The United States is seven months away from the most consequential midterm elections in its history. Meanwhile, its president Donald Trump, together with Israel, started a war against Iran. These are ideal conditions for a head of state to stage a coup and seize power.
Trump’s main concern is to preserve his well-being and power, which he will lose largely if the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives (as seems foreseeable). It is evident that Trump has no qualms about interference in elections: he has already tried to ignore the result of the 2020 presidential election and talked about annulling the midterm elections. He then attempted to push through a law that would impose severe restrictions on voting and turn it into a privilege.
Regarding Iran, Trump and “War” (Defense) Secretary Pete Hegseth are trapped in the logic of escalation, according to which a feeling of defeat today can be reversed by doing the first thing that comes to mind tomorrow. With each day that the conflict and related uncertainty continues (including whether the two-week ceasefire agreed upon with Iran will hold), people in the presidential entourage benefit (through insider trading, political gambling, or arms deals). And the longer the situation continues, the greater the likelihood that it will be used for an attempted coup d’état.
In this context, Trump’s proposal to increase more than 40% The defense budget must be understood as a gift to the officers whose support it hopes to obtain. Hegseth, for his part, has launched a frantic purge of principled people among the top brass.
It is true that turning an external war into an internal dictatorship is not easy, and Trump is in a weak position. But if he did indeed attempt a coup, there are five likely paths he could follow.
One would be to maintain that in times of war a firm hand is needed. President George Bush Jr. used this argument (which says nothing about whether the war should have been started in the first place, nor about the leadership’s ability to fight it) to win the 2004 presidential election. Trump, on the other hand, would have to use it to cancel the election or overturn its results.
The matter is complicated because Trump would need allies willing to break the law. But most Americans opposes to the war in Iran, and the conflict revealed fissures in the MAGA movement. Additionally, some of the people most likely to be amenable to electoral manipulation were fired.
The second possibility is Bonapartism, where the would-be dictator fights for democracy abroad and dismantles it in his own country; As its name suggests, it was the strategy behind the Napoleonic Wars. But Trump never pretended to care about democracy (he prefers dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin), and he campaigned against nation-building projects abroad, promising instead to spend the money on Americans.
Another alternative would be for Trump to attempt a Bismarckian unification, in which the ruler seeks to unite the nation. Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck unified several German-speaking states with his victories in three wars (against Denmark, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and France) between 1864 and 1871. As he achieved this by force rather than through revolution or elections, the new Reich Germany was a militaristic monarchy from the beginning, with an essentially symbolic parliament. There is no doubt that Trump would like this model, if it were not for one problem: he is incapable of winning a single war, let alone three.
The fourth strategy would be that of fascist leader that he sacrifices enough of his fellow citizens in a major campaign to ensure that the survivors accept that everything is fighting, that there are enemies everywhere, and that the world is against them. Here mass death becomes a source of meaning that unites the Fuehrer with his Volk. Although Putin’s war in Ukraine has some of this, the classic example is the remarkably arduous Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which (as the diaries by Victor Klemperer) strengthened the fascist movement in Germany for more than three years.
But Trump is not a fascist in the traditional sense. Unlike the Nazis, he does not believe in fighting; he converted to warmongering late in life, convinced that easy “victories” abroad would bring him success at home. Now that he has boasted so many times about having won in Iran, he is poorly positioned to order a full-scale ground invasion, which would cause numerous American casualties: he did not do the ideological work beforehand.
For comparison, Hitler had won quick wars in Poland and France before invading the Soviet Union; That gave the civilian population and military commanders who previously had doubts the feeling that they knew what they were doing, and paved the way for a second, more ideological stage of the war.
The last, most worrying possibility is taking advantage of an act of terrorism. This strategy depends on a foreign enemy carrying out an attack on American civilians in time of war, which would give a would-be dictator a pretext to declare a state of emergency and suspend elections. Nothing like this has ever happened in the United States; And it may not happen precisely because it is Trump’s best hope: Iranian leaders need to know that Trump would try to exploit an attack.
It is true that the propaganda Iranian includes threats against some American leaders. But it is better for the regime to mock Hegseth than to assassinate him.
Another possibility is a “false flag” operation: autoterrorism can be an effective strategy. In 1999, the Russian secret services They planted bombs in residential buildings from Moscow; the chain of events What this generated was the beginning of Putin’s march towards dictatorship. It is very possible that Trump (Putin’s client in the White House) has considered this idea.
But Trump has a contentious relationship with the US intelligence community and it is likely that if he attempts such an operation he will fail. Even if he were able to carry out a false flag attack on American soil, he would have no clear way to prevent the election. In any case, if there were a terrorist attack in the next seven months, Americans should be wary of Trump, who will no doubt try to blame his domestic opponents and discredit the midterm elections.
In practice, if Americans remain vigilant and steadfast, neither of these scenarios should work. Knowledge of history can change the future. The biggest impediment that Trump has to attempting a coup d’état is not his weakness, but that the people refuse to obey from the first moment.
*This article was originally published in Project Syndicate.
