Not at all sure this commentary is anything but a cleverly disguised view from the far left.
Seems to me the election was more about Americans being "mad as hell and not taking it anymore" from big government and the elitist establishment. Not so much a preference of which individual stood for whatever.

What a load of crap.
Just to address one of his points, "I asked where in the Constitution does it authorize building a wall to keep out immigrants whom Americans want to hire."
Congress, under the Plenary Power Doctrine, has the power to make immigration policy. The Executive Branch is charged with enforcing the immigration laws passed by Congress.
There is a legal process for immigration. Building a wall or whatever other means are chosen for enforcing current immigration law is clearly established in the Constitution.

If one of my guys wrote a report like this I would tell him to start over completely. This thing runs on and on, without a logic trail to follow.

We had two real choices and a protest vote. The least of the dictators won. I have no idea how a Trump victory contributes to a dictatorship, unless you go back to the primaries, where the vote against the status quo was even stronger.

The message is clear, and it is not supporting a dictatorship.

Continued from above
I wish, in the interests of objectivity, he had mentioned--but he does not--that as a young man Mr. Trump knew he was inheriting a large fortune. He could have become a man of leisure, a playboy, but he entered into a remarkably energetic career of NYC construction, Atlantic City casino development, book writing, and latterly his reality TV program. His energy and commitment to keep producing seem extraordinary. He is over 70, now, and still manifesting extraordinary energy, work ethic, and determination.

Few would affirm Trump, or consider it a virtue, that he has created for himself a life of "conspicuous consumption," enjoying his wealth, and always surrounding himself with glamorous women, women of beauty. Never apologizing for his wealth--in fact, boasting of it--and never apologizing for the the "Penthouse Legend" of his world.

It is a fascination of the sweeping Trump appeal that his working-class, middle-American supporters, fed up with the crony capitalism system and with the so-called "liberal elites, embrace the billionaire Trump and his unapologetic enjoyment of his life, including all the glamor. They can fully accept a man who has worked to achieve great wealth and without apology enjoys it.

But also, never, ever stopped working at an extraordinary pace. Is this not worth any mention by Dr. Ghate?

I wish that Dr. Ghate had pointed to Trump's family, not for the usual "family values," "family man" ethic--far from it--but because he has raised and shaped his entirely family around "the business." All of them pushed to work, to rise; there are no hippies of any description, and no postmodernist rebels. Mr. Trump's values emerge clearly.

I have dealt at great length with the media creation--an act of virtually pure fiction--that is Donald Trump the racist, xenophobic, misogynist, sexist mocker of the disabled. That is a fantasy of the postmodernism, advocacy journalist media. (http://www.thesavvystreet.com/the-med...)

I could wish that Dr. Ghates at least had raised the issue of the rule of law when it comes to the 11.0 million illegal aliens in the United States. They are not "undocumented," they are illegal, for the most part. As the holder of the highest elective office in the land, sworn to duly execute the law, what should Mr. Trump do with 11.0 million people whose first act upon entering our country was to break the law? Mr. Trump does, after all, embrace legal immigration, pledging a much more efficient, faster system of legal entry.

It never become clear, at least to me, in Dr. Ghates's essay, how Mr. Trump is a step toward dictatorship as compared with Hillary Clinton--it was going to be one or the other, you know. Or how a step toward dictatorship after President Obama.

It seemed to me that Mr. Trump represents a step back from dictatorship after Obama or the new Obama, Clinton. It seemed to me that his specific pledges were in the direction of liberty. I have grave concerns about his supposed commitment to "the right to life. But it seems misleading to speak of "One Small Step Toward Dictatorship," after some half century of the disturbing progression of Ayn Rand's prophecy of fascism, when we have the first President to defy the liberal left on its dearest causes--such as global warming, shutting down fossil fuels, challenging public education, simply paying no attention to the obsession with "identity politics"--and never ever apologizes or falls for the argument from intimidation or any number of smears.

A better title might be "For the first time in our generation, a successful business man wins the Presidency and never once apologizes for his wealth."

Something like that, you know.

Probably the most utterly stupid statement in this piece is that while Trump might do some really good things, they shouldn't count, because he's doing them for the wrong reasons. This preposterous piece of tripe goes further to say that people voted for him mainly out of the fear he generated, as though we were all blissfully content with things just the way they are.

I feel the writer is engaging in projection, assuming that if he acted as Trump has, his motivations would be dangerous. That's a tell-tale for leftist thinking, with which I am well experienced, having had to deal with liberal hysterics in family and government. I can't count how many times I've had to say "How about asking me why I have a certain view or took a particular action, instead of telling me why I did?"

My wife received an email from Penzey's Spices the other day, telling her that if she voted for Trump she was a racist. We've been customers of Penzeys for 20 years, but no more. Insanity has become contagious, and it's sad to see it's now infecting the Ayn Rand crowd.

