This was sent to our email audience last summer ahead of the 2024 election. Back then, it was titled “Dictator Trump? It’s easier than you think.” We are resharing today as it’s relevant to one of Trump’s recent executive orders, giving him power to decide how laws governing agencies are interpreted and implemented, rather than trusting each agency’s experts or following the language of each law.
Let us ask you a question… Do you wanna be a dictator?
If you catch most of our emails, you already know about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – and like most concerned Americans, you’ve probably asked yourself how any of it is possible.
Everyone, including us, has told you that the plot to make Donald Trump this country’s first all-powerful leader depends on replacing 54,000 government employees with MAGA diehards.
As it turns out, that’s Step Two.
Bringing Project 2025 to life starts with a reinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution that started nearly 40 years ago. Worse: Republican presidents have already pulled it off.
In November 2019, while serving as Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr spoke at an event for the Federalist Society (a member of the Council for National Policy, like the Heritage Foundation).
During his speech, Barr argued that Congress had become too powerful. Neither the legislative branch nor the judicial branch, he said, should have enough power to override the president.
Barr’s argument is known as the theory of the “unitary executive.” It’s an alternative interpretation of the Constitution in which any checks and balances on the president is seen as unconstitutional since our three branches of government are “equal.”
If this spin on the Constitution was legitimized by the Supreme Court, then the U.S. president would operate as a near-total dictator. Unfortunately, Barr didn’t come up with this himself.
One of our Supreme Court justices did.
In 1986, Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old attorney at the Justice Department, proposed the idea of overriding Congress’s power to write laws by giving the president authority over how to interpret them. His idea hinged on “signing statements.”
When a president signs a bill into law, he (or she) can attach a signing statement as commentary on their decision. Since Alito shares Barr’s belief that Congress should have no power over the executive branch, he suggested that a president could use signing statements to declare his right to interpret any law as he pleased.
A year later, Ronald Reagan did just that. He issued a signing statement to a debt bill, stating that only he could decide how the law would be executed.
He added that the president is not required “to follow the orders of a subordinate,” and that expecting him to do so would infringe on the constitutional rights of “the head of a unitary executive branch.”
Reagan was the first, but he wasn’t the last.
In 2004, when Congress outlawed a new U.S. torture program, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.”
And then there’s Trump.
In April 2020, reporters asked Donald Trump why he thought he could force governors to “reopen” their states amidst a deadly and still-mysterious pandemic. Trump’s response: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”
There is nothing in writing asserting that a president has the authority to ignore Congress or the courts, but the Supreme Court has NEVER challenged a president’s right to declare unitary executive privilege.
SCOTUS has also never explored how to stop a president from choosing to extend his own power. The current bench certainly won’t.
Now, Alito is among the justices deciding whether or not Donald Trump has “presidential immunity” for crimes he committed while president.
Folks, there are ZERO safeguards to protect us from Trump and Project 2025’s assault on our rights and our democracy if he wins this year.
The only way to prevent this authoritarian takeover is through the democratic process that he tried to “reinterpret” in 2020 and plans to destroy if he gets a second chance.
We have to stop asking whether or not Project 2025 is possible and start asking how many people we can get to the polls in November.
More soon,
The Team at Trump File
