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Dictator from Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back
“The best short summary of how Trump is turning the US into a dictatorship.”—Steven Pinker
“Journalism of a very high order.”—Damon Linker
“A vital and urgent book.”—Charlie Sykes
Donald Trump warned us that if he returned to the White House, he would be “a dictator on day one.” It wasn’t just on day one.
Dictator from Day One describes, in breadth and detail, the story of America’s political devolution from a free society to an authoritarian dictatorship.
The policies of Donald Trump’s second term in office are a political revolution against our constitutional order, concentrating all power in Trump’s hands and creating a system of one-man rule.
This book lays out, systematically and dispassionately, the five prongs of this attack on the American stealing from Congress the power to control government spending and to decide what government agencies exist; creating a police state that can seize and imprison people without due process and occupy our cities; defying the courts and controlling the legal profession; imposing centralized control over the economy with arbitrary powers to tax and regulate; dominating independent institutions like universities and the press.
This is the best short guide to give us the big picture of our current political moment, its unprecedented danger—and how to fight back.
“Journalism of a very high order.”—Damon Linker
“A vital and urgent book.”—Charlie Sykes
Donald Trump warned us that if he returned to the White House, he would be “a dictator on day one.” It wasn’t just on day one.
Dictator from Day One describes, in breadth and detail, the story of America’s political devolution from a free society to an authoritarian dictatorship.
The policies of Donald Trump’s second term in office are a political revolution against our constitutional order, concentrating all power in Trump’s hands and creating a system of one-man rule.
This book lays out, systematically and dispassionately, the five prongs of this attack on the American stealing from Congress the power to control government spending and to decide what government agencies exist; creating a police state that can seize and imprison people without due process and occupy our cities; defying the courts and controlling the legal profession; imposing centralized control over the economy with arbitrary powers to tax and regulate; dominating independent institutions like universities and the press.
This is the best short guide to give us the big picture of our current political moment, its unprecedented danger—and how to fight back.
- GenresHistory
162 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 17, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 21, 2025
Technically it should be 4 stars (it is a little short, and doesn't explain in detail how we arrived to all this - ind it should). But 5 stars because the book is really important and everyone should read this. Perhaps it is already too late.
September 23, 2025
Dictator From Day One — How Donald Trump is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back
Robert Tracinski, ©2025
A short Book Report by Ron Housley, 22 September 2025
I have been following Robert Tracinski’s analysis of current events for a long time. He has been clear, compelling, frequently “spot on” in his assessments. A friend of mine not infrequently observes: “He nailed it again.” His output distinguishes itself from the legions of other pundits by always carefully indicating the philosophic positions framing each assessment.
How refreshing to remain grounded by virtue of an explicit connection to underlying philosophic ideas.
In “Dictator From Day One,” Tracinski lays out the details of our government allowing itself to be hijacked. In other words, the outrages keep happening because a vast conceptual chaos has developed within the culture, one consequence being that most of the usual opposition is intellectually disarmed and impotent to stage any effective resistance to Trump’s over-reaches.
Many of us see the rapid implosion of our freedoms, but we don’t see the broader principles playing out, nor can we project where it’s all headed if somehow we don’t put a stop to it. There is no meaningful protest on the horizon as the ominous power-grab continues to play out on the nation’s front pages and in the abundance of Substack postings.
FORMAT
Earlier in the year, Tracinski launched a recurring feature on “The UnPopulist” website called “Executive Watch.” Periodically, he corralled the recent outrages and catalogued them into one of five broad categories intended to represent the scope of Trump’s arrogation of power. The present book also divides the Trump threats into categories and gives us a separate chapter for each of them.
As I read through each of these chapters, most of it extracted from what has already appeared in “Executive Watch,” I could palpably sense the frustration and despair of so many of my countrymen who don’t see an actionable way out — like being caught up in a dystopian nightmare with a chance of not waking up.
DOGE
How many of us even remember DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) in the early hours of Trump’s second administration? DOGE was promoted as a cost-cutting project, but in reality government spending greatly increased. The real accomplishment of DOGE was to normalize arbitrary exercises in Presidential power, to steam role over objections and to set the course for more serious Constitutional attacks that were to come.
By commandeering the government’s payment system, Trump has been able to wrest control from Congress over what gets funded and what doesn’t. He has been able to fire and hire almost by the total exercise of personal whim. He has been able to cancel university research funding. He has been able to take over the FCC for personal (broadcast license) attacks on his detractors. He has been able to direct FTC (antitrust) persecutions of companies he wants to control.
DOGE was a total success in laying the groundwork to support a more ominous government take-over which was apparently in the planning from the outset.
