What If Trump Wins?
Donald Trump was slamming his fist on the Resolute Desk and, once again, calling for blood.
It was the second year of his presidency, and Trump was seething about gang members and drug lords. He wanted to see their bodies piled up in the streets. Specifically, he sought a series of mass executions — with firing squads and gallows, and certainly without the quaintness of an appeals process — to send a chilling message about the scope of his power.
Trump, who’d taken office inveighing against “American carnage,” wanted to create some of his own.
This violent fantasy became an obsession, according to former Trump administration officials. The 45th president brought up the topic so often during the early years of his presidency that one former White House official tells Rolling Stone they lost count. “Fucking kill them all,” Trump would say. “An eye for an eye.” Other times he’d snap at his staff: “You just got to kill these people.” Invoking the brutality of dictatorial regimes that Trump wanted to emulate, he’d add, “Other countries do it all the time.”
For Trump, the spectacle was crucial. “He had a particular affinity for the firing squad,” says one of the former White House officials. He’d say, “They need to be eradicated, not jailed.” Administration officials privately referred to this demand as Trump’s “American death-squads idea,” comparing it to the drug-war bloodbath carried out by Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte. (The sources, some still very much within Trump’s circle, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive conversations.)
That mass executions were not a feature of Trump’s term is a credit to the American justice system and the more sober-minded government officials who were unwilling to be complicit in his mad schemes. These aides and advisers typically put the president off, making vague promises to “look into” the idea, long enough to let Trump’s tyrannical tantrum blow over.
But if Trump defeats Vice President Kamala Harris this November, America will encounter a Trump unbound, a man whose darkest impulses will not be checked by “adults in the room” — -creating potentially catastrophic consequences for the American experiment. “This election is about whether or not we remain a democratic society or we move to authoritarianism,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells Rolling Stone, insisting that Trump “does not believe in the basic tenets and foundations of American democracy.”
The safeguards that kept Trump in check during his first term have collapsed — starting with the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party. “We know from the first administration that Trump was an amateur and lots of people stopped his most radical actions,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He underscores that Trump’s darkest ambitions were present from the beginning — from the Muslim ban to the coup attempt of Jan. 6. “The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people,” Stanley says. “We know that that’s not going to happen anymore.”
Trump’s campaign to retain power after losing the 2020 election only collapsed because Vice President Mike Pence proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump’s cult of personality. But for 2024, Trump has a vice presidential candidate who appears even less committed to the democratic process than he is. J.D. Vance is a protégé and plaything of the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has written that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.”
A second administration will not feature advisers in the mold of former Chief of Staff John Kelly, or Defense Secretary Mark Esper — establishment Republicans with a stake in keeping Trump constitutionally in bounds. “These are going to be all MAGA people,” says Michael Klarman, a Harvard law professor and an expert in executive power. “Some of them are much more ideologically committed to the agenda than Trump is,” he says, listing deputies like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, as well as masterminds of the Heritage Foundation’s extreme policy agenda, Project 2025.
More dangerous, Trump would reenter the Oval Office with powers that have been supercharged by the ultraconservative Supreme Court, which Trump helped build as president. A partisan 6-3 decision in July placed the presidency beyond the reach of criminal punishment for any acts that can be couched as “official.” The once-outrageous Nixonian maxim “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” is today a statement of fact, leading Justice Sonia Sotomayor to warn in a fiery dissent: “In every use of official power the president is now a king above the law.”
If he were to return to the White House, Trump would benefit from a set of circumstances that — had they existed in January 2021 — might well have blocked Joe Biden from becoming president after winning the election. “There are no guardrails,” Stanley insists of Trump. “He already has control of any institutions that might stop him.”
Dictatorship Threat
TRUMP HAS BEEN PUBLIC about his plans, vowing to be a “dictator” — though just for a day, he claims, so he could supercharge fossil--fuel production and seal off the border. How any of this would work is likely beyond Trump’s understanding, but he’s certainly going to pull every lever of power within his grasp. And the targets of his authoritarian ambition are not single-day, or even single-year, projects. Trump seeks autocratic power to implement his draconian immigration policies, including starting “the largest domestic deportation operation” in U.S. history and reinstating the Muslim travel ban. He’s called for ending the constitutional right of birthright citizenship with an “executive order” — a notion backed by Vance.
Trump also seeks to remake American energy policy to benefit the fossil-fuel industry, a plan he shorthands as “drill, drill, drill.” And he’s put criminal justice on the agenda, vowing to free the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling them “hostages” and vowing to “sign their pardons or commutations on Day One.”
