What if America elected a Democratic version of Trump? – Las Vegas Sun News

 Sun Editorial:

What if America elected a Democratic version of Trump?

President Donald Trump speaks during a lunch with African leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House, Wednesday, July 9, 2025, in Washington. Photo by: Evan Vucci / Associated Press

Sunday, Sept. 21, 2025 | 2 a.m.

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Imagine, for a moment, that Democrats were the ones behaving as President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have behaved over the past nine months. Imagine a Democratic president, with control of both chambers of Congress, wielding the levers of federal power not as instruments of governance but as cudgels to punish dissent, intimidate rivals and neuter oversight. Imagine a Democratic Supreme Court, unbothered by precedent, waving through almost every assertion of executive authority, no matter how brazenly opposed to the Constitution or the Founders’ vision of a nation in which power is vested in the people that it might be. Picture the very norms of constitutional governance — checks and balances, free expression and political pluralism — tossed aside with the casualness of a talk-show sound bite.

For conservatives who shrug at Trump’s abuses because he is “their” president, the thought experiment should be sobering. For if today’s Republicans accept a vision of unbound executive power, they are accepting it not just for Trump but for whoever comes next. And history has a way of turning tables. One day soon, it could be a liberal president wielding unchecked power against conservatives and their allies — and by then, Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.

A glimpse into an alternate reality

Let’s sketch the scene. A highly progressive president, backed by a progressive majority in both houses of Congress, appoints liberal podcasters to nearly all Cabinet positions. He declares the Republican Party, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the House Freedom Caucus, the Federalist Society and other conservative organizations as “domestic extremist organizations” and begins deploying masked federal agents and U.S. military forces to Florida, Texas, Arizona and the solidly Republican and conservative suburban communities across the South and West. Their purpose is to monitor and perhaps detain known conservatives. The deployment order would be justified under the pretext of “maintaining order” in dangerous communities where people have fought for decades to build up private arsenals that threaten the peace and stability of the United States. The events of the Jan. 6 insurrection are offered as evidence. All members of the Proud Boys are detained on sight and held without trial.

The occupying federal force has no time or patience for Americans wishing to exercise their First Amendment rights, and Republicans who attempt to protest are promptly tackled to the ground and arrested for disorderly conduct. Those with a firearm, even one that is legally registered, find themselves charged with assaulting a federal agent with a deadly weapon, even though the weapon never left its holster. Few speak out against the injustice for fear of becoming the next target.

Private schools, including Christian colleges and universities, are warned that their licenses to operate and tax exempt status may be revoked unless they demonstrate loyalty to the administration’s “equity and justice” agenda. Simply employing conservative faculty members runs the risk of making a school a target for government funding cuts. Meanwhile, students espousing conservative ideologies face constant harassment from federal investigators that are laser focused on finding — or inventing — a reason to arrest them, deport them, revoke their federal student aid or otherwise make their life difficult.

Federal contractors that donated to Republican candidates find their government contracts suspended until they agree to “pro bono” work on behalf of climate refugees. Attorneys who file lawsuits against the administration are sanctioned personally, their law firms stripped of security clearances, their employees barred from federal courthouses.

When hurricanes or wildfires strike red states, they are forced to fend for themselves without any federal aid.

Any country with internal or external policies that the president doesn’t like faces immediate tariffs of 75%. Foreign media is required to ask friendly questions lest their economy at home suffer the president’s wrath. Meanwhile, the president’s family actively launches companies and partnerships around the world netting them billions in personal income.

Conservative journalists are detained at airports and interrogated about their sources. Their phones are taken from them, forcibly unlocked and all social media and text messages examined. And broadcasting companies like News Corp, Sinclair and Nexstar discover that allowing anyone on the air who criticizes the president could result in a loss of their broadcasting license. Media company mergers are only allowed when it’s proven that the editorial voice of the merging companies fully support the president and the Democrats.

Americans who criticize the government are designated “possible insurgents” and have their finances audited by a special IRS unit dedicated to “patriot enforcement.”

Strangely, only “South Park” is able to attack the administration and does so vigorously. No one can quite figure out how “South Park” gets away with skewering those in power. Rumors are it has to do with something nearly extinguished from the national psyche: courage.

Would Republicans cheer this muscular assertion of state power? Would they embrace bending international trade and policy to the personal whims and obsessions of the president? Would they accept that this is just what the executive branch is allowed to do? Or would they, rightly, call it what it is: authoritarianism draped in the language of legitimacy?

The Republican bargain

The irony is rich. For decades, conservatives have argued that government is inherently coercive and must be constrained by law, custom and a vigilant citizenry. They warned that Democrats were the ones who couldn’t be trusted with power, that progressives would use the state to reengineer society and punish dissent.

And yet, confronted with a Republican president who has done exactly that — deployed the military against civilians, targeted political opponents with prosecutions and punished private businesses for ideological nonconformity — the vast majority of the GOP have not only tolerated it but celebrated it.

They have cheered as the Supreme Court has abandoned its role as a check, instead rubber-stamping Trump’s assertions of unreviewable power. They have remained silent as congressional lawmakers were intimidated for attempting to exercise constitutionally mandated oversight.

They have looked the other way as U.S. residents, including green card holders and even U.S. citizens were threatened, assaulted, detained or deported for no reason beyond the language they spoke or the color of their skin. They have watched as masked agents of the government have occupied U.S. streets, throwing unwitting people into the back of unmarked vans without explanation. They have excused the administration’s chilling message to students, activists and late-night talk-show hosts: Dissent is grounds for exile.

And when Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, declared that “The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization,” Republican lawmakers did not recoil at this rejection of political pluralism. They nodded along.

A dangerous president and a dangerous precedent

Precedent cuts both ways. If Republicans today insist that presidents may target their political opponents with the machinery of the state, what is to stop a Democratic president tomorrow from doing the same? If the GOP embraces the idea that military deployments into U.S. cities are legitimate tools of domestic governance, what will conservatives say when troops are deployed to Omaha, Jacksonville, Anaheim, Tulsa or Colorado Springs, under a future Democratic administration?

The president has taken to targeting law firms whose attorneys investigated him, stripping their security clearances, barring them from federal buildings and conditioning contracts on political loyalty. Judges who issue unfavorable rulings are denounced as “radical left lunatics” or “deranged,” while the president fans the flames of impeachment threats.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

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