IMMIGRATION POLLICE STATE?
As with DOGE, the attack on immigrants is not what it seems. Images of masked men in black, in unmarked cars, scooping up brown people off the street and whisking them away to a Central American prison — that is the face of Trump’s immigration policy. But more ominously, it has been a sweeping away of the “rule of law” which had previously defined the American relationship of the individual to the state. Trump has successfully washed away that image in the minds of many Americans.
In the process, ICE has been given a budget that already exceeds the budget of the United States Marine Corps. And we are encouraged to view the national guard as the normal force to protect ICE as they sweep immigrants off the street.
The greatest accomplishment of Trump’s immigration policy is the normalization of the idea that it’s ok for government to act outside the framework of the law….and the normalization of “..partisan militia sent to occupy cities that Trump considers strongholds of the political opposition.” (p. 57) We are all softened up to surrender our rights to the strongman.
KILLING THE COURTS
The Trump juggernaut to dismantle liberal institutions protecting liberty itself has been stage center in the daily headlines. But his undermining of the judiciary might be the lynchpin to bringing the entire system down, “burning it all down” as the saying goes.
Not only has he successfully defied the courts directly, but he has deployed an entire set of Executive Orders aimed at preventing lawyers from “being able to mount a challenge to his edicts in the first place.” (p. 77)
What I see here is an under-reported rigging of the entire legal system, with almost no pushback from any of Trump’s feckless opponents, many who remain spineless if not scared.
It is clear to me that Trump has launched a revenge attack against those who conducted “lawfare” against him in the recent past.
What is getting precious little attention is the long term secondary damage to the legal institutions that have been pivotal to creating and sustaining two and a half centuries of prosperity and pursuit of happiness. In his disregard for the sanctity of these institutions, Trump is willing to wash that all down the drain — all for petty personal revenge.
Trump is succeeding to a frightening extent in normalizing defiance of the courts.
TRUMP AND THE MARITIME WORLD ORDER
Top on my personal list of worries is the damage Trump is inflicting to our international alliances and agreements, the glue that holds the Maritime World Order together.
Trump believes down deep that my own personal trade deficit with Whole Foods Market is somehow a problem for me. He then extrapolates that to a national level and claims: American trade deficits with other countries are somehow a problem for America(!). His conclusion: trade is bad for America. Trump hates trade.
Trump appears to have no grasp of why America became “great” in the first place, and how free trade played a pivotal role in America’s ascendency to greatness. In all his eagerness to promote “Make America Great Again,” he never stopped to ask himself what made America great in the first place, and to realize that free trade was high on the list.
In his attempt to seize control over the economy away from leftist influence, Trump is unwittingly moving the nation even further away from the freedom which had been at the foundation of America’s economic prosperity. In scheming to place his control over their control, he is strengthening control itself — rather than securing freedom from control as the goal going forward.
The keystone of Trump’s mission to control the economy is the tariff. Tracinski tells us that there is “no other area of the government where he so clearly exhibits the sheer joy of seeing his slightest whim instantly made into policy.” (p. 84)
Trump doesn’t care, or even understand, the critical value of maintaining the Maritime World Order as our best shield against the aggressions of the Continental World Order dictators.
His Vice President glibly dismissed the idea of keeping the sea-lanes open at the entrance to the Red Sea because traffic there mostly benefits Europe; he was not able to form an integrated view. He would be willing to sell the world into dictatorial slavery if only they would give him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Destroying the Maritime World Order, taking an ownership interest in major companies, gladly accepting Memecoin bribes and cash for pardons, canceling criminal prosecutions of donors — this is all just window dressing. The principle playing itself out is Trump’s normalizing the idea that we don’t really need freedom any longer.
FORMERLY INDEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS
Much of the success of America has been fueled by its independent institutions, free from the coercive bonds of government edicts: the universities, the press, the legal profession.
It has long been clear to me that the “long march through the institutions” project of critical Theory academia has largely been a success. Trump’s solution is not to free those institutions from the Marxist take-over, but to take them over for himself.
Using threats to shakedown these institutions, Trump is normalizing the notion that these institutions are too important to be allowed to exist independent of ongoing coercive regulations from Trump’s band of merry regulators.
GOING FORWARD
Many of us are stuck in feelings of impotence — asking ourselves “what can we do to stop this?”
Trump has systematically leveraged the weakness in the system, long-standing weaknesses that Congress has been too lazy to fix. Combined with a worrisome degree of conceptual chaos in the minds of Americans, it is like a “perfect storm,” a category-5 political storm bearing down on all of us.
