This is what the former president said in a recent speech at a Christian summit. In fact, the following are his exact words, hopefully with sufficient context to prevent drawing misleading or incorrect conclusions:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time, you won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.

Obviously, this caused a lot of outrage, as its most straightforward interpretation (which according to Occam’s razor, is most likely the correct one) is that if the former president gets elected as president, in four years, “it’ll be fixed” such that elections and voting rights will be cancelled, and there won’t be any more elections in which the Christians will have to vote. But at the same time, and rightfully so, some pointed out that one should not jump the gun and rush to the conclusion, and that the above sentences are not exactly saying this, and maybe he had something else in mind. I agree. One should not rush to the conclusion based on half truths, and the reality is that the above sentences are not explicitly talking about establishing a dictatorship and canceling elections or the Constitution (to be fair, these were covered in other speeches, interviews, or social media posts, though). So, I decided to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible and try to find out what really he meant by these sentences.

Fortunately, many others, including reporters from various media outlets including his favorite Fox News itself, had the same question in mind. So I listened to an interview by Fox News which raised this very same question. And after probably four times back and forth, I guess I managed to extract the following about his state of mind, that Christians usually don’t have a large turn-out in presidential elections (I am not sure if this is actually backed by data), and that what he meant was that they only need to come out and go through the trouble of voting just this once, and in four years, things will be so great that they won’t have to do it anymore.

Wow, what a relief! So, he really didn’t mean to say that he wanted to establish a dictatorship. He just wanted to be mindful of the busy schedules of the Christian voters, and tell them that they really needed to spend time for voting only this time. But wait, then what does “it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine”, or “things will be so great” “that they won’t have to vote anymore” really mean? Doesn’t it mean that, in four years, things will be “fixed” such that, no matter the Christian voters actually vote or not vote, the outcome will be the same and in their favor? Doesn’t it mean that things will be skewed so much (possibly by the help of the great Supreme Court Justices that he has appointed himself, and the other two who are even deeper in the cult than the ones he has appointed) in favor of Christianity and possibly Christian nationalism, that no other group or political party will have a chance of winning in any election? Call me a pessimist, but to me, this doesn’t sound any less scary than a full-blown dictatorship.

So, yes, let’s not jump the gun and rush to the conclusion, and stay with the facts. But let’s also not try to fool ourselves by trying to come up with any possible excuse to explain away the outrageous remarks any of which would mean the end of the career for any decent politician. And, by the way, let’s hope that Fox News also does not jump the gun and rush to the conclusion, that others have been misrepresenting the facts, without actually giving a little bit of thought to the real meaning of the alternative interpretations that they are advocating.