Fox News held what it billed as a “town hall” with Donald Trump on Tuesday night in Davenport, Iowa, an opportunity for the former president’s devoted acolyte Sean Hannity to emcee what was essentially an hourlong advertisement for the Trump campaign. The audience of red-hatted Trump superfans — Fox couldn’t have found a whiter crowd if it had held the event in Reykjavik, Iceland — wasn’t there to ask questions, but merely to cheer at every applause line and laugh uproariously at the jokes about Joe Biden. Yet, despite Hannity’s best efforts and softest questions, something important actually happened.
The show was taped, perhaps so Fox could edit out anything that would open it up to another damaging defamation lawsuit. Whatever the reason, the network didn’t remove the part in which Hannity almost begged Trump to refute reporting that he’s planning a kind of authoritarian takeover should he be elected next November, to no avail.
Trump clearly didn’t give Hannity what the host was after: a clear statement that the former president is not planning a dictatorship.
“To be clear, do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if re-elected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?” Hannity asked. Trump answered not by saying “No,” but with his usual whining about how victimized he is. He then embarked on a lengthy digression about what a terrific mobster Al Capone was, which eventually came around to his point that he has been indicted more times than Capone. True enough.
But Trump clearly didn’t give Hannity what the host was after: a clear statement that the former president is not planning a dictatorship. So Hannity tried again. “I want to go back to this one issue,” he said, “because the media has been focused on this and attacking you. Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight — you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.”
“Except for day one,” Trump replied.
Trump had a couple of “day one” policies he claimed he would enact — “We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.” But remember, this is a man who shouts “fake news” at the drop of a hat. Yet Trump was clearly unbothered by the widespread reporting about the plans he and his loyalists are laying. He didn’t indignantly insist that the media is wrong, that he doesn’t intend to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies, or fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with cronies vetted for devotion to him, or deploy the military against those who protest against him.
It’s not merely that Trump would like to do all those things; of course he would. He has talked about them all before. The reason he doesn’t hide those intentions is that he knows that a Trump dictatorship that dismantles American democracy is exactly what his most ardent supporters want. If, that is, Trump sits atop that dictatorship and uses the federal government to attack the people they despise. At one point in the Fox program, Hannity played a clip of Trump promising supporters, “I am your retribution.” The crowd in the theater cheered. Trump is never more shocking in his pronouncements, or honest about his disturbing objectives, than when he’s before a MAGA crowd.
Nor are the Trump advisers carefully designing this assault on the American system of government concealing their efforts. They’re publishing their blueprints online, talking to reporters about them and publicly indulging their authoritarian fantasies. Former and future Trump aide Kash Patel told Steve Bannon this week that in a second Trump administration, “we will go out and find the conspirators not just in government but in the media.” Anyone who supposedly “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections” would be a target, Patel said. “We’re going to come after you.”
Every politician promises great things to come if they are elected, but Trump always offered something far darker.
Had Trump expressed the same sentiments to Hannity, the town hall audience would have cheered, because part of what thrills them about Trump is his eagerness to indulge his supporters’ most lurid fantasies. Every politician promises great things to come if they are elected, but Trump always offered something far darker: visions of rage unleashed, violence given official sanction, the people you hate not just defeated politically, but also running for their lives like the “vermin” he says they are.
Hannity understands the political danger of Trump going too far in painting that picture; it may make the kind of cultists who packed the theater in Davenport vibrate with excitement, but it will repel a far greater number of voters. But Trump wants to hear the roar of crowds that find joy in the prospect of authoritarianism. He can’t get enough of it. And he’s not stopping now.