What would Hunter do?

A few weeks ago I happened to catch an episode of Freakonomics while listening to NPR. The theme was the election with a long segment on two questions. "What kind of chaos would a second Trump term bring?" They didn't beat around the bush on the elephant in America's living room, can “Trump really destroy democracy?”

In short the episode's guest, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, said no. That despite the rhetoric and desire for power, becoming and maintaining a dictatorship is not easy. “It's actually pretty hard to be a dictator. You have to be kind of smart, shrewd at least. You have to be tough. You have to be brave.” And he goes on to say that Trump is none of those things.

"It’s just hard to imagine him having this ambition to be a dictator. I know he wants power, and he wants to hold on to power. But I think he does it in an ad hoc way rather than the kind of shrewd, planned way that real dictators do to obtain power."

In other words, Trump is too ADHD, dim, and lazy, to become a dictator. Let's face it, the guy can't even open a truck door. Posner nails it when he calls Trump’s style 'ad hoc' instead of strategic. Real authoritarians play the long game—every move is part of a calculated plot to lock down power. Trump, on the other hand, seems to run on pure impulse, tossing out directives like confetti and shuffling staff more often than a Vegas card dealer. It is hard for me to imagine that he's got the savvy to dictate in the manner that so many fear.

Posner believes this next administration will be more like the one we saw during his first term, and the United States will live on.

“If you read about the history of the Ottoman Empire or the Roman Empire they had a lot of really terrible leaders for a long time and they would last a few more centuries I think it takes more than a bad president to destroy an Empire.”

I does take more than a bad president and thankfully the one that just got elected doesn't have that many years in front of him. And though this guy definately pushes the boundaries we've survived more than him.

We’ve been here before, in our own way. Take Nixon—another president who tried to elbow his way around institutional limits but eventually found out that even the best ‘I am not a crook’ routine only goes so far. American democracy has a funny way of hitting back when leaders think they’re above the rules. It’s a pattern: presidents push, the system pushes back, and we get a course correction. Our institutions have been roughed up before, and each time, they’ve proven they can take a punch and keep standing.

We survived Nixon and the first Trump administration, and we'll do it again. It's time to dust off the old playbooks and dig in.