Over the weekend, during a rally, a would-be emperor said that everyone needs to get out and vote just this one time. He said that things were going to get fixed over the next four years so they wouldn’t need to worry about voting again.

I read this remark as the obvious threat to democracy that it is. Another in a long series of off-hand comments that the man has made that belie his true intentions. It isn’t even hard to see where he is going with that, and if you look at all, you’ll see that he telegraphs his next moves all of the time. He tells you exactly what he intends to do and then he does it. This would be an admirable quality if it were attached to a human being with even a modest amount of decency, but he isn’t any of that. He craves power for its own sake and will stop at nothing to achieve it.

The right mobilized immediately to defend the comments as harmless, trying to contextualize a statement that was a complete thought that didn’t need framing. The man wants to be in the White House until the day he dies, and he wants to put his family in it for good so the power outlives him but remains in his name.

Bombastic rhetoric aside, if you remove all of the inflection from the statement and read it in an objective way, what does it sound like to you? To me it sounds like he wants to reorganize power to favor the executive branch doing whatever it wants, whenever it wants, so long as he remains in power.

You know, like a dictator might.