We Can’t Let Trump Run America Like His Business

It would be an autocracy like we’ve never seen.

Donald Trump in his office, at his desk, in Trump Tower, circa September, 1987. (GettyImages)

THE SCHOLARS AND DOOMSAYERS ARE RIGHT: Autocracy is the correct word for what Donald Trump has in mind for a second presidency, should our nation be accursed enough for him to get one.

I don’t say this lightly. It seemed to me, going back to the 2016 campaign, that some Trump critics used the word loosely. I have avoided characterizing Trump as an aspiring autocrat with dreams of controlling his very own autocracy. 

But things have changed. It’s now clear we have gone way beyond the creepily disturbing dictator worship that’s marked Trump’s political career, way beyond installing daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner in the West Wing as presidential advisers. We’re even way beyond Trump’s successful coup to make his daughter-in-law Lara co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and her vow that the RNC would spend “every single penny” to get her father-in-law elected.

Now we have headlines like “Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results.” And “What Trump promised oil CEOs as he asked them to steer $1 billion to his campaign.” And “Barron Trump makes political debut as Florida delegate for GOP convention.” Those three headlines above were lumped together at the top of the Washington Post homepage and phone app last Thursday:

That was the tipping point for me, and I’m betting that other holdouts trying to temper their alarm are not far from tipping points of their own.

The most routine news was the Republican Party of Florida’s list of delegates to the national convention in Milwaukee, and yet it was anything but routine. Barron, age 18, was the tip of a Trump contingent that still includes three of his half siblings—Don Jr., Eric, and Tiffany—along with longtime Don Jr. fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is on the RNC committee writing the 2024 Republican platform, and Tiffany’s husband Michael Boulos. Barron’s launch as a member of Team Trump lasted only two days, until his mother issued an opaque statement about “prior commitments,” but by then the news had been splashed across front pages all over.

Lara Trump, already making the rounds of state GOP conventions, will of course be highly visible at the national convention in July. Add in close, longtime associates, operatives, and allies, and the family extends much further. And now come reports that Ivanka and Jared, who left politics in 2021, are returning to the fold. Puck reported that Ivanka is looking to help her father’s campaign and possibly return to the White House, while Reuters scooped that Jared was reaching out to donors ahead of a Manhattan fundraiser for Trump this week. (One cohost was Jared’s father Charles, whom Trump pardoned in 2020 for crimes including tax evasion and witness retaliation in a case Chris Christie called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he’d ever prosecuted as a U.S. attorney.)

This show of family force immediately brought to mind how Hope Hicks described the Trump Organization in her testimony at the hush money trial in New York: “Everybody that works there in some sense reports to Mr. Trump. It’s a very big and successful company, but it’s really run like a small family business in certain ways. And Mr. Trump and Don and Eric and Ivanka were very involved in the business, and so people reported to the four family members.”

A penny-pinching, media-obsessed micromanager dad with three children as his trusted lieutenants is running a family business, no matter how large it is. What do you call it when you transfer that model to the nation’s highest office—a micromanager president attended by five or six family members at his beck and call, both inside and outside the White House, with broad and largely undefined political, policy, or legal roles and limits, running a country of 330 million people? That’s an autocracy—“government by a single person or small group that has unlimited power or authority, or the power of authority of such a person or group.”

You don’t need much imagination to envision how this would work. In fact, the Post exclusive on Trump’s meeting with oil CEOs lays it out in all its excruciatingly transactional detail: They’re at Mar-a-Lago in a room with a view of the (warming, rising) ocean. One of them complains about the burdens of President Joe Biden’s climate policies and regulations. Trump tells the CEOs they should raise $1 billion to return him to office and he’ll immediately reverse dozens of Biden environmental rules and block new ones. He tells them it will be a “deal,” the Post reported, “because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.”

Trump obviously does not anticipate problems getting this done. After all, he has a plan to dismantle much of the federal civil service and replace government experts with partisan loyalists. And so what if some say his meeting with the oil company CEOs sounds like a corrupt quid pro quo, or suggest he may have violated a federal bribery law? Other analysts say the meeting likely was legal, and it’s not like judges and justices have been rushing to hold Trump accountable—for anything.

He already has shown that he can effectively manipulate Republican lawmakers when he wants or needs something. They acquitted him in two impeachment trials, killed a landmark bipartisan border security package because he told them to, and as Joe Perticone reports, they are already laying the groundwork for 2024 election denialism. Compliance levels are high and unsurprising, given the threats and menace—both implicit and explicit—of Trump-era politics.

Speaking of transactions and compliance, Stormy Daniels on the stand at the New York “hush money” trial seemed to be as stunned as some of the oil CEOs at Trump’s unsubtle demands. She thought she’d accepted a dinner invitation to Trump’s penthouse hotel suite. She testified that she didn’t get dinner, but she did get a sexual encounter after Trump suggested she should appear on his TV show, The Apprentice. Daniels says she was too shocked and insecure to decline the sex—in part because Trump was older, bigger, had a bodyguard, and implied sex was part of a deal she didn’t realize she’d agreed to. “This is the only way you’re getting out of the trailer park,” she said he told her. And “I thought you were serious about what you wanted.”

Every day we learn more about how Trump intends to command a global superpower the second time around. Every day it looks more like how he ran the Trump Organization. And in the same way that “there’s always a tweet” from Trump for any occasion, or a joke from The Simpsons, the hush money/election interference trial is delivering a vivid series of darkly frightening insights about Trump and the way he does business, both his own and America’s.