Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.
The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.
The one exception is that I expected Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day 1. Instead, perhaps to preserve a veneer of legality, he has commissioned a report from the Secretary of Defense (Hegseth) and the Secretary of Homeland Security (Noem), due by 20 April. Unless he faces massive political blowback in the next few days, he will doubtless order these flunkies to recommend invoking the Act, effectively the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act.
Meanwhile, two other crucial issues are coming to a head. First, Trump is openly defying the courts over the illegal deportation and imprisonment in a concentration camp of legal migrant Abrego Garcia and others and is now threatening the same even for native-born US citizens. Second, elements of civil society (notably universities and law firms) that have previously engaged in shameful capitulation are now standing up.
If Trump is defeated on all three fronts, there is a good chance that US democracy could survive his onslaughts, though it will take many years to recover. But a Trump victory on even one of them will spell the end. Defeating the courts would render any legal constraints on his power irrelevant. The Insurrection Act would permit him to use troops to suppress protest and to arrest his political opponents. A victory over civil society would turn the US into a totalitarian state, in which all organisations are controled by the Leader and his followers.
I haven’t given up hope, but I don’t expect that Trump will be stopped. The vast majority of Republican voters support everything Trump is doing, even though he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised. And while it would only take a handful of Republicans in Congress to change sides and stop him, there is no sign that this will happen.
Once Trump’s dictatorship is established there is no way back within the current US system. When his regime finally collapses the models for reform will be those of post-war reconstruction of a defeated and discredited state, a process which is sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always painful
{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
Alex SL 04.17.25 at 10:26 am
Same here. I do not think that my overall prediction – USA will still have elections, only it will become nearly impossible for Democrats to win at the federal level – will hold up. But I vastly underestimated how brazenly the new government can get away with dismantling the rule of law, how radically they destroy government services and the USA’s foundations of soft power in diplomacy and science, how nakedly self-enriching they can be without Republican politicians putting even the slightest constraints on them, and how much they can harm the lives and material interests of their own supporters and voters without facing meaningful backlash. I underestimated the strength and the spread of the cultishness that has taken over the Republican party.
Unfortunately, I am now not optimistic. Even if millions of Republican voters lose their jobs or businesses or see social security payments cancelled, they will blame the deep state or Democrats before they ever consider that they are the victims of a confidence fraud. Even if Trump has a stroke next year, the cult will go on without him and coalesce around a new leader. Even if the Democrats should somehow be able to retake the presidency in 2028 (assuming their candidate doesn’t get conveniently arrested during the campaign), the MAGA cult will remain, and the Democrats being the Democrats, the cult will then be back in power from 2032.
That doesn’t mean there is no hope at all. But one has to be realistic. Unless the Republican party is liberated from the cult, there is no hope for democracy and rule of law in the USA.
marcel proust 04.17.25 at 11:54 am
I have missed seeing anything in the news (or forgotten about it) about some of your statements concerning the regime, e.g., considering invoking the insurrection act. Thank you for the reminder.
I have not seen anything explicit about abducting and exiling native born citizens, though obviously if people are picked up and exiled without judicial review, there is nothing to prevent this (and it follows as a very likely possibility, a “mistake” similar to what happened with Kilmar Abrego Garcia).
Do you have any links for that?
“If you ever wondered what you would do in Germany in February of 1933, you’re doing it now.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/find-the-cost-of-freedom
Laban 04.17.25 at 12:06 pm
“he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised”
Now be fair, he’s not exactly been in power long. Three months? UK Labour have been in power for nine and we’re getting poorer.
I know “everyone I don’t like is Hitler”, but I can’t see The Donald as Il Duce. I’m more concerned that
a) he doesn’t seem to have a thought out strategy for re-industrialising America, whereas the Far Eastern nations built their undoubted industrial might over decades, no matter who occupied political power.
b) he’ll be gone in 4 years whereas reindustrialising the US is a 20-30 year project
But.. the story of the last 40 years is one of ever-diminishing Western economic power. I remember seeing the derelict factories of Milwaukee in the 1980s and being reminded of the UK. Trump, for all his faults, sees that decline and is attempting to halt or reverse it. Whereas the default position of both parties, in the US and UK, has been to manage the decline.
