How Donald Trump is Channeling Machiavelli
This past weekend, Donald Trump and JD Vance accused their Democratic opponents of plotting to kill Trump, implicitly threatening to prosecute Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz should the Republican ticket capture the White House. As shocking as it sounds, it was unremarkable since personal threats are a common and menacing feature of the Republican presidential campaign. Since Trump announced his bid for a second term, he has threatened to investigate and jail President Joe Biden and his family, Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Representative Liz Cheney, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Representatives Adam Schiff and Ilhan Omar, plus his perennial target Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 presidential race.
That’s only the beginning. Trump threatened to convene a military tribunal to try former President Barack Obama, imprison Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO, for life, and bring conspiracy and racketeering charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Judge Arthur Engoron, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, and the members of the Select House Committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
He also launched a broad threat to jail “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who have been “involved in unscrupulous behavior,” along with millions of “illegal immigrants” whom he vows to deport. And he doesn’t hide his motive. Recently, he reposted a word cloud from his speeches, and “revenge” was the most frequently uttered word.
Trump’s threats are more than a dark schtick or entertainment for his hours-long rallies. They reflect a view of the president as a strongman who determines the law. Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance-era chronicler of power, nailed Donald Trump a long time ago: A strongman ruler should display “the fearlessness of a being who makes and executes his own law” and by issuing threats to punish anyone as he sees fit, he “gathers in his person the power to awe his subjects.”
By instinct, Trump heeds Machiavelli’s counsel that a “memorable execution”—or at least the suggestion of one—helps a strongman intimidate the people. That’s the specter Trump raised by charging that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, committed “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” Milley’s crime: In the aftermath of the January 6 attack, he called a high-ranking Chinese official to reassure him that the assault on the Capitol by Trump’s followers did not represent a threat to Beijing. Trump has publicly contemplated other executions, calling for Obama’s prosecution by a military tribunal for capital murder and the civilian prosecution of Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, and has claimed that pro-choice doctors and nurses are executing newborns. This charge carries an implicit threat of prosecuting medical personnel.
Beyond intimidation, awe, and revenge, the former president’s litany of threats constitutes a strategy of scapegoating his critics. This blame recalls Machiavelli’s advice to strong rulers in The Prince, his 1532 exegeses of power that is still a relevant guide for would-be strongmen. By excoriating Haitians for “eating the pets,” pledging to bar Muslims from the country, stating Jews would be to blame if he loses, and railing that migrants are murdering innocent Americans, he reassures his overwhelmingly white, Christian, native-born supporters that they are safe and protected—all with an implicit warning that they too should stay in line.
The stumbling block to Trump’s thirst for threats and condemnation is that courts alone retain the authority to mete out punishment. As president, Trump followed his predecessors by nominating all-out supporters for seats on the federal bench—but with a difference. While previous presidents chose ideologically aligned jurists, Trump expected what he calls “his” judges and “his” justices to protect him personally from civil and criminal prosecution.
So, when even those nominated and confirmed jurists he selected failed to do so, Trump threatened them, too. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented many of Trump’s responses to uncooperative judges and courts. This goes even more so for judges nominated by Democrats. When he was president, Trump demanded that Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonya Sotomayor recuse themselves from all cases involving him. He pressed Ginsburg to resign for “incompetence.” During his first term, the 45th president charged that the judge presiding over the trials and convictions of his political operatives and friends, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, with “blatant bias.”
Trump regularly singles out jurists who question his insistence on exercising what he claims are unilateral powers, especially when he wants to punish immigrants. As president, he called the federal courts “unfair and broken” when a judge blocked his order to unilaterally terminate the DACA program for Dreamers. He called another federal judge “a disgrace” and “unfair” for ruling that he lacked legal authority to summarily reject the applications of asylum seekers who failed to enter the country at a designated port of entry.
In fairness, Biden kept that policy in place with an exception for asylum seekers who use a Customs and Border Protection app to schedule an appointment. When the COVID-19 emergency ended in 2023, Biden ended Trump’s policy of refusing asylum seekers at the southern border because they might spread infectious diseases. He also ended Trump’s order that asylum seekers remain in Mexico while their claims are adjudicated, often under dangerous conditions and for more than two years.
In 2017, Trump also called three federal judges and the Ninth Circuit “ridiculous” and “political” for blocking his ban on Muslims entering the country. In that case, he also questioned the judicial authority to review his executive orders and suggested that the judges who did should be blamed for future terror attacks.
When he was in the Oval Office, Trump also denounced a federal judge for ruling that he could not summarily deny congressionally appropriated funds to sanctuary cities, those that do not use their police to help federal authorities round up unauthorized immigrants. In that case, he branded the judge’s decision “a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element empowering the worst kind of human trafficking and sex trafficking.”
Trump’s bluster hasn’t been effective since judges and courts still have the final say in those matters, and they’ve stood up to the threats despite Trump’s bullying. Even so, Trump’s ambition to remake the presidency into an autocrat’s perch—the unspoken goal behind years of threatened punishment for those who oppose or annoy him—seems to have swayed the court that counts most.
In this year’s decision on presidential immunity, Trump’s three appointed justices and three more, including the two most radical conservatives and the chief justice, held that whatever the president does in an official capacity is above the law. Equally important, they endorsed the radical view of the president as a “unitary executive” with plenary authority over every part of the Executive Branch, including prosecutions pursued by the Department of Justice.
By this holding, lawful governance rests on the character of unfettered presidents, including one convicted of 34 felonies and held liable for large-scale fraud and sexual assault.
So, the court’s ruling will allow Trump to carry out his threats. As president in a second term, he could direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute those he has vowed to punish. Using his Supreme Court-given authority, the 78-year-old also could direct federal law enforcement to carry out his threats to round up and imprison or deport millions of immigrants, whether legal or undocumented. And if the judiciary were to hold that he lacks such legal authority, Trump could press ahead, knowing he can’t be held liable.
That’s rule with the power to carry out threats, just as Machiavelli proscribed.
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