"Does Donald Stop Being Dictator on Day 1?

Apologies for the light posting. I’ve been working on a deadline so, in the meantime, I wanted to flag this interview that I did this afternoon with Jim Acosta, plus a bonus transcript for anybody who prefers to read. Enjoy! JIM ACOSTA Right now, joining me now is the niece, former President Trump, Mary Trump. Mary, great to have you back on the program. Really appreciate your time. You heard what the president was saying last night at this fundraiser in California, seizing on what Donald Trump has been talking about recently, and I just wanted to get your reaction to what Trump was saying on Fox the other night, a dictator, but only on day one. What was your reaction when you heard that? MARY First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be back. We need to take Donald at his word to a certain point. We can ignore the second half of that statement. Dictators, last I checked, don't stop being dictators. And he has every intention of destroying American democracy and we need to be clear that it's entirely for his own benefit. Nothing about this is ideological. So, in that context, it was really heartening to hear President Biden be so direct about what's facing this country. I agree that it is too early to assume that people are paying attention and we don't want that argument to get normalized, which has been part of the problem over the last seven years. Almost everything Donald does seems to be normalized, but we've seen what he's done in the past, and I think what he's starting to do now is push the envelope and get people familiar with the concept of his dictatorial tendencies so that they just write it off the way they've written off all of his other egregious anti-democratic behaviors. JIM ACOSTA Yeah, I mean that leads me to this question, Mary, and that is, I mean, do you think Trump would stop on day one? I mean to say he would only be a dictator on the first day. I suppose if you're the dictator on the first day, you could say, well, tomorrow I'll be dictator too, because you're the dictator at that point. I mean, what do you think? Does he stop on day one? MARY Every day from then on will be day one, let's put it that way. He has no intention of stopping. He knows why he needs to get back into the White House. Those reasons won't disappear on a day two or day 100. So we have to take this threat incredibly seriously. And part of that threat isn't just Donald's rhetoric, it's the reception that rhetoric receives. We heard the laughing and the cheering in that audience. We hear what his sycophants and enablers like Sean Hannity, and practically every single elected member in Congress who is a Republican, is willing to put up with, is willing to allow, and is willing to support. JIM ACOSTA Mary, I am sure you've been paying attention to all of this too. Trump and his aides have been giving us a sneak preview into what he is planning if he's put back into the White House, including mass deportations, Muslim ban, mass firings in the federal government going after the press and so on. What do you think a second Trump term would look like? MARY Quite simply, and not at all hyperbolically, it would be the end of American democracy. America would become a leading autocratic nation in the world and we would, therefore, be emboldening countries like some of those you mentioned in earlier North Korea, China, but also the pro-autocratic tendencies of countries that haven't entirely lost their way but are well on their way to, like Hungary and Turkey. So it would be absolutely disastrous not just for the future of American democracy, but the future of the Western alliance and global liberal democracy. I don't think we can overstate just how incredibly dangerous a second Trump administration would be. And we need to start preparing the ground for making those arguments now. JIM ACOSTA Mary, I know that you have spent some time trying to think about what's going on inside your uncle's head, as difficult as that might be. But when he uses language like vermin to talk about his political opponents, I was wondering what you thought of that. MARY It's all of a piece with how he's always behaved. The difference now of course is that his target audience is just getting bigger and bigger and the amount of power he has is increasing. Jim, if you had told me in December of 2020 that things would be worse now than they were then, or that Donald would have more power now than he had then, I wouldn't have believed you because it was just utterly unthinkable. Look where we are. He uses that kind of rhetoric because he knows it plays with his base, but he also uses it because he doesn't care about other human beings and we cannot afford to continue to place people like that in power because the stakes are just too high. And the consequences would just be too devastating. JIM ACOSTA I'm sure you saw this, Axios was reporting earlier this week that Trump is likely to elevate some of his key loyalists, put him back in the administration, and people like Steve Miller, Steve Bannon, Kash Patel potentially putting some of those folks in cabinet positions and they're parroting Trump's anti-democratic rhetoric. I want to play a little bit of this for you and get you to respond. AUDIO OF KASH PATEL ON STEVE BANNON‘S PODCAST: We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you. JIM ACOSTA Mary, do you think these are empty threats, Kash Patel saying,”We're going to go after the media?” MARY No, not at all. Donald has been promising to do that for years, if not decades. Anytime anybody in the media slightly criticizes him or isn't willing to toe his line, he's threatened them. The difference now of course he would have the power to enact those kinds of threats, but also they've learned a lot. We can't forget that these people made a dry run for an insurrection. It didn't quite succeed on January 6th, but it's still unfolding. We don't yet know if the attempted interaction that started on January 6th or, I should say, a few months leading up to January 6th, we don't yet know if it's been successful. So we can't pretend that these are empty words and empty threats. We cannot put anything past these people. Donald Trump and everybody he surrounds him with, including fascists like Steven Miller and Steve Bannon, are willing to do anything they have to do or feel they have to do in order to stay in power no matter how illegitimately they seize that power. JIM ACOSTA And what did you think when you saw the Wall Street Journal poll that came out today? Our Kevin Liptak was talking about it a few moments ago. I mean Trump ahead of Biden at this point. Yes. It's only four percentage points. Yes, we're way out in front of the general election next year. Polls can go up, polls can go down and so on. But the staying power of your uncle in all of this, after everything that he said talking about being a dictator and so on day one, does that surprise you? MARY It doesn't surprise me. And I think one of the taglines of Donald's ascendence in American politics is that, it doesn't surprise me but that doesn't mean it isn't shocking. It's shocking, it's demoralizing, and it's a pretty devastating commentary on a significant portion of the American electorate. And I think part of what we need to do, and part of the reason I think that President Biden's statements about Donald's attacks on democracy are so important, is because we need to start educating people about what it would mean if we lost democracy. And I think right now not enough people understand what is at risk here. And I try to comfort myself by repeating that it's many, many months out, but it is a little bit hard to square the fact that people seem more concerned about Hunter Biden's indictments than about Donald's much more serious indictments and … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.marytrump.org/subscribe