by Fred Fleitz
The leftwing media recently got its orders from the Biden campaign on a new narrative to smear Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign. Because their previous narrative of Trump colluding with Russia and Vladimir Putin has been discredited, they are promoting anew one: if Donald Trump wins the November 2024 presidential election, he will become a dictator similar to Hitler or Napoleon.
This fear-mongering theme appeared in similar articles within days of each other in The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Atlantic is promoting the theme in a January/February special issue with 16 essays where liberal elite authors warn how a dictatorial Trump presidency in 2025 would threaten America and the world on issues ranging from abortion, NATO, climate, the courts, immigration, etc. The Atlantic has posted online 16 of these anti-Trump essays and plans to add more.
The most prominent of these Trump-will-be-a-dictator essays was written for the Washington Post by Robert Kagan, a Never Trumper and neoconservative who advised John McCain and Mitt Romney and now works for the liberal Brookings Institution. Kagan’s article was published in full hysteria mode with an image of Caeser’s head morphing into Trump, a Napoleon hat with Trump’s face superimposed on red streaks resembling blood, and references to Hitler and McCarthyism.
Kagan led his article off by warning that there is a good chance Trump will win the 2024 presidential election. He blames this on dysfunction in Washington and President Biden carrying the world’s problems “like an albatross around his neck.” Kagan also made the bizarre claim that Trump has “unusual advantages” for a presidential candidate because he has Fox News and the Speaker of the House “in his pocket.”
Kagan made these arguments to sidestep the main reasons why Donald Trump’s candidacy is surging and Biden’s is in trouble: Joe Biden is one of the weakest U.S. presidents in history, and the vast majority of Americans believe they are worse off today than when Trump was president.
As a result, there’s no reference in Kagan’s article about the U.S. economic downturn, steeply increased inflation, the rise of crime in U.S. cities, or the flood of illegal migrants during the Biden presidency.
Kagan also doesn’t say a word about the serious deterioration in global security on Biden’s watch, including the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, increased Chinese military provocations against Taiwan, the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel, and th
And Kagan, of course, omits growing concerns in the U.S. and abroad about Joe Biden’s mental decline and fitness for office.
No one believes Kagan really thinks that Trump has a media advantage because Fox News is behind him (which I dispute) when the mainstream media establishment and social media are still dominant in this country and prepared to do whatever it takes to defeat Trump and elect Biden.
Kagan and the other anti-Trump essayists realize our country is in trouble and that Donald Trump’s solutions will be attractive to many voters. They know most Americans believe Trump will take quick action to reverse the damage done to the U.S. economy by “Bidenomics” and high energy costs. Kagan realizes many Americans are angry about Biden’s failure to secure the U.S. southern border and stop the surge in crime in our cities and are willing to look to Trump to fix these problems.
Kagan is also aware that most Americans know the U.S. was more secure under Trump because he was a strong and decisive president. They remember that despite Democratic warnings in 2016 that it would be dangerous to elect Donald Trump as president because he would get the U.S. into new wars, Trump was the first president in decades to not begin a new overseas military campaign and used diplomacy and economic sanctions to create four years of relative peace.
Kagan understands that most Americans believe that if Trump is reelected, he will not get the United States into another war.
The dictator talk by Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans not just to distract them from the failures and weakness of the Biden Administration but because of something they are even more afraid of: that a second Trump administration will be far more successful in implementing its agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first.
Kagan knows President Trump and his close advisers learned from the first Trump term on how to govern effectively. They know what they did wrong the first time in staffing the federal government and dealing with the federal bureaucracy. Kagan admitted this when he lamented that President Trump probably will not name officials to his second administration with an “unstated intention of refusing to carry out his wishes.”
Most alarming to Kagan is the possibility that a second Trump presidency will get control of the federal bureaucracy. The permanent federal bureaucracy, also referred to as the administrative state or the deep state, is a bastion of liberal power and influence. These bureaucrats overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and many go out of their way to advance the policies of Democratic presidents and obstruct Republican presidents.