The dictator would have been Hildebeast. All of the things she accused Trump of, she was guilty of- and more

Onkar Ghate, the chief content officer at the Ayn Rand Institute, has spent almost 4,000 words making the case that election of Donald Trump is "One Small Step Toward Dictatorship." He argues that Mr. Trump's character, personality, ideas (or lack of political principles), rhetoric, and proposals (for the most part) simply advance America toward dictatorship, set us up for the next and worse tyrant.

I don't dismiss these concerns. When I received the "Objectivist Newsletter" with the article "The Fascist New Frontier," I was floored utterly. I had had no idea. But her argument proved so powerful that a whole generation of Objectivists, and many since, came to interpret the trend of government intervention and the growing welfare state as the fascist, not communist, variant of socialism. It was a distinction that Ludwig von Mises already had made in his essays on the rise of the German Nazi power because, of course, first the Freikorps, and then the Nazis, were born to battle the German socialists in the streets. Again and again, the socialists attempted violent takeovers in Germany, repulsed by the Freikorps. Socialist against socialist, one with an international bent (Marxist/Leninist) and one with a nationalist bent (National Socialists).

As a comic sideline: My mother and father forbade me absolutely from referring to the "Fascist New Frontier" or, later about the Johnson administration, "The New Fascist: Rule by Consensus." I heard the later, as I recall as a lecture at Ford Hall Forum.

But since that foundational essay, "The Fascist New Frontier," I would suggest to you, we have interpreted virtually every candidate for President as one step further toward fascism. And so, half a century later, we have seen in Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (?), Carter, Reagan (?), Clinton, and Obama just one more advance toward fascism: more regulation, a more pervasive command economy, a larger welfare state, a devastating control over the money supply and credit, financial regulations--the growth of regulation alone now has created a $2 trillion a year drag on the economy. Since 2000, the new regulations passed by the EPA have surpassed the total of new regulations by every other government department--most aimed at suppressing the fossil fuel industry.

So exactly what is the significance of the title--no longer in the slightest surprising to Objectivists--"One Small Step Toward Dictatorship?" Shouldn't it be: Business as usual?

Dr. Ghate points out that some policies advocated by Mr. Trump might be in the direction of more limited government. My examination of the Trump platform, which began to budge me in his direction, revealed almost consistent constraint of government power over the individual: curtail regulation, slash taxes, ignore "global warming" and the whole anti-Industrial Revolution, opt for school choice/charter schools/vouchers,, up hold the Second Amendment, let the American energy industry rip, and so on.

But Dr. Ghate points to Trump's endorsement of the so-called "right to life." Ayn Rand used commitment to a woman's choice over her own body and pregnancy as a touchstone for understanding of all human rights. But, as I recall, she came to modify that position, saying that no one could hope to win the Republican nomination for President without at least paying lip service to the so-called "right to life." And thus, she said, we must decide: Is it lip service or serious?

It seems clear with Mr. Trump. Ten years ago, after all, he was a "liberal" and Democrat; his life style and involvements hardly suggest an opponent of abortion. But, launching his candidacy, he avowed belief in the "right to life." Unfortunately, for those who might hope this was lip service, he selected Mike Pence as his vice president and Pence is a serious, devout Christian and leader of the "right to life" movement in Congress. This is a negative, as far as I am concerned, about Trump. But I believe that he personally has no commitment to the "right to life." Reagan, who Ayn Rand bitterly opposed; Bush, and Romney all paid lip service to the right to life. The first two did not make efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade; the last didn't get the chance.

Dr. Ghade quickly dismisses Trump's consistently pro-liberty positions and says that the way he enacts them will vitiate their value. But for the most part he seems to focus very, very heavily on Mr. Trump's character and personality.

Continued below

I never liked Trump. But I saw it as a choice be-
tween certain death and Russian roulette, and I
would do the same thing again. I was very uneasy
about some tendencies, perhaps dictatorial, of
Trump's, but thought that Hillary Clinton was no less dictatorial.
Still, I don't really trust Trump. Now that he
has won, we have to watch him and clamp down
on him, when necessary.
There is a talk show host, Mark Levin, who
has been proposing a "convention of states". At
first I thought it was a second Constitutional
Convention, and would be a disaster, but he ex-
plained that it would not be a convention
for a whole Constitution, but specific amendments, which would have to be individually ratified by the
states, or they couldn't become part of the Constitution. (And, who knows, maybe we could
get rid of #16?)

I also think that maybe we should promote
the American Capitalist Party, maybe not at the
Presidential level to start with, but at the local
and Congressional levels.