Trump’s opponents do not see themselves in a position to protest: they are timid; they are fearful of retaliation; they are weak; they are restrained. They don’t feel emboldened to oppose Trump’s assault on free speech after their own disgraceful throttling of social media’s right to post negative reports about the Biden shenanigans. They have been mostly silent as Trump has launched a campaign to silence any anti Trump sentiment throughout the kingdom.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The decline of American liberty has troubled me for decades, as our “Mixed Economy” has lurched ever closer into statism. We fear statism, yet it has drawn closer as the decades have unfolded. And now with Trump, it is so close that we can smell and taste it. We are on the verge of an early arrival at the station to which the train has been headed all along.
Some of my friends claim no interest in politics or political philosophy. They have none of the Revolutionary generation’s reverence for reason; they will not consider challenges to beliefs they happen to hold. Some of them even agree with a claim that certain speech must be silenced.
Our universities have taught entire generations that speech is violence, that only white people can be racist, and that there is no such thing as objective truth. Opposing Trump’s power grab is unlikely to grow out of this level of conceptual chaos.
Tracinski does have a chapter aimed at “How to Fight Back.” But his suggestions depend on being able to integrate all his outrages into a “Big Picture,” to bring conceptual clarity to what’s happening. He suggests that we must measure the U.S. against “what the constitutional balance of power ought to be.” (p. 14) In other words, he is pointing out that disrupting the death spiral requires clarity of vision.
Tracinski points out when we have a “dangerously unchecked leader, a mad king whose erratic and paranoid rule is spiraling out of control,” (137) that there are advantages to waging even a losing battle because (a)it lays down a marker, and (b)people tend to rally around a dissident, but not around a collaborator. Until the dissident appears, my antenna will be on full alert.
For me, clarity of vision includes a focus on a principled way to look at the gathering storm — by identifying each instance of tyranny raining down upon us, and contrasting that to what its pro-liberty antipode would look like. That’s the only way for any hope of even identifying the patriotic dissident when he finally appears. In the meantime I dare not support a Republican candidate for any office, regardless of how awful the opponent seems.
Robert Tracinski, ©2025
A short Book Report by Ron Housley, 22 September 2025
I have been following Robert Tracinski’s analysis of current events for a long time. He has been clear, compelling, frequently “spot on” in his assessments. A friend of mine not infrequently observes: “He nailed it again.” His output distinguishes itself from the legions of other pundits by always carefully indicating the philosophic positions framing each assessment.
How refreshing to remain grounded by virtue of an explicit connection to underlying philosophic ideas.
In “Dictator From Day One,” Tracinski lays out the details of our government allowing itself to be hijacked. In other words, the outrages keep happening because a vast conceptual chaos has developed within the culture, one consequence being that most of the usual opposition is intellectually disarmed and impotent to stage any effective resistance to Trump’s over-reaches.
Many of us see the rapid implosion of our freedoms, but we don’t see the broader principles playing out, nor can we project where it’s all headed if somehow we don’t put a stop to it. There is no meaningful protest on the horizon as the ominous power-grab continues to play out on the nation’s front pages and in the abundance of Substack postings.
FORMAT
Earlier in the year, Tracinski launched a recurring feature on “The UnPopulist” website called “Executive Watch.” Periodically, he corralled the recent outrages and catalogued them into one of five broad categories intended to represent the scope of Trump’s arrogation of power. The present book also divides the Trump threats into categories and gives us a separate chapter for each of them.
As I read through each of these chapters, most of it extracted from what has already appeared in “Executive Watch,” I could palpably sense the frustration and despair of so many of my countrymen who don’t see an actionable way out — like being caught up in a dystopian nightmare with a chance of not waking up.
DOGE
How many of us even remember DOGE (Department Of Government Efficiency) in the early hours of Trump’s second administration? DOGE was promoted as a cost-cutting project, but in reality government spending greatly increased. The real accomplishment of DOGE was to normalize arbitrary exercises in Presidential power, to steam role over objections and to set the course for more serious Constitutional attacks that were to come.
By commandeering the government’s payment system, Trump has been able to wrest control from Congress over what gets funded and what doesn’t. He has been able to fire and hire almost by the total exercise of personal whim. He has been able to cancel university research funding. He has been able to take over the FCC for personal (broadcast license) attacks on his detractors. He has been able to direct FTC (antitrust) persecutions of companies he wants to control.
DOGE was a total success in laying the groundwork to support a more ominous government take-over which was apparently in the planning from the outset.
IMMIGRATION POLLICE STATE?
