Hard as this is to believe, but a lot of people don’t like it when someone running for president says they want to be a dictator. It doesn’t exactly set the mind at ease. Even if that person says they’ll “only” go autocratic for a day, that’s not very reassuring, is it? Does anyone really think that someone who wants to be a dictator will seriously give up those powers after only 24 hours. Anyway, to the surprise of few, Donald Trump finally said exactly that.
It took him till his third presidential campaign, but he said he’d be a dictator, but just for one day, so he can get a tick a couple biggies off his to-do list. The response wasn’t so hot. And at a Fox News town hall Wednesday, Trump got mad about that…but only after saying he’d be a dictator all over again.
"I am not going to be a dictator" — Trump pic.twitter.com/2laB5FLANF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 11, 2024
Last month, at another Fox News town hall, Trump was asked by his good buddy Sean Hannity a softball question: He asked the former president, who was last year indicted on 91 criminal charges, to swear he’d never go abuse his powers if re-elected. Trump couldn’t even do that.
“Except for day one,” Trump said, attempting to be reassuring. “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” He added, “After that, I’m not a dictator, okay?”
A month of bad press later and Trump can’t believe that people aren’t cool with a presidential candidate saying they’d be a dictator but only temporarily.
“All I said [is] I’m gonna be a dictator for one day,” Trump fumed at Wednesday’s town hall. “We’re gonna do two things: the border, we’re gonna make it so tight you can’t get in, unless you come in legally; and the other is energy. We’re gonna drill, baby, drill. After that I’m not going to be a dictator.”
Feel better? Surely it only takes a day to tighten the border and drill for oil in places maybe one shouldn’t lest you screw up the environment. And again, dictators always relinquish power when they say they will. It’s not like the words “after that I’m not going to be a dictator” aren’t as calming as Trump thinks they are.
But Trump didn’t see what was up with all the hoopla. He accused the press of taking him out of context, cutting it after the part where he said “I’m going to be a dictator.”
“They cut the rest of the sentence!” Trump marveled. He then said the opposite. “No, no. I’m not going to be a dictator. I’m going to manage, like we did…We were so successful that the country was coming together, it was actually coming together and coming together well. There was a beautiful thing to see. And we’re going to do it again.”
It’s not clear what Trump was referring to with the “coming together” part. The last year of his presidency saw a badly bungled federal response to a once-in-a-century pandemic, a spike in unemployment, mass protests over systemic racism (which included his administration teargassing its own citizens), and it concluded with him spreading voter fraud nonsense after he lost re-election. The country was rarely less together.
So perhaps the same guy who managed all that saying he’ll “only” be a dictator for one day isn’t as encouraging as the noted magnet understander thinks.