According to longtime Republican insider William Kristol, while 80-year-old President Donald Trump may seem too old to stage a full “authoritarian takeover,” Americans should remain vigilant. Not only has Trump become more “willful and erratic” than ever, but he’s surrounded by “younger henchmen” who are “hale and hungry” for unrestricted power.
Trump, writes Kristol in the Bulwark, has “lost a step. He’s even more willful and erratic than he once was. His self-indulgence and narcissism are even more out of control. And it’s only getting worse. A sense of impending mortality seems to be making our president even more unhinged than ever.” So, warns Kristol, while it may be tempting to reassure oneself that Trump “doesn’t really have the patience to carry out a thoroughgoing subversion of the rule of law, of our political and civil liberties, or of our elections,” and that “he doesn’t really have the ability to execute a full-scale authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government,” Americans should remain on alert.
Kristol gives two reasons for this wariness. First, because “there’s no doubt he would like to see such a takeover.” But also, because “he does have young men with a lean and hungry look in positions of authority and power in the executive branch who are committed to making his dream of power without limits a reality.” And as Kristol notes, while some of Trump’s lieutenants are more capable than others, “they all have lots of energy. They’re all young men in a hurry to reshape our government and our country.”
There are numerous examples, writes Kristol: “Bill Pulte, the new acting director of national intelligence, is 38. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is 40.1 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and FBI Director Kash Patel are all 46. OMB Director Russell Vought is 50. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is 51. They’re young, but they’re as determined as the old man they work for not to hand their positions over to anyone other than fellow loyalists after their terms in office, if they intend to leave office at all. They’re as determined as the old man they work for not to step aside from their powers and allow political opponents to look into what they have done. And like the old man they work for, they aren’t committed to the peaceful and democratic transfer of power after an election, or to the political norms or lawful procedures of a liberal democracy.”
Kristol raises the example of Pulte, whom Trump specifically appointed as Acting Director of National Intelligence so he can conduct mass firings of non-loyalists. While Pulte’s confirmation was unlikely from the get-go due to opposition even from Republican lawmakers, Kristol says it is now clear that Trump only needed Pulte in the role long enough to purge the intelligence community. And on Monday, a source told CNN, “The deep state firings have begun.”
“And so Pulte has begun to follow in the footsteps of what Hegseth has been doing at the Pentagon, and Blanche at Justice, and Patel at the FBI,” writes Kristol. “Looking at their purges along with the mass hirings at ICE, one sees that we’re entering a period of maximum authoritarian threat, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play. And we’ll be in that era of threat for the next two and a half years.”
Faced with this danger, Kristol — who spent decades working against the Democratic Party — is now urging his past opponents to take action to stop it, writing, “They should be bold and resolute about using all means at their power — such as blocking unrelated legislation and balking at usually routine appropriations and encouraging dissent and whistleblowing from within the executive — to thwart the pernicious schemes of the old autocrat and his younger henchmen.”