For those who have studied the rise of authoritarian leaders throughout history, the playbook of Trump and his allies dictates they will push through as many new laws, executive decrees, and emergency orders as possible before anyone understands what is happening. “They want to have a blitzkrieg — and then all you need to be is a dictator for a day,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall and a professor at New York University. “It’s not just a change of methods, it’s a change of political system — a vast expansion of the powers of the executive, so that Trump will be able to rule as an autocrat.”
Get Out of Jail Free
TRUMP’S EFFORT TO REGAIN power is driven substantially by his desire to stay out of prison — part of a long pattern of putting his own interests ahead of the nation’s. He is a felon convicted on 34 counts stemming from the cover---up of a hush-money payout to a porn star at the height of the 2016 election. He also faces federal charges for election interference, as well as a Georgia indictment for his demand that GOP election officials “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss in that swing state.
Regaining the White House would put a naked abuse of power at Trump’s fingertips. Trump has long been open about his desire to meddle in his criminal cases, having called on Congress to defund the Justice Department until it dropped charges against him. No one in MAGA world denies that Trump would begin a second term by ordering federal charges against himself and his cronies dismissed. In a more normal time, such a brazenly corrupt act might define a political era.
Trump’s tightrope walk to keep out of prison is a hallmark of autocrats. “Regular politicians wouldn’t even run for office if they had big legal problems. But strongmen are not normal politicians,” says Ben-Ghiat. “They have to run; they have to get back into power and make their legal troubles go away.” She points to the examples of Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who faced dozens of criminal trials, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. “This is how these guys think. And it’s why they all denigrate the press and the judiciary as corrupt, because that’s their enemy.”
The longer Trump cultivates political power while skirting criminal accountability, the more dangerous he becomes. Trump has set the “preconditions for autocracy,” Ben-Ghiat says, by having emerged as “a dangerous leader who was not met with limits” in the wake of Jan. 6 — as well as having “domesticated” a major political party, transforming the GOP to “truly make it his personal tool.”
Retribution Agenda
TRUMP HAS POSITIONED HIMSELF as an avatar of a collective revenge fantasy for his followers. During a 2023 speech in Waco, Texas, site of the fiery 1993 standoff between the anti-government Branch Davidian cult, led by David Koresh, and federal authorities, Trump told the audience: “I am your warrior, I am your justice.… For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”
The Waco setting was chilling -— and no accident. The FBI’s deadly siege of the Koresh compound inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by militia member and anti--government extremist Timothy McVeigh, the deadliest domestic terror attack in U.S. history and a horrific act of vengeance. McVeigh and Koresh are seen as martyrs by the far right, and Trump was speaking directly to the most radical core of his base.
Trump has already threatened to turn the Justice Department into a vehicle for retribution for what he perceives as unjust political persecution — for election interference, hush-money payments, as well as his alleged mishandling of classified documents. He has posted on Truth Social, for example: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump has long blamed Biden for all of his legal woes, despite the president’s hands-off approach to the various cases against him. Trump has vowed to appoint “a special prosecutor” to go after President Biden and his family over what Trump describes as “bribes, kickbacks, and other crimes,” insisting, “Justice will be done.”
Trump associate and former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee Mike Davis, who has been talked up for a top post in a new Trump administration, said on a recent podcast that if he were selected as acting attorney general, he’d carry out a “three-week reign of terror” before getting “chased out of town with my Trump pardon,” pledging to “indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden.”
Reached by Rolling Stone, Davis claims he was “trolling” — “using hyperbole to make an important point that a politicized and weaponized justice system is very dangerous” — and that the “pesky Constitution” would foil such threats regardless. (Davis also says he is not looking to serve in a Trump White House.)
This kind of public backtracking is consistent with a general-election push, led by Trump himself, to dial down the rhetoric — but not the reality — of his retribution plot. During private conversations with aides and allies this year, Trump has warned surrogates who have aired his plans: “You can’t say that.” His message, as understood by those in the room: We’ve got to tone this down, so suburban-mom voters don’t get scared off.
The only thing that stopped him from being a full-on dictator was other people.
But as they try to soften the messaging, Trump’s enemy list continues to grow, including prosecutors who’ve brought criminal and civil charges against him. Indeed, lawyers close to Trump and his inner circle have spent more than a year researching obscure elements of the criminal code, seeking novel ways to criminally charge such officials in retaliation.
There’s no nemesis too small. The tally even includes late-night comics who’ve pissed him off. As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal. During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire.
‘Mass Deportation Now!’
ECHOING MANY DANGEROUS authoritarian leaders in modern history, Trump has put ethnic cleansing at the heart of a second-term agenda, promising the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants.
