Anti-Trump Means Anti-Democracy? You Can’t Be Serious
Peter Berkowitz’s bizarre and disingenuous “I’m rubber, you’re glue” argument.
WHO POSES A GREATER DANGER TO DEMOCRACY: Donald Trump and his minions? Or the very critics of Trump who are raising the alarm about an impending slide into authoritarianism?
Among those critics is Robert Kagan, who warned in the Washington Post last November that a second Trump presidency raised the specter of an “irreversible descent into dictatorship.” There are the editors of the Atlantic, who in the January/February issue present an array of top-flight authors—David Frum, Anne Applebaum, McKay Coppins, Ron Brownstein, David Graham, Tom Nichols, and more—spelling out in detail how Trump would usher an authoritarian or even a fascist regime into power. There is Liz Cheney, who paid a steep political price for standing up to Trump; she argues that, thanks to his candidacy, the United States is “sleepwalking into dictatorship.” There are the many academics whose studies in history and government leave them worried about the threat Trump poses to the American political system. And there are those officials and staffers and retired military officers who saw Trump up close during his first term and who now suggest that he is a “wannabe dictator” and warn that “a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it.”
Yet in an article published late last month in RealClearPolitics, Peter Berkowitz turns the tables. It is not Trump, he argues, but these critics themselves who are endangering democracy and the rule of law. The author and editor of a handful of largely academic books about political theory, Berkowitz is known as a moderate conservative, one who has regularly defended liberalism from illiberal depredations, especially in higher education. A longtime scholar at the Hoover Institution, he served in a high-ranking position in the Trump State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, where he was a standout appointment in an administration rife with grifters and MAGA true believers. Given Berkowitz’s credentials and reputation, it is worth hearing him out.
Berkowitz’s article is titled “‘Flight 93 Election’ Anti-Trumpers Imperil the Rule of Law”—a reference to Michael Anton’s pseudonymously authored 2016 Claremont Review of Books article “The Flight 93 Election.” Anton made the case for electing Trump as president, notoriously comparing the choice between Hillary Clinton and Trump to the decision faced by the passengers aboard the hijacked flight on 9/11: “charge the cockpit or you die.”
A Clinton administration in this analogy represented the death of the American republic. Or in Anton’s characteristically overwrought prose, she would put “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments.” As Anton continued the analogy, electing Trump was a desperate measure that at least gave you a chance at survival, while “if you don’t try”—if you elect Clinton—then “death is certain.”
Flipping the script, Berkowitz maintains that anti-Trumpers have now embraced a similar Antonian logic of desperation. Only worse, for Anton “did not call for lawlessness.” Whereas Anton “warned of the danger of progressive dictatorship a mere two months before the 2016 election, anti-Trumpers have been sounding the alarm continuously against Trumpian tyranny since 2016 and have picked up the pace this cycle.” With their incessant warnings, and pressure for ever more radical measures to stop Trump in his electoral tracks, they themselves, maintains Berkowitz, are “fostering substantial dangers to democracy in America.”
As for Trump, Berkowitz assures us that there is little call to worry about his dictatorial proclivities. History, Berkowitz writes,
provides scarce evidence of democracies deteriorating into dictatorships without the cooperation of the military, government bureaucracy, business world, media, and universities. . . . America’s military, well-educated in the laws of war, is unlikely to carry out unlawful presidential orders. Meanwhile, the massive federal bureaucracy is overwhelmingly progressive. The corporate world and Silicon Valley oppose Trump. The mainstream media (on a good night approximately 1% of the nation watches Fox News), Hollywood, and the universities despise him.
In short, Trump’s critics are proposing draconian solutions to a nonexistent problem, for the former president, should he re-enter the White House, will almost certainly be constrained by the institutions that surround him.
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of this two-pronged argument?
To begin with, Berkowitz entirely elides all of the danger signals that have been coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth. We have Trump’s repeated assertions that he will not be a dictator in his administration, “except for day one.” We have him justifying “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” We have his insistence that he would turn away immigrants who do not share “our religion.” We have his descent into Hitlerian rhetoric, calling his opponents “vermin,” and his assertion that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” “I am your retribution,” is his pledge to his MAGA followers.