As with DOGE, the attack on immigrants is not what it seems. Images of masked men in black, in unmarked cars, scooping up brown people off the street and whisking them away to a Central American prison — that is the face of Trump’s immigration policy. But more ominously, it has been a sweeping away of the “rule of law” which had previously defined the American relationship of the individual to the state. Trump has successfully washed away that image in the minds of many Americans.
In the process, ICE has been given a budget that already exceeds the budget of the United States Marine Corps. And we are encouraged to view the national guard as the normal force to protect ICE as they sweep immigrants off the street.
The greatest accomplishment of Trump’s immigration policy is the normalization of the idea that it’s ok for government to act outside the framework of the law….and the normalization of “..partisan militia sent to occupy cities that Trump considers strongholds of the political opposition.” (p. 57) We are all softened up to surrender our rights to the strongman.
KILLING THE COURTS
The Trump juggernaut to dismantle liberal institutions protecting liberty itself has been stage center in the daily headlines. But his undermining of the judiciary might be the lynchpin to bringing the entire system down, “burning it all down” as the saying goes.
Not only has he successfully defied the courts directly, but he has deployed an entire set of Executive Orders aimed at preventing lawyers from “being able to mount a challenge to his edicts in the first place.” (p. 77)
What I see here is an under-reported rigging of the entire legal system, with almost no pushback from any of Trump’s feckless opponents, many who remain spineless if not scared.
It is clear to me that Trump has launched a revenge attack against those who conducted “lawfare” against him in the recent past.
What is getting precious little attention is the long term secondary damage to the legal institutions that have been pivotal to creating and sustaining two and a half centuries of prosperity and pursuit of happiness. In his disregard for the sanctity of these institutions, Trump is willing to wash that all down the drain — all for petty personal revenge.
Trump is succeeding to a frightening extent in normalizing defiance of the courts.
TRUMP AND THE MARITIME WORLD ORDER
Top on my personal list of worries is the damage Trump is inflicting to our international alliances and agreements, the glue that holds the Maritime World Order together.
Trump believes down deep that my own personal trade deficit with Whole Foods Market is somehow a problem for me. He then extrapolates that to a national level and claims: American trade deficits with other countries are somehow a problem for America(!). His conclusion: trade is bad for America. Trump hates trade.
Trump appears to have no grasp of why America became “great” in the first place, and how free trade played a pivotal role in America’s ascendency to greatness. In all his eagerness to promote “Make America Great Again,” he never stopped to ask himself what made America great in the first place, and to realize that free trade was high on the list.
In his attempt to seize control over the economy away from leftist influence, Trump is unwittingly moving the nation even further away from the freedom which had been at the foundation of America’s economic prosperity. In scheming to place his control over their control, he is strengthening control itself — rather than securing freedom from control as the goal going forward.
The keystone of Trump’s mission to control the economy is the tariff. Tracinski tells us that there is “no other area of the government where he so clearly exhibits the sheer joy of seeing his slightest whim instantly made into policy.” (p. 84)
Trump doesn’t care, or even understand, the critical value of maintaining the Maritime World Order as our best shield against the aggressions of the Continental World Order dictators.
His Vice President glibly dismissed the idea of keeping the sea-lanes open at the entrance to the Red Sea because traffic there mostly benefits Europe; he was not able to form an integrated view. He would be willing to sell the world into dictatorial slavery if only they would give him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Destroying the Maritime World Order, taking an ownership interest in major companies, gladly accepting Memecoin bribes and cash for pardons, canceling criminal prosecutions of donors — this is all just window dressing. The principle playing itself out is Trump’s normalizing the idea that we don’t really need freedom any longer.
FORMERLY INDEPENDENT INSTITUTIONS
Much of the success of America has been fueled by its independent institutions, free from the coercive bonds of government edicts: the universities, the press, the legal profession.
It has long been clear to me that the “long march through the institutions” project of critical Theory academia has largely been a success. Trump’s solution is not to free those institutions from the Marxist take-over, but to take them over for himself.
Using threats to shakedown these institutions, Trump is normalizing the notion that these institutions are too important to be allowed to exist independent of ongoing coercive regulations from Trump’s band of merry regulators.
GOING FORWARD
Many of us are stuck in feelings of impotence — asking ourselves “what can we do to stop this?”
Trump has systematically leveraged the weakness in the system, long-standing weaknesses that Congress has been too lazy to fix. Combined with a worrisome degree of conceptual chaos in the minds of Americans, it is like a “perfect storm,” a category-5 political storm bearing down on all of us.
