Trusting Trump to be a ‘Dictator on Day 1’

Published 5:56 pm Sunday, November 3, 2024

OK, my fellow Americans, time to choose.

Which dictator are you going to vote for on Tuesday?

Donald Trump, the alleged Hitler wannabe who the liberal media keep telling us is an existential threat to democracy?

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Or Kamala Harris, the unelected choice for president of the Democrat Party who’ll give us four more years of bad ideas and using the justice department to jail her political opponents?

“Trump said he’ll be a dictator on Day 1” is a scary line Democrats and their cheering squad in the liberal media have been saying a hundred times a day for at least a year to scare low-information voters.

Trump’s tyranny is a terrifying possibility to people like the idiots on “The View,” Rachel Maddow and the deranged editorial writers at the Los Angeles Times.

They truly believe if Trump is re-elected, he will make himself a dictator, rip up the Constitution and throw anyone who’s ever said a cross word about him into a concentration camp – if he doesn’t shoot them first.

The pervasiveness of the Trump “dictator” quote proves how partisan and incompetent the mainstream liberal media are.

Deliberately taken out of context to slur Trump, it originated about a year ago when Trump was being interviewed by Sean Hannity before a live audience in Nebraska.

During a long discussion about being called a wannabe dictator by the media, Trump told Hannity on his first day back in office he would issue a bunch of executive orders like a dictator.

“I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill,” Trump said.

Trump, who was laughing, made it clear he was referring only to executive orders and Day One. “After that,” he said, “I’m not a dictator.”

That was all the ammo the liberal media needed. Even though it was clearly a joke, the idea that Trump wanted to become a dictator for a day went viral with little or no context.

If the mainstream media were honest, and if they did their job fairly, they would have made it clear that every president has been a “dictator on Day One.”

Every incoming president issues executive orders as soon as they can, often to overturn the executive orders of the previous president.

In his first 100 days in office, Biden signed more than 60 executive actions, 24 of which were direct reversals of what he considered Trump’s bad policies. Ten involved immigration.

The most controversial ones included halting funding for the construction of Trump’s border wall, cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline and imposing a mask mandate on federal property.

Did that make Joe Biden a dictator and a threat to our democracy? Maybe. But no one in the liberal media said so because they agreed with what Herr Biden did.

When Trump reverses dozens of Biden executive decisions, which I hope he will get the chance to do in a couple of months, the shamelessly partisan media will again call him Hitler 2.0.

The liberal media have been trying to scare the public about Trump’s alleged Hitler complex and love for authoritarians for nine years.

They have been faithfully supporting the Democrat Party’s playbook of fear for decades. Remember how the media told voters in 1980 that my father was going to start World War III and cut your grandma off Social Security?

On Tuesday we’re going to elect a new president to replace the one we really haven’t had for several years.

By this time next week, we’ll have a new “dictator in chief.”

It can be the incompetent, inexperienced and serially incoherent person who’s spent the last four years helping Joe Biden screw up the economy, immigration, foreign policy and the war on covid.

Or it can be the ex-president who makes lots of jokes, says dumb things now and then but ran the country smoothly and safely once – and can be trusted to do it again starting on Day 1.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com