Donald Trump’s Autocratic Ambitions

“If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country,” Donald Trump warned in a menacing speech over the weekend. It was more of Trump’s classic projection. To the MAGA faithful in Ohio, Trump said some migrants are “not people”—dehumanizing language right out of the autocrat playbook—and described January 6 insurrectionists as “hostages.” (He even saluted them.) And there was the “bloodbath” comment that came as he mused about putting a wildly inflationary 100% tariff on Mexico-made Chinese cars while also complaining about inflation.

Though we’ve heard Trump lay out his vision of American carnage for years now, it’s important that the media doesn’t lose sight of how radically different this rhetoric is from that of past presidential nominees—and that of current president Joe Biden. It was about a week earlier, at Mar-a-Lago, that Trump gushed about Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader,” he said. Days later, CNN’s Jim Sciutto reported new details on Trump’s admiration for strongmen, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, and how the former president allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”

In 2016, the news media seemed more fixated on Hillary Clinton’s emails than the stakes of a Trump presidency, while still assuring readers of the likelihood of her victory. The media this time around can’t dismiss the consequences of a second Trump presidency, and needs to stay focused on not just a candidate eschewing democratic norms, but an entire political party doing so.

At this point, Trump is the Republican Party, after effectively installing daughter-in-law Lara Trump as the cochair of the RNC and “MAGA Mike” Johnson as the Speaker of the House. Johnson, a leading election denier, was one of the 139 House Republicans who tried to overturn the 2020 election to keep Trump in power despite the ex-president clearly losing the election. Republicans who challenged Trump’s lies, like Liz Cheney, have since been purged. The House, under Johnson, seemingly serves as an arm of the Trump campaign.

With 231 days to go, polls indicate a second Trump presidency is a distinct possibility. I’ve written before how polls are really pseudo news events, and we’ve seen where they’ve been wrong before. “National surveys of the 2020 presidential contest were the least accurate in 40 years, while the state polls were the worst in at least two decades,” Politico reported after that last presidential contest. But we don’t need another poll to point out the obvious—that the 2024 election will be close, perhaps coming down to tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states.

So given the possibility of a Trump return to the White House, the media has a responsibility to educate readers and viewers about the threat to democracy, and how radically he could reshape the government and realign US priorities around the world. The challenge is that the public seems exhausted. News fatigue is real. Cable news networks witnessed significant audience declines last year, and Americans largely tuned out the primaries, for which there was little competition amid expectations of a Biden-Trump rematch. The 2024 cycle has been a far cry from eight years ago, when Trump drove eyeballs and helped make the media boom.

Social media is no longer even trying to pretend to fact-check Trump and his allies. One such platform is now owned by someone who spends time demonizing migrants and helping spread election misinformation. Trumpers have effectively worked the refs when it comes to disinformation, attacking social media companies for labeling lies while at the same time trying to portray Biden as the one threatening democracy. “The people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out,” professor Kate Starbird told The New York Times.

The Times found that “disinformation about elections is once again coursing through news feeds,” which is aiding Trump “as he fuels his comeback with falsehoods about the 2020 election.” Indeed, 6 in 10 Republicans still think the last election was stolen despite all the evidence to the contrary. And trying to convince them otherwise won’t be easy: Just 11% of Republicans told Gallup last September that they had confidence in the mainstream media, down from 52% in 1998

In January—which was only two months ago, though it feels like a century has passed—I took issue with how little media attention Trump’s wild statements were getting. This past week, Susan Glasser wrote in The New Yorker about this problem of a siloed media and an undercovered would-be autocrat. After listening to Trump’s “rambling, unhinged, vituperative Georgia rally,” she wrote that, “like so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and undercovered, the flood of lies and BS seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality.”

The problem in 2016 was Trump getting too much free media. Newsrooms allowed then candidate Trump, and later President Trump, to be their assignment editor, as Politico’s Jack Shafer explored in early 2017. Essentially, Trump would talk (or tweet) about something and the media would follow right behind him. The problem now is not giving Trump enough attention—at least where it concerns his threat to democracy. I’ve noted before how conventional political framing creates a false equivalency that normalizes and elevates Trump’s antidemocratic rhetoric. Biden is a normal, conventional president and candidate, while Trump is not—the minute you compare the two, you elevate the deviation to the norm.

Given fears of appearing partisan, journalists may pause before describing Trump as a danger to democracy. But there they can also turn to any number of former Trump administration officials, from James Mattis to Alyssa Farah Griffin to Mark Esper, who’ll clearly make that point. Then there’s Mike Pence, who says “Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years.” It’s remarkable that Pence, who, as 2016 running mate, created the permission structure that allowed evangelicals to get in bed with Trump the first time, won’t endorse him in 2024. The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last argued Monday that “Pence should be the biggest story of the 2024 campaign.”

Covering Trump breathlessly and repeating his lies incredulously clearly isn’t the answer. The only way to hold Trump accountable is to be clear-eyed about his authoritarian second-term plans and how he’s aligned himself with autocrats. And it’s essential to hear from the people who have seen his dysfunction firsthand, like those from his former administration who are sounding the alarm about his potential return to the White House. We in the media have to get this right, as the future of democracy—and the free press that goes with it—is on the line.