Why I’m So Worried About 2024
Let me count the reasons
Brief Announcement: Monday’s post and this one add up to around 5,000 words in all, so this will be it from me for this week. I’ll be back on Monday with an essay about the movie Oppenheimer, which I will be seeing this Friday.
This will be a somewhat unusual post from me, roughly in the form of a list. The items on the list are reasons why I’m growing increasingly worried about the 2024 election. Put simply, we face the prospect of a lawless and unpredictable Republican nominee who aims to enhance greatly the powers of the presidency facing off against a broadly unpopular incumbent who could easily lose. Where that would leave us as a country is anyone’s guess, but it would be nowhere good.
Reason 1: An Agenda for an Autocratic Presidency
The most important piece of journalism published this week is the blockbuster story by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman that ran in the New York Times on Monday. It explained the numerous ways Trump loyalists, and populist-oriented Republicans more generally, are planning to enhance the powers of the presidency in the event that the right defeats President Joe Biden in November 2024.
I discussed one of those ways in a post from late April: Schedule F reform, which would remove civil-service protections from executive branch bureaucrats who stay on from administration to administration. This would enable the president to fire tens of thousands of employees and replace them with political loyalists. Trump signed an executive order implementing the reform shortly before he left office, and Biden promptly rescinded the order. If he manages to win the 2024 election, Trump would almost certainly reissue the order and begin using it to ensure direct White House control over executive branch departments.
This would be coupled with an effort to bring ostensibly independent agencies and commissions, including the Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission, under direct Oval Office oversight, enabling the president to use the immense regulatory power of the federal government for his own ends. It might also empower him to (in the words of the Times piece) “scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials [Trump] has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country.’”
Finally, Trump and his allies plan to revive the practice of “impounding” congressionally allocated funds of which the president disapproves. Lawmakers banned the practice under President Richard Nixon, but Trump’s brain trust wants to bring the practice back in order to enhance the power of the Oval Office.
At a rally in Michigan late last month, Trump gave his audience a sense of what he hopes to accomplish with his campaign and eventual enhancements to presidential power:
We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will defeat crooked Joe Biden. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
Lest readers console themselves with the possibility that another candidate—say the currently second-place Ron DeSantis—would be less likely to follow this autocratic path, it’s worth noting, as the Times does, that these plans for a presidential power grab were formulated as part of what’s called Project 2025, a combined effort involving 65 right-wing organizations and led by the Heritage Foundation, which is itself headed by a man who openly admires Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. There is little chance DeSantis (or any other right-populist candidate) would follow a different path.
Reason 2: Trump is Overwhelmingly Likely to Win the GOP Nomination
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