For the second day in a row, President Donald Trump insisted he is not a dictator, but also insisted that many Americans would like to have one running the country. Some critics are calling his remarks a “trial balloon.”
“So the line is that I’m a dictator — but I stop crime,” Trump said at his televised Cabinet meeting on Tuesday (video below). “So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator. I just know how to stop crime.”
Those remarks echo ones he made just one day earlier in the Oval Office while attacking Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker.
“I have some slob like Pritzker criticizing us before we even go there,” he said of his plan to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. “I made the statement that next should be Chicago, ’cause, as you all know, Chicago’s a killing field right now. And they don’t acknowledge it, and they say, ‘We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator, he’s a dictator.’”
“A lot of people are saying, maybe we like a dictator,” Trump mused. “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
Declaring that an American president “even suggesting that Americans want to do away with democracy and be ruled” by a dictator is “chilling,” Rolling Stone on Monday noted that “Trump has been ruling like an authoritarian since retaking office in January, repeatedly thumbing his nose at Congress, the Constitution, and any other check on presidential power.”
CNN’s Aaron Blake, even before Trump’s second “I’m not a dictator” attestation, wrote: “Many people are increasingly entertaining the idea of a dictator. They are his supporters.”
“They don’t necessarily say, ‘Yes, I want a dictator.’ But polling shows Republicans have edged in that direction – to a pretty remarkable degree.”
“Perhaps the most startling poll on this came last year,” Blake explained. “A University of Massachusetts Amherst survey asked about Trump’s comment that he wanted to be a dictator, but only for a day,” during the campaign. “Trump said it was a joke, but 74% of Republicans endorsed the idea.”
He noted that a “Pew Research Center poll early this year showed 59% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed that many of the country’s problems could be better solved ‘if Donald Trump didn’t have to worry so much about Congress and the courts.’”
And, Blake added, “as many 3 or 4 in 10” Republicans, according to several polls, are “endorsing that kind of power.”
Critics expressed outrage.
Journalist Ahmed Baba observed: “This is the second day in a row he’s said this. This is an intentional normalization effort.”
Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote, “note how Trump on a daily basis is trying to normalize the idea that he’s a dictator.”
Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) wrote: “Deploying the military to cities. Breaking laws. Attacking judges. Firing generals, economists, and central bankers who speak truth to power. Praising autocrats who hate America. Republican officials have given up on the rule of law. They obey the law of the ruler. But in America, law is king.”
Hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian wrote: “You are all frogs in a boiling pot.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