Another thing to try would be to end the pro-
cess of "crossovers" in state primaries (I mean
on a state-by-state level). For a long time, there
were no primaries in Virginia. One reason for not
bringing them in was the possibility of registra-
tion by party. But we could do it this way: Let
a voter vote in whichever party's primary he chose, but then he would not be allowed to vote
in any other party's primary for a term of years--
perhaps 1 1/2 election cycles (6 years). He could still vote whichever way he chose in the
general; he could even cross over if the chose,
but if he tried to thereby mess up the other party's primary, he would have to do it at the price of not voting in his own.

Finding fault where none exists is so much like the Progressive's carping that it casts a pall on the entire article. It is true that the Trump presentations can be taken pre-emptive steps toward a dictatorship. But so can several speeches by Lincoln, FDR, RFK, Reagan, and others depending on how you choose to interpret the words. English is a beautiful language but is not to be used as a scientific expression such as math. Every word can have several interpretations. With language, intent is what counts, and while Trump's language is not the most precise, anyone can interpret the intent behind it. I choose to believe in Trump's good intent until such time as his actions prove otherwise.

I don't believe this author has a clue about Trump........his merits or his flaws.

This article, as do a lot of people in this country, places too much importance on the office of president. Yes, congress has given up too much power to the administrative state. Yes, the supreme court has taken too much power when there is supposed to be a separation of powers. And, yes, the federal government is encroaching on us more and more daily.

However, I think the Trump election was more a reaction to that than anything else. We needed someone who was not a typical Washington crony who would continue this encroachment. I think this is what we got. If he has some ego problems, so what? If he makes the government start to do things "under budget and EARLY" like he does in his business, then we will start to roll back the encroachment. If you don't think him making the government more efficient will include lessening the encroachment, you're not paying attention! My 2 cents. :-)

Part of this does strike me as more Trump bashing. The other part strikes me as "don't delay the revolution" rhetoric.

Dictatorship? Didn't they read the news - Clinton DIDN'T win...

At first I didn't finish reading the entire article because my impression became "Trumpaphobic tripe". However, since this is an ARI article I figured I must have missed something profound and restarted at the top. I didn't miss anything. It's long winded Trumpaphobic tripe I didn't finish reading the second time, either, and now I don't care who the author is or where it was published. I notice a number of posters herein have already taken the author to task with the same thoughts as mine so I needn't bother doing it again.

This could have come from the butt-hurt Team Hillary.

What a bunch of crap. Not A voice of reason at all.

I also had the feeling through most of the article that it was written by a disgruntled Hillary voter. When he brought in Ayn Rand at the end, that was by then disjointed. He made the people sound like they were oto thinking for themselves. We had a giant disgust for the corruption, the self-serving financial dealing, and the lies of both parties. We wanted someone who was not a politicians, preferably someone who understood economics and, in my case, someone who would stop the march froward by the UN to take over this country. Why would we focus on what Trump said years ago, when Hillary was being hooked up with women by their "fixer" and cussing like a storm trooper to staff, generals, SS, and even broadcast media, call those oh the Middle East "sand niggers"? We knew of her corruption clear back to Watergate We could read her Marxist thesis. Seems like the article was grasping at straws to prove what he believed.

Fascinating analysis. I have shared this with friends elsewhere too because I think it's important for all of us to consider thoughtfully the impact of the "King's court" in particular.

I have concerns about the alt right believing they've scored a win with Trump's election, and I don't see how Bannon's appointment is a step in the right direction if disabusing them of that notion is one of Trump's goals (and I'm being generous, I don't think he fully grasps the philosophy of the people who supported him most ardently over at Breitbart).

I also don't like the Sessions pick, and Flynn gives me pause as well.

Bottom line? We need to be vigilant, because I think Trump's narcissistic tendencies lend themselves well to attracting yes-men with an agenda, and I further think the agend won't have anything to do with protecting individual liberty.

This writing makes me long for an article on the subject by Bierce, Twain, or Mencken.

Reading Atlas Shrugged, this article makes me think ,America is not "Galt's Gulch". We are all on this website seeking the attitude Ms Rand would have if she were here no, seeking.the John Galt of today who would lead us to our reasoning minds. Your words give us pause for thought!

An interesting contrast to the above article, courtesy of the Atlas Society:
http://atlassociety.org/commentary/co...

"Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan. He said of her novel The Fountainhead, “It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything.” He identified with Howard Roark, the novel's idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment. When I pointed out that The Fountainhead is in a way about the tyranny of groupthink, Trump sat up and said, “That’s what is happening here.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion...

Wow! This article mirrors my thoughts and analysis on the 2016 Trump “dumpster fire” campaign perfectly (about 99%, anyway…). It is very well written… Ten thumbs up!

Read Trump's books then you know.

...and one large step for Humanoidal kind...let's hope not.