Kagan, of course, views the federal bureaucracy differently, calling it “another traditional check on a president” that is “generally in the business of limiting any president’s options.” Kagan and other liberal writers are worried that a second Trump Administration will force the federal bureaucracy to do what it was created to do: implement the policies of the elected president.
Kagan is right that Trump will name loyal officials to get control of the federal bureaucracy and that some careerists will quit or be replaced. But despite his frantic claims that such efforts would be dictatorial or similar to the work of “Hitler’s local gauleiters,” reforming the federal bureaucracy to better implement presidential policy is consistent with Article II of the U.S. Constitution that makes the president responsible for the execution and enforcement of the laws created by Congress.
I would like Robert Kagan to show me where the U.S. Constitution says the federal bureaucracy was created to act as a check on the president.
On the other hand, President Biden’s frequent use of the federal bureaucracy to evade Congress by imposing unpopular policies on the American people through regulations instead of laws are actual abuses of power and violations of the Constitution. These include regulations to ban gasoline-powered cars and force Americans to buy electric vehicles, regulations removing federal lands and waters from oil and gas exploration, and regulations allowing “woke” investing by retirement funds and investment firms.
Finally, Kagan, other liberal essayists, and several Republican Trump opponents like Liz Cheney, have stitched together another argument that Trump will be a dictator if reelected because they claim he will ignore the courts, use his office to retaliate against his enemies, and could even refuse to give up the presidency at the end of his term.
It is rich to see Kagan’s apoplectic warning that Trump might take revenge against his enemies if reelected after the bogus 90+ charges brought against Trump by Democratic and career prosecutors over the last two years and numerous lawsuits by liberal groups to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot. These are all blatantly anti-democratic efforts to prevent Americans from voting for a presidential candidate that the Left fears it cannot defeat at the ballot box.
I know Donald Trump will form an expert and ethical second administration that will not persecute anyone and will spend its time rebuilding this country and promoting global stability. It will be subject to the rule of law and the courts. That’s why former Trump officials like myself who worked most of our careers in the federal bureaucracy would be honored to work for a second Trump presidency.
That is not to say there will not be some much-needed and legitimate investigations and house cleanings of rogue agencies like the FBI. I expect there will be investigations of the Biden family’s corruption, its ties to China, and the Hunter Biden laptop debacle. Such investigations would not be revenge or abuses of power – they would be queries into possible serious corruption that may have compromised U.S. national security. As congressional Democrats love to say about President Trump, “No man is above the law.” That includes Joe Biden.
The Left hated Donald Trump as president because he was a disrupter who ignored convention and conventional wisdom and refused to defer to the administrative state and liberal elites. Using this approach, he had many significant accomplishments, like making America energy independent, removing over 25,000 pages of job-destroying regulations, pulling the U.S. out of bad international agreements, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and initiating the historic Abraham Accords peace agreement. Trump and his team achieved these and many other major accomplishments despite many mistakes they made in staffing the federal government and handling the federal bureaucracy.
Kagan is making his “Trump will be a dictator” argument because he knows a second Trump Administration will be different. Not only will it likely be much more efficient in promoting Donald Trump’s primary objectives of energy security, securing the southern border, and reasserting U.S. global leadership, Kagan is terrified that Trump will successfully undo Joe Biden’s massive misuse of power to use regulations to ram through deeply unpopular far-left priorities, like injecting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies into every aspect of society and the federal government (including the U.S. military), requiring schools to let biological males participate in women’s sports, forcing Americans to buy electric cars, phasing out gas-powered stoves, etc.
Although Robert Kagan and others on the Left will try to portray a possible second Trump Administration as dictatorial, a threat to democracy, the return of Hitler and Napoleon, etc., most Americans will dismiss this prediction as over-the-top fearmongering. They will see this claim for what it is: a desperate attempt to distract them from the damage done to this country by Joe Biden’s incompetence and from his likely 2024 election opponent who is offering leadership and compelling policies to restore our country.
If trying to frighten Americans about a second Trump presidency with predictions of a dictatorship, references to Hitler, and images of Napoleon hats is the best Biden’s media allies can do, Biden’s reelection is in serious jeopardy.
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Fred Fleitz served as National Security Council chief of staff, a CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member during his 25-year U.S. Government career.
