Scared of Trump? Don’t move overseas yet — he won’t be a dictator on day one

Andres Oppenheimer

We should all wish President-elect Trump good luck and a successful four years in power. But, at the same time, his recent statements and cabinet picks should put us on guard against a possible concentration of unchecked presidential power, a slow-motion destruction of democracy and massive corruption in Trump’s America.

To be sure, I’m not among those believing that America will become an autocracy overnight. I’m not planning to move to Canada, Portugal or Argentina. It took Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan two decades to dismantle his country’s independent institutions, and a similar time for Viktor Orban — a close Trump ally — to amass near-absolute powers in Hungary.

Trump, 78, will end his term as the oldest president in American history, and most likely won’t be able to totally destroy America’s democracy in four years. He may try to change the constitution to run for a third term, but that won’t be an easy task.

Granted, Trump will surely claim in his inaugural address that he won by a landslide and has an unprecedented mandate to carry out his campaign pledges. But the truth is that he won the popular vote with only 49.8% of the votes. His margin of victory was 1.5 percentage points, one of the smallest ones since 1900.

Trump will start his term with a razor-thin, 219-member Republican majority in the House, which amounts to only one more vote than the 218 he will need to pass legislation. It will be the smallest House majority since 1931, in a country where opposition parties tend to win mid-term elections.

Also, out of more than 830 active federal judges, only about 235 were appointed by Trump. Most judges will probably continue to be loyal to the Constitution, rather than to Trump.

But there are many warning signs that Trump may try to weaken America’s system of checks and balances in an effort to grab unprecedented powers. After losing the 2020 election and refusing to accept his defeat, he has threatened to punish political rivals, journalists and judges.

Since 2022, Trump has issued more than 100 threats to investigate, prosecute and imprison his critics, according to a National Public Radio count. He may succeed in intimidating the media — perhaps the only remaining source of effective checks on his government — to practice self-censorship for fear of costly lawsuits from the incoming president.

In addition to having a majority in both houses of Congress, Trump will have a conservative-majority Supreme Court. And, unlike in his first term, he has picked unconditional loyalists over experienced conservative policy makers for most of his top cabinet jobs.

Will anybody around him dare to privately contradict him on some of his dumbest ideas, such as not ruling out using military force to take the Panama Canal? (Yes, it’s a dumb idea, because as I wrote recently, it would among other things give China a perfect excuse to invade Taiwan, or Russia to grab Poland.)

Trump has already hinted at seeking a way to stay in power beyond his term, even if the Constitution forbids presidents from serving more than two terms. He told House Republicans in November, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you say, “He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out.”

Some of the right-wing populist leaders he has invited to his inauguration, such as Orban and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, have already changed constitutional rules in their countries to run for re-election beyond their term limits.

Bukele is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration, alongside Argentina’s leader Javier Milei and Italian president Giorgia Meloni. Orban has said he won’t be able to attend.

Outgoing President Biden, who plans to attend Trump’s inauguration despite the fact that Trump didn’t go to his, is leaving office with a dire warning about the Trump presidency.

“An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our democracy,” Biden said.

In a reference to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and other social media tycoons’ closeness to Trump, Biden said he’s worried about the emergence of a “tech-industrial complex.” He added that “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”

Indeed, never before in recent history has there been a U.S. government with so many billionaires, with such control over public information. And never before in recent years have media owners such as Zuckerberg openly announced they favored abandoning fact-checking in the name of “free speech” — in many cases their code word for eliminating costly data-checking jobs and allowing online racism and conspiracy theories in search of more clicks and greater profits. We can’t rule out that, much like oligarchs in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or in other authoritarian countries, Trump-allied media moguls may buy many of the remaining independent media.

The presence of nearly a dozen billionaires in top Trump cabinet jobs may also be fertile ground for government corruption. Will Musk, placed in charge of the White House newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE,) abstain from using his closeness to Trump to favor his businesses?

We will soon have answers to many of these questions. But one thing should be clear to all of us: Without checks and balances, everybody — even Trump — will lose. As the old saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.