Sam B 04.17.25 at 12:57 pm
The strongest evidence that there is no plan to use the military against democratic politicians is that they are busy pointlessly alienating frontline troops by doing stuff like cancelling Jenga: https://bsky.app/profile/whatahellofawaytodad.com/post/3lmz2vqscw224
J-D 04.17.25 at 12:58 pm
Would the Reichstag Fire Decree be a better analogy?
US Refugee 04.17.25 at 2:50 pm
American here – haven’t commented before. I’ll admit I was one of those who thought you were being dramatic. Now I’m selling everything I own and hoping I can get both me and my money across the border before it closes.
The penny dropped for me when the president of the united states went on TV and said that he would be thrilled to send americans to those concentration camps he’s building. I spend two days unable to sleep and ruminating.
Today I’m going to call my family and beg them to come with me. I hope to be across the border and figuring out what to do with my life by this weekend. As you said, it may only be days.
steven t johnson 04.17.25 at 3:34 pm
“…the [Insurrection] Act, effectively the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act.”
Not sure that this is correct enough. Trump has already tried to put troops into the cities back in his last term but was stymied behind the scenes. I think that’s why Trumpery trumpets that George Floyd/BLM was a much worse revolutionary threat than 1/6. And why DEI in the military is the Deep State conspiracy to enslave or even replace real Americans, therefore some conveniently undefined we need Hegseth to purge the officer corps.
Now it is true that the wonderful thing about armies is that you can more or less give them orders and it doesn’t matter in the normal course of events what the troops think. But when you turn the rungs of the career ladder into turnstiles? Even worse, what happens if your newly whitewashed officer corps starts looking rather different from substantial segments of the rank-and-file? Especially when these troops start confronting the real world citizens in hostile missions into what is allegedly their own country, even when they are loathsome dens of iniquity, aka cities? Would every Gary Gallegher be so admirably lethal not just in El Paso but Austin, not just in Harlem but Boulder? And if there were, are there enough Galleghers to patrol the streets?
There are hints of what might function more as an Enabling Act, the purge of the judiciary. https://apnews.com/article/gop-bill-district-court-injunction-trump-doge-764231e50ae5e7119a8bdc9c0d7daf89 Even if a purported compromise merely required such orders to be fast tracked to the Supreme Court, that would leave legal judgments to the mercies of the so-called shadow docket…while acceptable rulings would be finessed, as in the current example of the difference between “facilitate” and “effectuate.”
Political moves against the Federal Reserve, whether vilifying Jay Powell or good old fashioned jawboning by Trump, also would be highly significant, in my view.
In one sense this is quibbling over the difference between days (John Quiggins’ position) versus months. I will note that the speed of Hitler’s movement was partially determined by the necessity for elections for legal cover…but the 2026 midterms means the Hitler precedents are not directly relevant. By the way, the recent book Takeover by Timothy Ryback is I think grimly instructive reading. [The importance of the slump in the Nazi vote in the actual course of events is not particularly helpful to the Thaelmann thesis that it was always the Communists’ fault, I’m afraid.]
“The vast majority of Republican voters support everything Trump is doing, even though he has signally failed to deliver on the economic prosperity he promised.” Republican voters or Republican office holders? In my judgment, the real mass support for Trump lies in billionaires, decibillionaires and centibillionaires, particularly those who control their rural districts. It’s relatively easy for what you might call the gentry to dominate their rural districts. The power of the masses is felt most strongly where there are actual masses of people. They tend to be Blue. Every Blue state has its Red districts.
The problem of course is that the rather antiquated representative system in the US is designed to empower the minority. The principle of majority rule is not only not accepted as defining democracy, the system is pretty much based on the notion that only a system of minority rule is democratic. That minority is formally defined as citizens, but the practical definition has always been centered on property. The minority has always ruled on the key issue, what kind of property does the state defend? [Against the propertyless within the nation *and against other states, which may or may not impose the necessity of concessions to the lowers.]