He has referred to migrants as “animals” and “vermin,” whom he accuses of “poisoning the blood” of the country. “The idea of purification is central to fascist ideology,” says Stanley, who calls Trump’s eliminationist -language “as explicit as it’s possible to be, -rhetorically.” Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, calls the rhetoric “Hitlerian.”
The mass-deportation campaign envisioned by Trump would be a turbocharged combination of the Japanese internment and Operation Wetback, a racist Eisenhower-era deportation campaign that Trump cites as precedent. That program was brutal, rounding up migrants and deporting them via plane, boat, and bus — often dumping them in remote areas of Mexico. People died of -sunstroke and disease in custody. Some of the boat journeys were compared to slave ships. The program was responsible for more than 1 million “returns” in 1954 alone, and 1.3 -million deportations overall, and is notorious for mistakenly removing United States citizens to Mexico.
Stephen Miller, perhaps Trump’s most openly authoritarian deputy, has promised that Trump will “unleash” a “vast arsenal” of federal powers, including deputizing the National Guard from red states, to carry out “the most spectacular migration crackdown” — which Miller describes as “pure bliss.” Other Trump allies, like Davis, have described this program with delight, promising the forced removal of American-citizen children: “We’re going to deport a lot of … anchor babies, their parents, the grandparents. We’re going to put kids in cages,” he’s said. “It’s going to be glorious.” (Davis also characterizes these statements as “hyperbole.”)
Much of the rhetoric at Trump’s nominating convention in Milwaukee was devoted to an alleged epidemic of “migrant crime” — focusing on isolated, high-profile murders of white women like Laken Riley, a Georgia college student who was allegedly killed by an undocumented Venezuelan man. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Crime data shows that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. But MAGA convention delegates weren’t about to let facts get in the way of their feelings, eagerly waving signs demanding “Mass Deportation Now!”
Echoing the Japanese internment during World War II, Miller promises a new Trump administration will build “vast holding facilities” on “open land” near the Mexican border in Texas to detain migrants pending deportation. If Trump follows through, “the United States will have a stain on its history — America’s concentration camps,” Stanley says. “Ten million immigrants who will face daily, if not hourly, human rights violations. That’s something history remembers. People ask, ‘How could that have happened?’”
Crushing Dissent
ENACTING MASS DEPORTATION will trigger civil unrest that could, in turn, give Trump an excuse for a violent crackdown on progressive cities, warns Klarman, the Harvard law professor. “You’re just going to grab them, and nobody’s going to try to stop you?” he asks of targeted immigrants, who are woven into communities as spouses, employees, and neighbors. “I expect massive civil disobedience, and then violence if Trump decides to suppress it using the military.”
Trump has already sought to use the military against protesters. In 2020, he clashed with then-Defense Secretary Esper about deploying troops and using live bullets against racial-justice
protesters in the streets near the White House. Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them … in the legs or something?” When top officials balked at carrying out large-scale call-ups of the National Guard to suppress protest nationwide, Trump berated them as “fucking losers,” insisting, “None of you have any backbone.”
That same year, Trump deployed federal agents to quell civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, including elite tactical units from the Border Patrol who dragged protesters into unmarked vans.
Presidents have broad authority to deploy the military in domestic operations thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1807, which permits the use of armed forces in times of civil unrest. And Trump has been explicit in his desire to engage troops against demonstrators. “I would use certainly the National Guard, if the police were unable to stop” urban unrest, he told Time magazine in April, while not ruling out a response by the military. He has publicly rebuked mayors of Democratic “crime dens” for not being tough enough on protesters, and vowed, “The next time, I’m not waiting.”
Controlling Families
LIKE MANY ASPIRING AUTOCRATS, Trump is a threat to families, seeking to impose government power on personal choices about reproduction. He’s “proud” of his success in overturning Roe v. Wade, which led to state-level, near-total abortion bans affecting millions of women. Trump has said he’ll personally vote to preserve Florida’s six-week abortion ban, and has even endorsed the idea of states choosing to punish women for seeking abortion care. The GOP platform, moreover, includes a declaration of fetal personhood, asserting that fetuses are entitled to 14th Amendment protections — logic that could lead to a court-imposed nationwide abortion ban.
Vance, meanwhile, has opposed abortion even in the case of rape and incest: “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said in a 2021 interview. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live — even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient to society.” Vance has also accused people without children of lacking a “direct stake” in the country and proposed that those with kids be given greater voting power. (His mentor, Thiel, has blamed his loss of confidence in democracy, in part, on “the extension of the franchise to women.”)
