Trump and the Threat to Democracy... We Knew Less Than Two Years Into His First Term (2017-2021)

 We knew what the Felon President of the United States was in 2019. IE: We were warned. Yet we, as a nation, refused to look and see, listen, or presumably care.

We now have in 2025 exactly what many knew would happen if he was reelected. Not enough cared.  So, here we are today. With a fascist minded authoritarian who wants to be King or dictator. And the republican party apparently and obviously approves.

The following paper was written in 2019 that made the case that the Felon President was who he is showing us today in full unconstitutional bloom.

Trump and the Threat to Democracy

The following is a policy blog post by Professor Michael Klarman. He is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law and Constitutional History.

The topic of this article is not politics or policy but rather democracy. Regardless of what one thinks of building walls at the border with Mexico, repealing Obamacare, or withdrawing the United States from the Paris accords on global climate change, one would think that Americans could agree on the importance of respecting certain basic norms of democracy. The evidence I cite in this article suggests that Trump is an existential threat to those norms. Yet he continues to enjoy strong backing from a little more than 40 percent of the American public and from 85 to 90 percent of the Republican Party. How can this be?

Here are ten basic democratic norms that Trump fails to comply with or outright repudiates: (1) respect for an independent judiciary, (2) support for a free and independent press, (3) more generally, the importance of independent actors within government, as opposed to actors who simply owe loyalty to the president; (4) a commitment to the peaceful resolution of political disputes rather than encouraging violence; (5) respect for the legitimacy of elections; (6) not using the legal system to attack political opponents; (7) not expressing admiration for foreign autocrats; (8) preserving transparency within government; (9) the maintenance of a sharp separation between the private interests of public servants and the public good; (10) at least a minimal commitment to truth telling. The remainder of this article elaborates upon Trump’s transgressions against these foundational norms of democracy.

First, Trump has repeatedly launched verbal assaults upon federal judges, thus challenging the independence of the federal judiciary. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump referred to federal District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who has lived all sixty-six years of his life in the United States and is a legitimate American hero, as a “Mexican” and a “disgrace,” because Curiel had issued adverse procedural rulings in a lawsuit against the fraudulent Trump University. When another federal district court judge invalidated the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban in late 2017, the president referred to him as a “so-called judge.” After a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit expressed skepticism about the ban during oral argument in an appeal of that case, Trump referred to the judges as “a disgrace.”

In November 2018, the president complained of “Obama judges” in the Ninth Circuit, whom he labeled a “disgrace,” after a federal district judge in California enjoined the administration’s new policy of rejecting asylum claims filed by refugees entering the United States somewhere other than a port of entry—a policy that violated the plain language of a federal statute. Trump’s attack on “Obama judges” earned him a rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who denied there was such a thing as “Obama judges or Trump judges,” defended judicial independence, and celebrated the fact that “[w]hat we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Second, with regard to the importance of a free and independent press, one of the president’s favorite pastimes in office has been attacking critical newspapers and other media outlets. From well before his days in the White House, Trump has advocated “opening up” our libel laws, so as to permit defamation suits on a lesser standard than the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution requires. Trump calls any reporting he disagrees with “fake news.”  Beginning soon after his inauguration, he began regularly referring to critical news media such as the New York Times as the “enemy of the people”—a term that, historically, would have been  understood as a call for their extermination.

Trump intimidates critical reporters by tweeting about them, calling for them to be fired, pointing them out at rallies, and inciting crowds to threaten violence against them. At one campaign rally in 2016, the Secret Service had to escort NBC reporter Katy Tur to her car after Trump incited a crowd against her. In October 2017, the president threatened to have NBC’s broadcast license removed—apparently ignorant of the fact that NBC does not actually have or need a broadcast license—because it had filed a “fake news” report that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had called Trump a “fucking moron,” a statement that Tillerson declined to repudiate on more than one occasion.

While Trump is unlikely any time soon to be able to have New York Times reporters thrown in jail, he has increasingly resorted to other means to clamp down on critical commentary that may prove more successful because they are less transparent. The Trump Justice Department sought to block—apparently on orders from the president—the proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner, unless CNN, the president’s favorite media punching bag, was sold off first. Because the Justice Department rarely resists vertical mergers such as this one, the chances that this objection was politically motivated seem high.