Trump’s opponents do not see themselves in a position to protest: they are timid; they are fearful of retaliation; they are weak; they are restrained. They don’t feel emboldened to oppose Trump’s assault on free speech after their own disgraceful throttling of social media’s right to post negative reports about the Biden shenanigans. They have been mostly silent as Trump has launched a campaign to silence any anti Trump sentiment throughout the kingdom.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The decline of American liberty has troubled me for decades, as our “Mixed Economy” has lurched ever closer into statism. We fear statism, yet it has drawn closer as the decades have unfolded. And now with Trump, it is so close that we can smell and taste it. We are on the verge of an early arrival at the station to which the train has been headed all along.
Some of my friends claim no interest in politics or political philosophy. They have none of the Revolutionary generation’s reverence for reason; they will not consider challenges to beliefs they happen to hold. Some of them even agree with a claim that certain speech must be silenced.
Our universities have taught entire generations that speech is violence, that only white people can be racist, and that there is no such thing as objective truth. Opposing Trump’s power grab is unlikely to grow out of this level of conceptual chaos.
Tracinski does have a chapter aimed at “How to Fight Back.” But his suggestions depend on being able to integrate all his outrages into a “Big Picture,” to bring conceptual clarity to what’s happening. He suggests that we must measure the U.S. against “what the constitutional balance of power ought to be.” (p. 14) In other words, he is pointing out that disrupting the death spiral requires clarity of vision.
Tracinski points out when we have a “dangerously unchecked leader, a mad king whose erratic and paranoid rule is spiraling out of control,” (137) that there are advantages to waging even a losing battle because (a)it lays down a marker, and (b)people tend to rally around a dissident, but not around a collaborator. Until the dissident appears, my antenna will be on full alert.
For me, clarity of vision includes a focus on a principled way to look at the gathering storm — by identifying each instance of tyranny raining down upon us, and contrasting that to what its pro-liberty antipode would look like. That’s the only way for any hope of even identifying the patriotic dissident when he finally appears. In the meantime I dare not support a Republican candidate for any office, regardless of how awful the opponent seems.
September 30, 2025
This is a concise review of the violations of law and morality done by a man who would be (and is) dictator. It is convincing and maddening.
September 26, 2025
“Dictator From Day One” very powerfully accomplishes two related tasks. First, it gathers up the Trump Administration’s deliberately confusing muddle of firings, arrests, threats, shutdowns, domestic military invasions, tariffs, institutional takeovers and more, then arranges them to show how they’re all part of an undeclared rebellion against our Constitutional system of government. And the goal is to convert the Presidency into a dictatorship with no checks and balances. Dangerous if Trump accomplishes it, and even more dangerous if it becomes the style of government for his successors.
Second, it outlines how we can fight off this surprisingly successful effort before it becomes permanent. Among the most intriguing of the book’s suggestions is that we need to form political alliances with those who we don’t necessarily agree with, to stop this attack before it takes hold. I interpret this to mean that, for example: In the past, you may have been a conservative, or a libertarian, or even a Republican. (I’ve been all three, at one point or another.) But to push back against this tide, we may have to ally with old political opponents, and even press the voting lever for an Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if it comes down to that. Personally, I can no longer convince myself that they’re a worse choice than Trump and his minions.
Chess Grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has written, “Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.” The time to read “Dictator From Day One” and act is now. The Constitution is a 238-year-old document that can’t defend itself.
Second, it outlines how we can fight off this surprisingly successful effort before it becomes permanent. Among the most intriguing of the book’s suggestions is that we need to form political alliances with those who we don’t necessarily agree with, to stop this attack before it takes hold. I interpret this to mean that, for example: In the past, you may have been a conservative, or a libertarian, or even a Republican. (I’ve been all three, at one point or another.) But to push back against this tide, we may have to ally with old political opponents, and even press the voting lever for an Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if it comes down to that. Personally, I can no longer convince myself that they’re a worse choice than Trump and his minions.
Chess Grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has written, “Somehow, people always forget that it’s much easier to install a dictator than to remove one.” The time to read “Dictator From Day One” and act is now. The Constitution is a 238-year-old document that can’t defend itself.
December 4, 2025
The most devastating characteristic of Robert Tracinski's evaluation of the Trump administration is the lack of exaggeration in its condemnation. Citing the history of the rule of law in this country, laying out the facts of what this administration has done, and following the implications of current policies, Mr. Tracinski has calmly and clearly outlined the threat to our individual rights and personal liberties. Thankfully, after doing so, he suggests a few things that we can do to counteract the assault. As soon as I finished reading this book, I put it in the free library box that one of my neighbors has in her yard, from where it was immediately snatched up. I'm hoping that this book will "go viral".
October 20, 2025
This is a superb and concise analysis of how Donald Trump is setting about subverting the American constitution. Here's my review on my blog. https://jollylibertarian.blogspot.com...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews