A Substack Live Next Week With Phillips O'Brien...One Year Since Trump's Election

What I predicted and what has surprised me

I’m pleased to announce an upcoming Substack Live on November 12 at 1pm EST with Phillips Payson O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of a new book, War and Power: Who Wins Wars — And Why. In the book, O’Brien tackles the oft misunderstood question of who wins wars and why, using examples from the 19th century to the present, including the Russo-Ukraine War. On Substack, O’Brien writes a very useful newsletter focusing on the war.

To join the Live, just download the Substack app, enable notifications, and look for the join link on the app at 1pmET/7pm CEST. It sometimes takes a few minutes to appear and then a few minutes to go live. For subscribers, here’s my column for this week.

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Photo by Bradley Andrews on Unsplash

The morning after Donald Trump was elected to a second term, I wrote a column detailing the threats to democracy in a second term. Trump said he would keep his promises, and I took him at his word. His promises have been a reliable guide to how his first year in office has turned out.

I wrote, “Trump will govern with vengeance; he has promised ‘retribution.’ He has vowed to use the Justice Department to punish his perceived enemies and deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens who disagree with him. He has promised to round up and deport millions of immigrants.”

All three of these are true: he has used the Justice Department to bring cases against his perceived enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. He has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis, and Portland, responding to small-scale and overwhelmingly peaceful protests. On immigration, numbers are hard to come by, but masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed to round up suspected undocumented immigrants.

I wrote that Trump “will face far fewer obstacles to carrying out his plans than in his first term…Trump has made clear that he will pick officials in the Justice Department and the military who will fulfill his agenda.” This has been the key difference between his first and second terms. In his first term, he appointed so-called “adults in the room” like Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; Attorney General William Barr publicly disagreed with him that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, he has appointed loyalists like Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi to be Defense Secretary and Attorney General.

Congressional Republican opposition to Trump, which was minor in his first term, is practically nonexistent in the second: according to the New York Times, he has joked that he is the speaker of the House and the president. The Supreme Court has generally rubber-stamped his administration’s expansion of executive power, although it appears skeptical of his use of tariffs. Federal courts have pushed back against some of Trump’s executive actions, but the Supreme Court has often reversed their decisions.

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In the column, I quoted Harvard democracy scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt who said that “societal mobilization” was the last line of defense against aspiring authoritarians. Last year, they wrote in the Times that when the constitutional order is threatened, leaders and institutions like universities “must speak out, reminding citizens of the red lines that democratic societies must never cross.”

I have been surprised by how little this has happened.