Trump’s verbal assaults on Jeff Bezos and the company he founded, Amazon, over the past couple of years have been truly extraordinary. The president has lied about whether Amazon collects state and local taxes and whether it is paying the United States Postal Service less than it should for delivering its packages. Trump’s hostility towards Amazon is almost surely attributable in dominant part to the fact that Bezos owns the Washington Post, whose investigative reporting and editorializing regularly highlight the threat Trump poses to democracy. The president has personally intervened with the Postmaster General on more than one occasion to demand that the shipping rate Amazon pays the postal service for delivery of its packages be doubled. (The president has managed to keep these meetings off his public calendar, so we know about them only through the efforts of investigative reporters.)  Recently, Amazon sued the Trump administration, credibly alleging that it was denied a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing services because of the president’s animus towards Bezos and the Washington Post.

Trump’s behavior toward Amazon poses an historically unprecedented threat to freedom of the press by an American president. Amazon stock has declined tens of billions of dollars, apparently in direct response to Trump’s attacks. Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, so he can absorb the president’s barbs without wilting. But imagine the incentive effects on other prospective critics of the administration.

Private vigilantism, inspired and often encouraged by Trump, may pose an even great threat to freedom of speech and of the press. After a Fox News commentator criticized Trump’s despicable response to the violence incited by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017—“very fine people on both sides”—she received hundreds of hostile emails calling for her to be fired and issuing death threats. A labor union leader at the Carrier air conditioner plant in Indiana, who exposed the president’s lies about how many jobs would ostensibly be saved by Trump’s personal intervention to pressure the company not to relocate its plant to Mexico, was denounced by name by the president on twitter, and then received death threats. The videographer of the killing of Heather Heyer on the downtown mall in Charlottesville in the aftermath of the white-supremacist rally there, received death threats, as did Heyer’s mother, who refused to meet with Trump to personally accept his condolences.

In recent months, news outlets have reported that a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House has begun to dug up dirt on journalists whom it perceives as critical of the administration in order to retaliate against them and discredit their reporting.  The group has already released negative information about journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Such an organized, wide-scale effort to humiliate journalists in retaliation for criticizing an administration is virtually unprecedented in American history.

Third, the president not only attacks the independent judiciary and the independence of the press, but also, more generally, fails to recognize the legitimacy of independent power sources within the government. To Trump, everyone in his administration owes loyalty to him, rather than to their oath of office.

As one of his first acts in office, Trump asked FBI director James Comey for his “loyalty.” The FBI director takes an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution, not to the president. Trump repeatedly and insultingly denounced his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for not being sufficiently loyal by recusing himself from the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Sessions’ recusal was clearly mandated by internal Department of Justice ethics rules. The Mueller Report establishes that Trump sought to pressure Sessions on several occasions to reverse his recusal decision.

The Mueller Report also establishes that Trump more than once ordered the firing of the special counsel, which probably violates the federal statute forbidding the obstruction of justice, if done with a corrupt motive (that is, for the purpose of protecting the president rather than owing to any malfeasance in office). A careful reading of the report indicates that Mueller would likely have indicted the president for obstruction of justice were it not for prior determinations by the Office of Legal Counsel that a sitting president may not be criminally indicted. Many hundreds of former federal prosecutors—Republicans as well as Democrats—confirmed that the Mueller Report described “several acts that satisfy all of the elements” for “multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

Here’s an unusual statement the president made in 2018: “The saddest thing is that because I’m the President of the United States I’m not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department, I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing and I’m very frustrated by it.” This is a remarkably candid confession of Trump’s disdain for independent government actors, whose existence is the very point of our system of separated powers.

Here’s another possibly even more alarming statement made by Trump a couple or months before the 2018 midterm elections, in response to the Justice Department’s announcement of criminal charges against two Republican congressmen, Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins—for, respectively, diverting campaign funds to personal use and engaging in insider trading: “Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff.”

Just to be clear, this is the president of the United States castigating his attorney general for prosecuting alleged criminal acts (both men have subsequently entered guilty pleas) by Republican congressmen because it would harm the party. If any sitting Republican congressional representatives or senators criticized Trump’s authoritarian understanding of the Justice Department’s role, I missed it.

Fourth, Trump actively encourages violence. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump urged crowds at his rallies to “knock the crap out” of protestors; he wanted to see protestors “carried out on stretchers”; and he offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone beating up protestors at his rallies.