Berkowitz exaggerates grotesquely in calling the federal bureaucracy “overwhelmingly progressive” (has he ever visited the Pentagon?). But even worse: he disingenuously ignores the subject of Project 2025, the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation plan to gut federal civil service rules and staff the government from top to bottom with Trump loyalists, ready to do his bidding. Combine Project 2025 with Trump’s expressed willingness to exercise his pardon power on behalf of those of his followers—the violent Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—ready to violate the law at his instruction, and we have a recipe for lawlessness and tyranny.
Berkowitz says it is “unlikely” that the U.S. military will be wielded by Trump as an instrument of repression. That is a curiously equivocal word choice. Perhaps that is because Berkowitz is aware that already during his first presidency Trump contemplated using the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military domestically on at least two occasions—first to put down Black Lives Matters protests and then to cling to power after his election defeat.
Berkowitz is also no doubt familiar with the fact that following his election defeat, Trump seeded the Pentagon with hardline loyalists, a move that in part prompted all ten living former defense secretaries to sign an unprecedented public warning. “Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory,” they wrote. In a second Trump term, there would be fewer restraints if Trump attempted to use the military for repressive ends.
Finally, there is the fact that Trump, for the first time in American history, attempted to short-circuit the peaceful transfer of power in a naked bid to defy the electorate and serve for a second term. Berkowitz does concede “Trump’s wretched judgment and conduct on Jan. 6 and the excesses to which Trump and his base have been prone.” But in extraordinary fashion, he minimizes Trump’s conduct. We need a trial, he writes, “to determine whether [Trump’s] conduct was unlawful.” For “challenging election results and attempting to reverse them,” he continues, “are not in themselves criminal.” Indeed, writes Berkowitz, “the United States protects speech and provides procedures for contesting elections.”
This raises disingenuousness to a new height. Only in a purely formal sense is Berkowitz correct: A trial is required to determine Trump’s guilt. Until he is tried, he enjoys the presumption of innocence that the criminal justice system affords to all defendants. But that legal necessity of preserving a defendant’s rights hardly means that before such a trial citizens must ignore the extensive public record of the illegal things that Trump did in late 2020 and early 2021.
Trump did not merely “challenge” the results and engage in protected “speech” and follow “procedures” for contesting elections. He organized the false elector scheme, he attempted to use the Justice Department to level bogus allegations of election fraud in Georgia, he pressured state officials to cook their election results, he pressured Vice President Mike Pence to violate his oath of office, he spread the Big Lie that he had sufficient evidence to prove that the election was stolen so as to whip up his supporters on January 6th to attack the U.S. Capitol and interrupt the transfer of power. Under our system of justice, even a man caught on video in flagrante delicto with a bloody knife in his hands while stabbing someone to death is presumed innocent, murderer though he may be. Trump was and is a serial lawbreaker, which is why he is facing 91 felony counts.
BERKOWITZ KNOWS ALL THIS. But it is the anti-Trumpists, in his view, who are threatening democracy. He cites their support for the Colorado court decision to bar Trump from the ballot. He points to Kagan, whom he accuses of providing “chilling justification for effectively setting aside the rule of law” based upon “lurid speculations.” Both charges are spurious.
The Colorado court decision to exclude Trump from the ballot, and the subsequent ruling in Maine, whatever their merits or demerits, are themselves the working out of the rule of law. They are subject to appeals, which will be heard, presumably promptly, by higher courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Though the Colorado and Maine rulings are indeed extraordinary, the actions that prompted them are even more extraordinary, which is why we have come to this pass.
As for Kagan, Berkowitz couldn’t be more wrong. Kagan deserves high praise for powerfully laying out the danger that Trump presents to the republic. Only an implausible reading of his Washington Post article would lead one to conclude that he suggests operating outside the law. Dismissing Kagan’s well-reasoned warning as “lurid speculations,” as Berkowitz does, is both telling and shameful.
In short, Berkowitz is standing matters on their head while brazenly repeating a Trump talking point. For it is Trump himself who has lately been charging, baselessly, that his opponents are the ones subverting democracy. “They’re willing to violate the U.S. Constitution at levels never seen before in order to win,” Trump said at a rally just days before Berkowitz’s article came out. “And remember this: Joe Biden is a threat to democracy—he’s a threat.”
The political consultant Rick Wilson famously remarked years ago that “everything Trump touches dies.” In the case of Peter Berkowitz, it seems that his judgment has succumbed to Wilson’s rule.
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