Donald May Want to Be a Dictator...

But despite liberal fears, it won't happen. Not in this country.

Quick note: On Wednesday’s No BS Zone, I’ll be talking to Bill O’Reilly about the current state of the news-media. As always, the episode will be exclusive to BernardGoldberg.com paying subscribers. If you’re not one already, you can become one here.

Now, onto today’s column…

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The headline in the Washington Post said what many critics of Donald Trump are warning us about: “Take Trump at his word when he threatens to punish his enemies.”

What followed was a laundry list of all the scary, authoritarian things Trump said he would do if he were elected next year. Things like promising to sic the FBI and the rest of the Justice Department on his political rivals — retaliation for their supposed persecution of him.

So let’s see if we have this right. Ever since he rode down that escalator to announce his candidacy for president, Democrats, including many of their allies in the so-called mainstream media, have been telling us that we can’t believe anything he says; that he’s a liar; that we know he’s lying because his lips are moving.

But now that the polls are indicating that he just might win next year, we’re told that we should “Take Trump at his word,” that all of a sudden Pinocchio has turned into the second coming of Honest Abe.

Question: Which is it? Is he compulsive liar or a man who should be taken at his word?

I think we know the answer. Donald Trump is a liar when calling him a liar helps Democrats, and he’s a truth-teller when calling him that helps the Democrats. It’s not about honesty or dishonesty. It’s about politics.

As Lindsey Graham, the GOP senator from South Carolina put it: “The bottom line is this narrative that ‘You vote for Trump, you vote for a dictator’ is the only thing left because their policies are not working. They can’t say ‘Vote for Biden.’ It’s impossible to sell the Biden agenda so they’re trying to sell fear-mongering against Trump.”

For the record, I’m no fan of Donald Trump. I don’t think he has the kind of character we want in a president. I think he might like to do all the nasty things liberals say he wants to do. But while calling him a would-be dictator may be good, albeit smarmy, politics — the kind of things that scares voters — it’s not going to happen, not with all the checks and balances that are in place.