By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Columnist
President-elect Donald Trump played it seemingly for laughs. That was his quip in a Fox-TV town hall in December 2023 that he would only be a dictator on his Day One back in the White House. He specifically referred to quickly getting moving on his signature campaign pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. He then added, “After that, I’m not a dictator, OK?”
This is the first in a two-part series on how President-elect Donald Trump will govern. The series is based on Hutchinson’s latest work, “Day 1 The Trump Reign” (Middle Passage Press).
However, given Trump’s virtual war with the Justice Department, his notorious contempt for several key federal agencies and his absolute insatiable thirst for total control, his dictator quip wasn’t totally a laughing matter. Coming from Trump, more than a few took it seriously.
The notion that an American president could assume dictatorial powers was vastly overblown even in the case of Trump. However, what was in the realm of possibility and peril was Trump’s unyielding vow to overhaul the government to his liking and to serve at his whim.
The centerpiece of Trump’s threatened quasi-authoritarian remake was to be able to hire and fire all government employees solely based on their loyalty to him and to scrap civil service protections. Trump, though, didn’t justify it quite that way.
He simply branded his plan for total government agencies control as a much-needed move to “remove rogue bureaucrats,” and to “clean out all of the corrupt actors” in the national security and intelligence apparatus. His favorite whipping agency for cleaning house was the Department of Justice.
The range of government public policy issues that Trump could exercise total control over was breathtaking. They included cybersecurity, climate change, education, abortion funding, immigration, LGBTQ protections, housing and job discrimination, and all foreign policy matters. Trump, in effect if he had his way, would be the final arbiter on all decisions that government agencies made on public policy matters.
The Trump governmental remake in his own image started when he became convinced and publicly railed that government administrators and employees were running the government as a “deep state.” In this quasi-conspiratorial view, it meant that the agency personnel made their own rules and were running the federal government as a totally separate entity that worked against the interests of the people.
The only way to break that cabal, as Trump saw it, was for him to have total control, the authority to get rid of any federal employee at will, and fully control the purse strings of government agencies.
To affect the takeover, Trump banked on the Constitution, specifically Article II. It reads, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States,” and the president of the United States “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
At first glance, it seemed a thin reed to hang the claim that the president can be something akin to a monarch when it came to exercising power.
Trump would not be the first to read into those words that the president had the right and authority to have total control over all governmental functions that are accorded the executive branch. Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan argued that the clause in the Constitution gave them sweeping power to make decisions about all government operations, too.
Like Nixon and Reagan, Trump boosted his case for sweeping power by claiming that the executive has power to make all decisions that are not specifically accorded in the Constitution to the other two government branches, Congress and the judiciary. And since the Constitution says the president must faithfully execute the laws, that can be interpreted to mean he can’t perform that function without having absolute control over government.
The real issue for Trump, beyond the squabble over what the Constitution deemed the extent of presidential power, was who makes decisions at government agencies. Trump and ultra conservatives had long charged that they were run by liberal social reformers and in the more extreme nonsensical inflammatory Trumpian bashing, as Marxist idealogues.
They supposedly would stymie him at every turn and in every way they could to torpedo and obstruct his agenda. As examples, they pointed to such agencies as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, which through congressional fiat had a great degree of independence apart from any presidential wishes.
Trump made clear time and again that he wanted the absolute power to oust any employee, and especially an agency head, that he wanted out for any reason he chose. He banked that the Supreme Court would back him on that if or more likely when he moved against an employee or a ranking agency head that presumably was protected from at will removal. It was a good bet given the hard right dominance of the court that when challenges were mounted to his whimsical ousting of an agency head or federal employees, he would have the court on his side.
In the end, though, if even a small part of the Trump planned government takeover scenario played out, it wouldn’t make him a dictator. But it sure would come close.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is “Day 1: The Trump Reign” (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Facebook Livesteamed.
