By Michael Bradley

Copyright crikey

US Vice President JD Vance guest-hosting the late Charlie Kirk’s podcast from his office next to the White House, in which he interviewed Donald Trump’s chief propagandist, Stephen Miller — somewhat like Göring and Goebbels broadcasting a fireside chat — is dystopia.

The Wall Street Journal reported it in business-as-usual terms: “Trump advisers prepare to target left-leaning groups after Kirk shooting”. Miller himself was more explicit: the “righteous anger” over Kirk’s murder is going to be channelled “to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … we are going to use every resource we have”.

MAGA has its martyr, and Trump’s lieutenants are not hiding their determination to seize this Reichstag moment and unleash the infinite power of the US state on their political enemies. It’s not ideological, for all the pretence; this is just about power and its maintenance.

Can they do it? Can America be converted from a presidential republic into an effective dictatorship, within the law?

The answer is yes.

Step 1: Already complete

From day one of his second term, Trump set about bringing all the instruments of the executive government to heel by conducting an effective purge and installing acolytes in all key positions. It’s pretty much done; the military, FBI, the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense, intelligence agencies, and the paramilitary ICE, all are fully under his personal control.

The judicial branch had been pre-emptively neutered in advance with the stacking of the Supreme Court, ready to overrule the resistance of the still-independent courts below it. The institutions of education, media and business have self-neutered, lining up in obeisance to Trump.

Step 2: Declare a national emergency

Trump did this upon taking office, declaring a national emergency on the southern border in January. The 1976 National Emergencies Act doesn’t define what qualifies as a national emergency, and every president has shared a liberal approach to it; more than 90 have been declared since the act was passed.

Congress can terminate a national emergency declaration, but Trump’s Congress won’t. He would have no difficulty sustaining a declaration that the “radical left-wing violence” he has been decrying since Kirk’s death is an emergency, and exercising the 150-odd extremely wide powers the declaration gives him.

Step 3: Invoke the Insurrection Act

This one is key, and Trump has been toying with it for a while. The 1807 Insurrection Act is a wild law; it gives the president authority to call out the military and assert federal control over the National Guard (which, ordinarily, is under the power of the individual states), whenever he “considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws” through the ordinary court processes. It is, effectively, a power to declare and enforce martial law, through the simple mechanism of a unilateral presidential proclamation.

This is why Trump has been banging on incessantly about lawless cities, and has already tested his arm by sending the army into Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and now Memphis. He — correctly — sees the big cities (where he is especially unpopular) as critical to his assertion of authority over the whole.

Step 4: Suspend civil rights

It’s a matter of legend that Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War, then defied the courts’ declaration that this was illegal. The precedent his actions set was one the Founding Fathers had feared deeply — that a president could, should he choose, act very much like a king.

It was their own fault for creating a constitutional structure with all executive power invested in a single person’s hands. In a knife fight, the executive will always defeat the other arms of government (legislative and judicial), because it’s the only one with guns.

Trump’s people know this, and they have a supine Supreme Court that has already given the president legal immunity for anything he does in office — lawful or not.

America has what we in Australia do not: constitutionally protected human rights, such as freedom of speech, assembly and due process. However, if Trump follows through on what he flagged early on, when he denied “illegal” immigrants any recourse through the courts by deporting them peremptorily and then defying court orders that he stop, who’s going to get in his way?

The Reichstag playbook is simple enough, and again, Trump’s words and actions aren’t pointing in any different direction. He has the military out there blowing up drug smuggling boats with no legal authority whatsoever; he says his authority is the threat to American security in itself.

If he pulls the trigger, the descent to dictatorship will be rapid; America is febrile and primed. Simply refusing to call elections will be an easy step. In that case, only two hopes remain — neither of them institutional, as all the institutions have already failed.

One is the people, whose ingrained instinct for personal freedom may yet override their fury towards each other (but I don’t think so).

The other is the one dictator-like thing Trump hasn’t yet been willing to do: “remove” his enemies. To hold the power he’s amassing, eventually that’s where he’ll have to go.

We will know soon enough.