My judgment is the turn of the truly rich to Trumpery (whether an Ackmanesque enthusiasm or a Dimon’s indifference) has to do with long-term relative decline of the US in world economy, hence the centrality of the struggle against the PRC and for the dollar’s role in the world economy. I certainly do not think this argues against John Quiggins’ pessimism. If anything it supports it. The democracy we had was never very democratic in the majority rule sense, but it was still a historic advance for US and in the long run for the world too. But even the longest runs end. I think the old democracy needs to be replaced by something better…which is not Trumpery.
steven t johnson 04.17.25 at 3:53 pm
Speak of the devil…https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-blasts-fed-chair-powell-saying-his-termination-cannot-come-fast-enough/ar-AA1D6fzp?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=d6dd26b2cff9443ba33a266d0f3b73e1&ei=13
LFC 04.17.25 at 4:51 pm
One small clarification on Abrego Garcia (which doesn’t change the conclusion): The main reason his deportation to El Salvador and the prison there is plainly illegal is that in 2019 an immigration judge ruled that he could not be sent to El Salvador because he faced a danger of persecution/harm there. (He’s not technically a “legal migrant” because he entered the U.S. illegally, fleeing personal threats/violence in El Salvador, as I understand it. He’s lived in Maryland for roughly a decade without incidents/run-ins with the law, or so I gather.) Of course the Trump administration really doesn’t care about any of these legal distinctions, and it’s likely that federal district judges will soon start to hold Trump officials in contempt of court for failure to comply with their orders.
J, not that one 04.17.25 at 8:50 pm
It is not good, and the things mentioned in the OP, the tariffs mentioned earlier, etc., are only part of it. The demolition of the administrative state is being challenged in court, as the due process issues are, but we’ve already seen how much damage can be done before anyone can do anything about it. Rebuilding those institutions won’t be easy.
That’s not even counting the foreign non-military aid that’s been held up. Say what you will about US global dominance, that money did a lot of good.
LFC 04.17.25 at 10:26 pm
p.s. Ezra Klein on the Abrego Garcia case (link to transcript):
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-asha-rangappa.html
bekabot 04.18.25 at 12:18 am
“Trump, for all his faults, sees that decline and is attempting to halt or reverse it.”
He is not. “I’m trying to reverse the decline instead of managing it” is his excuse. (And it’s a perfunctory one at that.) He wants to raze and ruin and immiserate the United States, and he’s made a very good start. People are what they do, and his actions allow of no other possible interpretation. There’s no “to be fair” about it.
Alex SL 04.18.25 at 12:19 am
The whole discourse around whether Trump is like Hitler, and MAGA is like the Nazis, is really unproductive. I have even seen people argue that you cannot call the MAGA crowd fascists because their rise to power did not mirror that of the Nazis in every detail as it played out in the 1920s to 1930s. There is no reasoned argument to be had with somebody who claims that it devalues “like the Nazis” if that comparison is applied to any ethnic cleansing with fewer than at least six million victims.
However, Laban at 3 has inadvertently illustrated one way in which MAGA is, in fact, very much like the Nazis. The commonality is the nostalgia for a past economic system combined with a seemingly earnest ignorance of how the contemporary economy functions and what constitutes national strength in the contemporary economic system.
The Nazis believed that the German people were morally weakened by industrial modernity and constrained by the small area of the German state. What was needed was a return to an agrarian society: conquer Lebensraum in the east, get rid of the people living there, and fill it with low-density German farming settlements. They did not appreciate that with modern farming techniques, only a minuscule fraction of the population needed to be farmers. More importantly, they did not appreciate that Germany was and had been for decades one of the leading, most prosperous nations of the world on the basis of modern (e.g., chemical) industries and scientific excellence, and that all that was needed to guarantee and grow that leadership and prosperity was maintaining a steady flow of imports and exports from and to other nations and continued investment in research.
Which is what happened after WW2. After an entirely unnecessary orgy of self-harm and harm to others, the logical path of economic development resumed. Germany now has even less area, and it doesn’t matter, because being a low-density agrarian society was a stupid idea in the first place.
The MAGA movement believes that the American people are morally weakened by effeminate office and service jobs. What is needed is a return to manly factory jobs: enact massive tariffs, bully other countries around, destroy the environment, and halt the deployment of regenerative energy sources like wind power, and somehow (?) manly American men will once again work in mines, oil fields, and manufacturing plants. They do not appreciate that with modern manufacturing and mining techniques, only a minuscule fraction of the population needs to work in mining and manufacturing. More importantly, they do not appreciate that the USA is currently one of the leading, most prosperous nations of the world on the basis of information/computer technologies, life sciences, and scientific excellence, and that all all that is needed to guarantee and grow that leadership and prosperity is maintaining a steady flow of imports and exports from and to other nations and continued investment in research.