Controlling reproduction is yet another hallmark of fascism, says Ben-Ghiat, whose expertise is in Benito Mussolini’s rule in Italy. Il Duce equated population growth with national strength, and restricted birth control and outlawed abortion while providing loans to married couples that would be forgiven in stages with the birth of each child. “Vance may not know that he’s repeating Mussolini proposals, but it’s the same stuff,” Ben-Ghiat says. “You have women seen as an enemy if they’re not contributing to the state by having babies.” Ben-Ghiat points out that this type of rhetoric doesn’t just impact women: “Mussolini actually passed a measure that taxed bachelors because they weren’t doing their duty” to reproduce. “It’s never just one target,” she warns. “The number of targets always expands.”
The MAGA State
ANOTHER KEY THREAT IS Trump’s dream of hollowing out the ranks of professionals in the federal government — including nonpartisan scientists, administrators, and experts who typically retain their posts regardless of the party in power.
Trump seeks to replace them with MAGA loyalists — a proposal that’s also central to Project 2025. The most alarming argument for this idea has come from Vance, who has compared Republicans to military conquerors who would purge the American bureaucracy, as was done after Saddam Hussein was -overthrown and members of his Ba’ath party were exiled.
“We need a de-Ba’athification program, but like a de-wokeification program, in the United States,” Vance has said. He has called on Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant” and “replace them with our people” in order to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes.” Vance recognized that such a scheme may not have a legal basis, but said that he would be willing to provoke a constitutional crisis to enact it. “When the courts stop you,” he said, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief -justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” (Klarman does not believe the current high court would offer much resistance: “I think the Supreme Court’s going to be on board.”)
Trump has called for the elimination of full agencies, including the Department of Education, while Project 2025 calls for abolishing Head Start and even eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which tracks climate change and hurricane forecasts. The goal, Klarman insists, is to create docile agencies that will comply with corporate power. A new Trump administration, he warns, “will just license industry to regulate itself — and we know how that works.”
Trump for Life?
TRUMP HAS NO LAWFUL WAY to be reelected to a third term, and would be undeterred by concerns for his own political popularity, allowing him to pursue raw power grabs. But Trump has also underscored that where he wants to take America, the ballot box will not be necessary, telling an evangelical audience in Florida this summer that, after this election, “we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Ben-Ghiat underscores that Trump has already distorted American ideas about voting and elections. She calls Trump “one of the most effective propagandists in history” for having convinced tens of millions of people, in an extraordinary “feat of mass deception,” that he won the 2020 election. Trump is seeking to weaponize the Department of Justice to buttress such lies by creating an “Office of Election Integrity,” according to sources familiar with the discussions with the former president. The unit would use federal power to investigate Democratic-majority areas where Trump baselessly claims “fraud” is rampant, and intimidate groups that fund election -infrastructure. Reflecting his mindset, Trump told an interviewer in September that a -president has “every right” to interfere in his own election.
“Barring his natural time on Earth coming to an end, he will never leave office,” says Ben-Ghiat. “And that’s very clear to everybody who studies autocrats.” Klarman, the Harvard Law professor, argues that even the constitutional prohibition against serving a third term is not an insurmountable obstacle. “There are autocrats in Latin America who’ve managed to circumvent clear term limits,” he says. “I don’t rule it out.”
Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, argues that it’s “delusional to think that he will step down” at the conclusion of a second term. “He will stay in office like Putin. His friends don’t step down. He [already] had a coup to stay in office. I mean, there’ll be sham elections, but he’ll stay in office till he dies, whether that’s two years, four years, eight years, 12 years, like any other autocrat,” he says. “Everyone is in reality denial. Americans, we think we’re special. But lots of people live in countries like that.”
‘Real Danger to the Rule of Law’
TRUMP’S AUTHORITARIANISM ISN’T going to look the same as Putin’s in Russia or Xi Jinping’s in China. Think more of a WWE-style circus mixed with former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover-style crackdowns and Newt Gingrich’s limited-government fantasies. Much of what Trump and his government-in-waiting are plotting — including invading and even bombing Mexico to supposedly send a message to drug cartels — is rooted in Trump’s impulse to wallow in the spectacle of cinematic violence.
The sheer cartoonishness of Trump’s vision for America can make it hard to accept as real. But Klarman insists that Trump and Co. must be taken at face value: “There’s no reason to doubt it. They admire Viktor Orban; Trump meets with him at Mar-a-Lago. He admires Putin’s strength. He admires Xi. They are authoritarian. There’s no reason in the world to doubt this.”
