Is Donald Trump really serious about being a dictator?

One of the pleasures of last week’s presidential debate was watching Vice President Kamala Harris deftly grill former President Trump about his affinity for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

“It’s absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats want you back as president because they are so obvious that they can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” Harris said. If he were to run for a second term, Trump would willingly hand Ukraine over to Putin “in exchange for favors and what you consider to be a friendship with … a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

In a confused response, Trump repeated his dubious claim that Russia never attacked Ukraine under his leadership, adding that Putin has an arsenal of nuclear weapons. “And at some point,” Trump said, “he may use them.”

He spoke approvingly of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader and darling of the MAGA media. I’d love to give you an exact quote, but I couldn’t extract a single meaningful sentence from Trump’s comments about Orban.

Trump has always flirted with the idea of autocracy, but now that flirtation has turned into a full-blown embrace. He is threatening to weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents, gut the civil service and replace professional federal employees with loyalists, invoke the Insurrection Act to crush protests, reinstate his Muslim immigration ban, and lock up millions of immigrants in detention camps.

If you believe he is not serious, then you are in a state of denial.

Trump has already tried to force state officials to overturn the results of a free and fair election. When that didn’t work, his supporters launched a deadly attack on the Capitol to prevent the confirmation of his defeat to Joe Biden. The former Secretary of State had already Madeline Albright called Trump “the first anti-democratic president in modern US history.”

And like most despots or would-be despots, he is sadistic: he rejects those who have given their lives for their country, mocks the disabled, and tears children away from their families.

To say that democracy experts are concerned would be an understatement.

“I consider Trump to be a very serious threat to American democracy,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of numerous books on democracy. “He has repeatedly shown in word and deed that he does not value democracy, does not respect constitutional norms, does not accept the outcome of democratic elections when he loses, and that he only cares about the friendship of strong autocrats like Orban and Putin, not our democratic allies.”

I met Diamond in July 2019, when Trump had already been in office for two and a half years. He had just published Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, a disturbing analysis of the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world. An entire chapter, titled “The Decline of American Democracy,” is devoted to Trump.

“We can survive the meanness and vulgarity of a president,” Diamond wrote. “We can challenge and reverse bad policies. But the threat Trump poses to America’s democratic institutions and norms is unprecedented.”

And, as Diamond told me in an email from Taiwan on Thursday, the threat has only grown more serious, especially since the Supreme Court undermined the fundamental American ideal that no one is above the law.

“He is much more deranged now than he was during his 2016 or 2020 candidacy, and I truly fear that he may abuse presidential power and use it as a weapon against his opponents,” Diamond wrote, “even more so given the Supreme Court’s recent decision extending immunity from prosecution to virtually anything a president does while in office that can be claimed as an official act.”

One of the most troubling aspects of Trump’s popularity is the willingness of his supporters to accept a president with unchecked authority.

A February survey of global opinions on authoritarianism by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of Americans would support a system “in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference” from legislatures or courts. (Not surprisingly, this is roughly the same share of Americans who really want a second Trump term.)

Diamond has often said that democracies, with their strong protections of civil liberties and the rule of law, do not die of heart attacks. Instead, they die slowly, incrementally, poisoned at the root by the fear and anger stoked by demagogues like Trump.

“They say we lost,” Trump told a crowd in Arizona last week, whining about 2020 as usual. “But we didn’t lose. And we will never allow anything like that to happen again in this country.”

Be careful: he tells you exactly what he plans to do.

@robinkabcarian