They are currently engaged in an entirely unnecessary orgy of self-harm and harm to others that will not bring millions of manufacturing jobs back. We will have to see over the next twenty years if the logical path of economic development can at some point be resumed, or if the damage being done to US research will permanently derail it.
What upsets me most are statements like “ever-diminishing Western economic power”. Outside of occasional blips caused by economic crises, Western nations have consistently grown their economies over the last few decades and are much richer now than they were twenty, forty, sixty years ago. Resource limits and global warming are looming ahead, but so far, the trend line has always been up. Life expectancy is up, and we have technologies that would have looked like magic when our grandparents were our age. If this looks like “diminishing economic power” to you, it can only mean in relative terms.
So, what is the demand here? That the people of China and India should have remained in abject poverty for the next few centuries? Is it a moral and strategic failure on the part of the West if we didn’t manage to beat them down, keep them in their place, keep them from industrialising like we did? What world view is that?
John Q 04.18.25 at 1:53 am
Alex SL @13 Agree 100%. I have been banging on about these points for years, even decades. Your last para echoes one of my first articles, responding to claims made in the 1980s that Australians were doomed to become the “poor white trash” of Asia, claims deployed as part of a case for neoliberal reform (including, ironically enough, tariff cuts)
https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n12514/pdf/ch01.pdf
Matt 04.18.25 at 2:36 am
He’s [Abrego Garcia] not technically a “legal migrant” because he entered the U.S. illegally, fleeing personal threats/violence in El Salvador, as I understand it.
“legal migrant” isn’t a technical legal term, so to a degree there’s no point arguing about this. But, Garcia was granted “withholding of removal”, a legal status that allowed him to live and work in the US. It isn’t an “immigrant” status, in the technical sense of that term, in that it itself doesn’t allow for eventual access to citizenship, and doesn’t, itself, allow for adjustment of status to that of a lawful permanent resident (“LPR”). But his status in the US was not in any way unlawful or illegal at the time he was kidnapped and removed in violation of the law.
nastywoman 04.18.25 at 5:14 am
But at the NY Mag a member of the Trump Campaign just posted:
‘Let’s see if Trump raids the homes of his political enemies, classifies parents protesting school political indoctrination as “domestic terrorists”, or coerces private companies to censor speech before we present him with the #1 Fascist award’.
and another commenter responded with:
It’s actually called the: ‘Let’s try to become the #1 Fascist award’.
And you couldn’t be more RIGHT –
Trump always will be
just a
HITLER
MINI
ME
(and known by his real name FF VON CLOWNSTICK)’
– and that’s the real problem about all of this… this… this GAME Elon Trump is playing –
it’s just NOT (serious) ‘German’ enough or as Paul Krugman once could have written:
‘Well, here’s my theory: The real divide between currently successful democracies, like Germany., and currently troubled ones, like the US, is not political but philosophical; it’s not Karl Marx vs. Adam Smith, it’s Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative vs. William James’ pragmatism. What the Germans really want is a clear set of principles: rules that specify the nature of truth, the basis of morality, when shops will be open, and what a Deutsche mark is worth. Americans, by contrast, are philosophically and personally sloppy: They go with whatever seems more or less to work. If people want to elect some FF VON CLOWNSTICK, that’s okay; if a dollar is sometimes worth 80 yen, sometimes 150, (or the market collapses) that’s also okay.
Now, the German way doesn’t always work better. Even today, Berlin can’t or won’t make games to US standards; The Bundesbahn (or Autobahn) can’t or won’t provide the precision regulating that Americans take for granted. Germans remains remarkably bad at speed control; the sheer crap of some American products, the virtuosity of American sloppiness, has allowed the country to remain a powerful importer despite having some of the world’s lowest labor costs. And Germany did a better job of resisting the inflationary pressures of the ’70s and ’80s than we did.
But the world has changed in a way that seems to favor flexibility over discipline. With technology and markets in flux, not everything worth doing is worth doing well;
(not even ‘Fascism’) –
and in an environment where deflation is more of a threat than inflation, an obsession with sound money can be a recipe for permanent recession.