It is seductive to dismiss Trump’s darkest calls for revenge and bloodshed as red meat to rally his troops, and to doubt the likelihood of follow-through. “It’s a very common theme in the history of fascism that lots of people think that the fascist leader is joking,” Stanley warns. “People don’t want to believe what’s right in front of their eyes. Let’s take Trump seriously this time.”
Trump allies like Davis call fears of an autocratic Trump term “silly.” He points to the fact that Trump never had Hillary Clinton arrested, despite the pervasive chants at his rallies to “Lock her up” — which he contends offers assurance that the former president’s most troubling rhetoric won’t translate into action: “Trump has already proven that he’s not going to be vindictive as president.”
Others who have seen Trump operate up close, however, are strident in their warnings. Pence refused to endorse Trump on the grounds that “anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, has blasted Trump’s admiration for “autocrats and murderous dictators,” while insisting the former president has “nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
But the surge of excitement and creative energy for the candidacy of Kamala Harris — and a Democratic agenda centered on Tim Walz’s call for Americans to both root for their neighbors and to “mind your own damn business” — provides hope of defending against Trump’s threat to democracy.
“We actually have time to head this off, this whole nightmare,” says Ben-Ghiat, who insists “this incredible wave of enthusiasm and engagement” is the antidote to voter cynicism and “demobilization.”
“When they don’t have power, it’s very difficult to do the sort of things they want to do,” Klarman says.
But just eking out a victory against Trump at the ballot box is no guarantee his threat won’t linger. His supporters on election boards in states like Georgia are already threatening to monkey-wrench the reporting of results. And Trump has talked about the possibility of a “bloodbath” if he loses.
I expect massive civil disobedience, and then violence if Trump decides to suppress it using the military.
“It’s not just one statement,” says Sanders, insisting that Trump’s long track record suggests he “will not abide by election results.” The Vermont senator points to Trump’s recent claim that huge crowds attending Harris-Walz rallies are AI-generated. “Somebody that can tell you that what you saw with your own eyes is not true,” Sanders says, will doubtless claim “election fraud” if he loses in 2024. Sanders insists the election will be close. “That is what worries me right now,” he says. “We have got to prepare the American people for what could be a very contentious and difficult period.”
If the opposite happens, and Trump wins — is democracy truly lost? “The United States has a much more deeply entrenched history of democracy,” says Klarman. “It’s not going to be as easy to steal democracy in the United States as it was in Hungary. It’s not like this is an off-on switch if Trump wins and the MAGA Republicans are in charge. It’s not like we ought to give up.”
Skye Perryman, president of the public policy legal nonprofit Democracy Forward, argues that a key pillar of combating a potential second Trump term is to make sure his lieutenants know that Trump’s immunity shield wouldn’t apply to them. “That decision extends to a president himself or herself, not to those surrounding the presidency,” Perryman insists. “That is a major focus for potential pushback.”
Ben-Ghiat points to hope for internal resistance to Trump’s authoritarian schemes from the Armed Forces. “Trump would like to partly reorient military power to be used for domestic repression,” says Ben-Ghiat. “A lot of [his] plans depend on the military being with him, and we don’t know if that’s true.”
If you talk to some of Trump’s closest confidants and most zealous defenders, they’ll claim it’s hysterical to believe he’d govern with an iron fist in a second term. However, to understand how Trump might aim to wield the military on U.S. soil, it’s instructive to recall his time as commander in chief.
In late 2019, Trump went against the advice of many military leaders and veterans and issued pardons and executive clemency to three accused American war criminals — Clint Lorance, Mathew Golsteyn, and Edward Gallagher. The then-president was so thrilled with his move that he told several Republicans close to him that he was hoping to appear onstage with the absolved men — and to have them each campaign for his reelection in 2020. He believed they should be revered, and he wanted their critics — including fellow soldiers who were willing to speak out against their alleged atrocities — to be cast as cowards. That is the kind of military Trump could seek to nurture, a fighting force he talks openly of unleashing on his enemies not in a far-off land but right here at home.
The 2024 election is not normal. It is not a choice between left and right, nor even, fundamentally, between two slates of policy proposals. It is a choice between a Harris-Walz campaign on one hand that is committed to upholding the norms of our republic and continuing America’s halting progress toward a more inclusive, multiethnic democracy. And on the other, a Trump-Vance ticket that would place America on a dark path backward, toward mistrust, racial division, and unconstrained executive power. “Beyond all of the issues on immigration, on women’s rights, on climate,” says Sanders, “this election really is about whether or not we want to maintain and strengthen our democracy — the right of the people to control their own future — or whether we want to move toward an authoritarian society.”
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