BBC
Dictatorship – or at least the threat of it – has been a topic of much discussion in American politics this week.
As Donald Trump continues his seemingly easy march to the Republican presidential nomination, critics have been sharpening their attacks on him.
Neoconservative scholar Robert Kagan penned an essay in the Washington Post warning that “the odds of the United States falling into dictatorship have grown considerably”. And former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, another vocal critic of Mr Trump, told CBS the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship”.
The former president dismissed these warnings as more evidence of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
Then, at a town hall forum in Iowa on Tuesday night, Trump – who has frequently lavished praise on strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – threw petrol on the fire and danced around the flames.
As some US news headlines put it, Trump seemed to confirm the worst fears of his critics – that he would become a “dictator” if re-elected to the US presidency.
However, the exchange was a bit more complicated than that.
Fox News moderator Sean Hannity was attempting to prompt the former president to dismiss the accusation that, if elected next year, he planned to abuse presidential power to punish his enemies, as Trump has sometimes implied in past comments.
“You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.
And that’s when Trump, again venturing into that grey area between humour and seriousness, said he wouldn’t abuse his power… “except for day one” of his next term in office.
He added that he would take unilateral action on border security and energy extraction (to “drill, drill drill”, as Trump put it).
“After that, I’m not a dictator,” he concluded.
Such half-assurances haven’t exactly come as a relief to Trump’s critics across the political spectrum.
According to them, democracy would be tested in a second term because there would be fewer safeguards.
They say the former president has himself talked about weaponising the justice department and of replacing civil servants with loyalists. And they warn this time he would not have experienced figures in his cabinet willing to object to more extreme proposals.
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