And so the US is in trouble–and with it, the whole American project of a totally un- unified America. For America – America is supposed to be the economic engine of the new America; if it is a drag instead, perhaps the whole train in the wrong direction goes, not so?
Mitchell Porter 04.18.25 at 8:30 am
I do not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump administration is about. Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side. Some fans of Trump want to regard him as a herald of systemic change within the USA, comparable to Roosevelt (but undoing much of what Roosevelt did), but I don’t know if what he’s doing actually runs that deep.
nastywoman 04.18.25 at 9:16 am
@’I do not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump administration is about’.
How about from Ed:
‘Much of the nihilistic destructiveness and rage unleashed by the second Trump administration has been understandably attributed to the intense and wide-ranging grievances of the 47th president. Donald Trump’s unlikely comeback from the failed post-election coup of 2021 was fueled by his determination to settle scores with the many individuals and institutions that had thwarted him as president and pursued him in the courts and in the media as ex-president.
But while it’s no surprise that some of Trump’s closest associates share his thirst for vengeance and desire to gloat over the supine figures of their vanquished enemies, there’s something deeply personal about the entire MAGA drive to destabilize the country that cannot really be explained by vicarious enjoyment of Trump’s comeuppance of his detractors. The targets of his veritable explosion of executive actions are much broader than any identifiable group of Democratic or Establishment Republican activists, or anyone complicit in the alleged “stolen election” of 2020 or the alleged legal persecutions of 2023 and 2024. And there’s a growing suspicion that an entire class of Americans is being targeted for political, cultural, and perhaps economic extinction as part of Trump’s vengeance tour, as Franklin Foer discussed in The Atlantic:
The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age.
In other words, there’s a pattern that connects the attacks on funding of university-based research, the shakedowns of white-shoe law firms, the ongoing threats to non-MAGA media, the effort to control corporate HR policies, the crackdown on inconvenient sources of data, and above all, the furious Elon Musk–Russell Vought assault on the federal employees and contractors. Indeed, the characteristic lawlessness of Trump 2.0 and the wild extremist rhetoric accompanying many of its actions is more consistent with a project of class warfare than any merely partisan or ideological agenda.
It’s no secret, of course, that there’s a long and terrible tradition in right-wing authoritarian politics of intense hostility to allegedly self-serving and disloyal “elites” that have to be demolished so that a given nation, race, or culture can thrive. In early 20th-century Europe, financial, academic, professional, and bureaucratic elements — which were thought to be disproportionately Jewish and “cosmopolitan” — were treated as the incorrigible enemy of truly productive capitalists, workers, and peasants alike. Thus they had to be crushed by any available means, legal or extralegal. And as Foer observes, there’s a less lethal but still distinctive U.S. conservative tradition of animosity toward the so-called PMC, often described as creating a government-dependent underclass in an unholy alliance of parasites feeding off the work of productive and patriotic Americans. That sort of thinking has gone viral in Trump 2.0’
Matt 04.18.25 at 9:37 am
Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.
There’s a fact of the matter here, of course. It seems like that’s relevant, even if some people wish it were not.
Fake Dave 04.18.25 at 10:07 am
Call me a naive dreamer, but the midterms are looking to be just awful for the Republicans. Trump was never particularly popular (even a worthless compromise candidate like Biden managed to beat him), but he was always a master of blame-shifting, grievance stoking, and finger pointing. Now that Democrats are obviously and completely out of power and the “deep state” keeps getting pink slips, he’s starting to run out of scapegoats — which was the ultimate fate of most first term “adults in the room”. Despite many (stupid) pundits expecting those people to save us or protect us from Trump, they actually served him in two ways.
First, they legitimized him and made him seem like a “normal” president palatable to naive moderates and liberals wanting to believe this too shall pass and the system would correct itself. (Strategic optimism aside, I was never foolish enough to imagine the Bob Muellers and Merrick Garlands and John Roberts of the the world would save us or that their gutless anodyne anti-charisma constituted some kind of eminence gris respectability.) Then, when the pandemic hit and the economy slumped and it became obvious his one term was a failure with nothing accomplished besides tax cuts for millionaires, the “adults” found a new role as someone to blame for it all. Their half-hearted obstructionism, foolishly hyped by a flailing elite media echo chamber (that had largely gone all-in for Clinton years before the first primary and still seemed to expect vindication any day now) became the smoking gun for an elite deep state plot to thwart Trump at every turn. Trump hadn’t failed, he’d been sabotaged and here were the saps in suits all but bragging about it. Thus January 6th, and “figurehead” Biden and “puppet” Harris and people willing to vote for a second Trump term not in spite of his miserable first term but because of it.
