into Trump’s secret police will be horrific, but J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO was plenty scary, too. We recovered, just as dozens of authoritarian countries around the world have been able to transition back toward democracy, most recently Brazil, Poland, and the Philippines.

We know that Trump is emboldened by the Supreme Court: immunity breeds impunity. But impunity and arrogance can be checked. In the last ten days, Trump has lost support in the polls. I think he’ll drop further in March with stories of how his unpopular “Medicaid Raid” led to a government shutdown. If that happens, his iron grip on the Republican Party will loosen a bit, which is all it takes to stymie him in a closely divided Congress.

“Something is shifting,” Timothy Snyder, our greatest student of dictatorship, reported last week. “They are still breaking things and stealing things. And they will keep trying to break and to steal. But the propaganda magic around the oligarchical coup is fading.”

We have to wait nearly four years to topple Tsar Trump from his throne. But working together, we can sap his strength.