The Danger of the Moment
The question during the Donald Trump presidency and then again after the 2020 election was whether Trump’s norm-shattering presidency would prompt a sustained reform initiative like the one following the Nixon presidency and the Watergate scandal. There is a wide range of reforms to consider. But Trump and his Republican allies are now advancing a novel reform of their own, and the “reform” effort marks a new front in the Trump-era attacks on norms and democratic institutions. Trump is promoting, and his party is using various means of achieving, a politicized electoral process in which politicians would have more power to direct the running of elections in their self-interest. Republican-controlled state legislatures are passing laws to subject election officials to partisan control, using the threat of civil fines, criminal liability, and suspension, and it appears that, beginning with Arizona, they will use unprecedented “audits” by political allies to cast doubt on these officials’ professionalism and integrity.
This is how Trump is adapting his brand of demagogic populism to his “post-presidency,” as he perhaps plots an eventual third presidential campaign but certainly maintains his grip on the Republican Party and molds it in his image. His strategy now is no different from the one he followed while president: to politicize institutions so that he can bend them to his will and personal interests. His disdain as president for the independence of the Department of Justice, his baldly political and self-interested uses of the pardon power, his effort to obstruct the presidential transition process: These and other abuses of power in the Trump presidency have the same source, in the same politics, as his drive to compromise the electoral process.