In August 2016, Trump said, with regard to the Second Amendment, that if Hillary Clinton won the presidential election and thus was in a position to appoint the replacement for the recently deceased justice Antonin Scalia, “nothing you can do folks.” Then, after a pregnant pause, he quickly added, “Although the second amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” Just to be clear, this is a sly invitation to violence.

As president, Trump has explicitly encouraged police to “rough up” criminal suspects. At a campaign rally in Montana in October 2018, Trump expressed admiration and approval for Republican congressman Greg Gianforte, who had physically assaulted a reporter daring to ask him a question about Obamacare repeal during his 2017 special election bid for Congress: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my guy,” Trump proclaimed.

Shortly thereafter, Trump warned that immigrants blocked at the Mexican border who threw rocks at American soldiers stationed there in response to the caravan “invasion” might be shot. “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” Trump told reporters. “I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like what they did to the Mexican military and police I say consider it a rifle.” This was the president urging American soldiers to commit war crimes. (A few days later, when the Nigerian army shot and killed rock-throwing protestors, it cited Trump’s words in justification of its actions.) In just the last couple of weeks, the president has pardoned American soldiers credibly charged with committing war crimes, which increases the likelihood of such crimes being committed in the future.

This is what Trump said in March 2019: “You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” This is a classic ploy of political demagogues: inciting violence by predicting it, while seeking to maintain plausible deniability if violence actually erupts.

In May 2019, Trump gave a speech in Florida, praising the bravery of America’s “border security people”—who, in his telling, were facing down “15,000 people marching up.” Trump then reminded his audience, his voice dripping with sarcasm: “We don’t let them and we can’t let them use weapons. We can’t. Other countries do. We can’t. I would never do that. But how do we stop these people?” One rallygoer shouted in reply, “Shoot them.” The crowd exploded in laughter. The president grinned and shook his head, observing, “Only in the panhandle you can get away with that statement, folks,” eliciting applause from the crowd.\

When critics complain of Trump’s inciting violence, the president’s defenders insist that he was only joking—that one should not take him literally. Yet such calls to violence have already begun coming home to roost. In 2018, the Boston Globe received death threats from someone parroting the president’s language that the press is “the enemy of the people.”

Just before the 2018 midterm elections, as Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric denouncing the caravan of Central American refugees headed to the United States—calling them “animals,” “criminals,” “smugglers,” and an “invasion”—two disturbed individuals evidently sharing the president’s animus towards immigrants of color decided to take action. In late October, Cesar Altieri Sayoc, Jr., an ardent Trump supporter, sent more than a dozen pipe bombs through the mail to prominent critics of the president, including Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Senator Cory Booker, and actor Robert De Niro.

Just days later, Robert Gregory Bowers, a white supremacist and anti-Semite, murdered eleven Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Bowers had expressed alarm at the caravan bringing “invaders in that kill our people” and blamed it on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Trump himself had stated that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros had funded the caravan.

Trump apologists, such as former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, expressed “outrage” at any suggestion that the president bore responsibility for violent actions such as those of Sayoc and Bowers. To be sure, it is true that crazy people do crazy things all the time. Yet it is virtually certain that neither of these specific acts of violence would have occurred were it not for Trump’s incendiary rhetoric distorting the truth about the caravan and seeking to turn it into a national crisis for his own political purposes.

In August 2019 in El Paso, Texas, Patrick Crusius opened fire with an assault rifle at a Walmart, killing more than twenty people, most of them Latin American or Mexican. Just before the attack, Crusius had posted on the internet an anti-immigrant manifesto littered with phrases used by the president to rile up hostility to immigration—warning of an “Hispanic invasion” and accusing Democrats of supporting “open borders.” Trump responded with a speech declaring that “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”—sentiments that might have carried greater weight had the president not spent much of his summer vacation tweeting racist insults at Democratic congressional representatives of color—telling them to “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came” (all four of them were U.S. citizens and three of the four were born in the United States).

For more recollections of the travesty that was and is the Felon President of the United States Go Below the Fold.

Recalling the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt by the Felon President of the United States, and witnessing his questionable acts in just two months following reelection, many vey likely unconstitutional, should send shivers down the spine of every truly Patriotic American. Finding the pair that will allow for removal from office is very likely the only way this nation can save itself from a full on fully fascist authoritarian government lead by a malignant narcissistic felon.