Republican Accountability PAC’s New Ad Calls Donald Trump a “Dictator”

In a new campaign, a Republican Accountability PAC opposed to Donald Trump compares the former president to several 'dictators' and authoritarian leaders. The Republican Accountability Project's Dictator Donald video, a six-figure ad campaign, which comes a few weeks after Trump asserted on national television that he would operate like a dictator on "Day 1" of a new administration if re-elected, raises concerns about the former president's 2024 campaign, per uinterview.

The Republican Accountability Project, a never-Trump conservative organization that is a component of Defending Democracy Together, has been praising Republicans who have been siding against Trump and exposing Trump's accomplices in media campaigns.

The commercial displays a December 2022 tweet from Trump in which the former president stated that past elections, including the 2020 presidential election, “allow for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Slamming Trump, the ad posits Trump's authoritarian tendencies. “Trump said he would terminate the Constitution so he could be president again,” the advertisement’s narrator said. “Do you know who also did that? [Benito] Mussolini, [Hugo] Chávez, [Augusto] Pinochet, all of them shelved their Constitutions to centralize power.”

“He caused an insurrection at the Capitol and, sorry to ruin your Christmas, but he’s running again,” said the ad’s narrator, who declares that Trump is “openly running as a wannabe dictator.”

The advertisement goes on to say that if Trump is re-elected to a second term, he intends to "purge tens of thousands of civil servants" from the government and replace them with his supporters. “Authoritarian Viktor Orbán used the same tactic to dismantle Hungary’s democracy,” the narrator said.

“The alarm is going off, everyone needs to wake up. We have a choice between protecting our democracy or letting Trump destroy it.”

According to the Republican Accountability Project, CNN and MSNBC will air the advertisement nationwide. The spot, which was part of a six-figure advertising campaign, aired on the Hallmark Channel and during TBS's holiday marathon of A Christmas Story in several swing states, including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, per The Hill.

In a news statement, Gunner Ramer, the political director of the PAC, stated that neither enough Republicans nor Democrats have accepted the fact that Trump is likely to seek a third nomination. According to Ramer, the former president "has a real chance" of winning the 2024 election because he has grown more autocratic, authoritarian, and conspiratorial.

“Threats to democracy don’t take a break for the holidays. Donald Trump poses an existential crisis for our Constitutional order,” the PAC’s Director of Strategy John Conway said in an emailed statement. “Americans all across the country are hoping he will simply fade away. He isn’t.”

Conway stated that the organization is “sounding the alarm” alerting people to “the dangers posed by his increasingly dictatorial statements,” given the likelihood that Trump will secure the Republican nomination. “If we value our democracy, we must start working now to ensure that Donald Trump never holds political power again,” Conway said.