Harvard professors analyzed the international implications of President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 win at a Wednesday afternoon Weatherhead Center for International Affairs forum.
Weatherhead Center Director Melani Cammett moderated the event, which featured Harvard Department of Government professors Joshua D. Kertzer and Daniel Ziblatt and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Pippa Norris. The professors discussed the executive power available to Trump and the potential global impacts of his second term.
Ziblatt said there are three key differences between this election cycle and that of 2016: Trump has now come to power without much aid from the Republican Party, the Supreme Court is now heavily Republican-leaning, and Trump has criminal immunity from any actions he carries out during his presidency as ruled in Trump v. United States.
“You add all this together, and it does give one a very frightening picture,” Ziblatt said. “His presidency has a much freer hand to do what authoritarians have done throughout time. That is, harassing and prosecuting opponents.”
Ziblatt added that Trump will have more freedom to enact the policies he promised supporters, such as “mass, deep, and disruptive deportation of immigrants, the hollowing out of the federal bureaucracy, replacing scientists and experts with loyalists, the use of the military and the insurrection act against protesters, rampant political corruption.”
Ziblatt described a worldwide “anti-incumbent wave” in which citizens across the world have become dissatisfied with the status quo, resulting in incumbents losing elections.
"The genius of democracy is its self-correcting nature,” Ziblatt said. “But the problem, of course, is if the person being elected into office is the kind of threat that it seems, and I just described, then this does disrupt this happy self-correcting logic of democracy.”