Like many Americans. I now know far more about how that man’s brain works than I ever wanted to and I don’t think he wants to be Hitler (Despite apparently admiring him). He wants people to like him and praise him and tell him how important he is and is willing to tank the global economy to get attention and feel like a big shot, but triumph of the will isn’t in him. As soon as the moment passes and he gets too much pushback (or just gets distracted), he’s onto the next stupid bullshit that will “reset” his image and create a veneer of dynamism that masks the most consistent theme in his life which is snatching failure from the jaws of success. Lots of terrible rich people are apparently like this and if the socioeconomic calculus wasn’t utterly different for them, we’d have more of them actually going broke instead of just stiffing their creditors and getting away with it. (incidentally, “privileged plutocratic parasite” also seems to be the role Trump envisions the US playing in the world economy).
Trump unleashed is a terrifying prospect for the world and even most Americans don’t want it, but to his acolytes, it’s the holy grail, the panacea, and the Second Coming all in one. Their hopes are set so high that actually getting what they think they want and not liking it never crossed their mind. Most of them will still be crowing about the beautiful cruelty of this moment come the midterms, but I do expect the shadow of doubt to cross some minds (just as it briefly did after January 6th before the revisionist version won out). That alone might be enough to dampen the ardor of some MAGA faithful, but so will the fact that Dear Leader won’t actually be on the ballot. It will be interesting to see what happens to a Congress and dozens of statehouses currently stocked with some of the stupidest, slimiest, smarmiest, and most downright punchable little shits ever to win a Republican primary. I’m expecting a shellacking.
Given the extent of gerrymandering and voter suppression in red states, one loss won’t — can’t — break them, but the margins in both chambers and many of the “purple” statehouses are razor thin and that’s after their big comeback with nothing more likely than regression to the mean. Will that stop Trump from being the worst? Probably not, but without both chambers and most of the states, a “quiet” dictatorship becomes impossible, and Trump (who, despite his reality show persona, actually hates confrontation) might even be relieved to once again have some dirty cheating obstructionists to blame for his ongoing failure to deliver all the various contradictory impossible things he’s promised.
But wait, you say, what if he mounts a self-coup before that? Obviously some of you are expecting this, but there’s something of a paradox with Trump’s personality you perhaps haven’t considered. He is impulsive, but not decisive. He likes grandiose visions and bold moves, but he is not personally brave. He will back down to protect his “brand” (while insisting he isn’t.) If he’s surrounded by yes men and enablers and getting drowned in accolades though, he doesn’t have to worry about that, so that makes him dangerous, right? Well maybe, but it also means he already has what he wants. It’s all about looking and feeling like a bigshot, right? He gets to flex in the White House and alternately humiliate and hobknob with various world leaders and, best of all, he is constantly in the news. CONSTANTLY. Even the richest man on Earth is sucking up to him. He’s in heaven.
The actual act of governance means nothing to him. Some of the people around him are straight-up fascists who scare the bejesus out of me (especially Patel and Hegseth) and they might want to make a move, but the group chat confirmed the impression that the top of this administration lacks any real leaders (except maybe Stephen Miller, a man so stupid and careless he never noticed he included an Atlantic reporter in a group chat with fewer than twenty members). I suspect Trump will disappoint them as the rush of fulfilling four years of stupid, evil campaign promises wears off and he settles into the complacent torpor punctuated by pointless media stunts that characterized most of his first term.
If I’m wrong, feel free to chide me on the way to the Gulag.
J-D 04.18.25 at 12:04 pm
Sure they will, but those things they tell you will be lies! If you go back to the comments on the earlier post John Quiggin has linked, that’s exactly what you will find: responses from a conservative commenter full of stories which aren’t true.
It’s common enough to find two parties or two people or two whatever each saying bad things about the other, but that’s not a valid excuse for indulging in false equivalences. To quote Daria Morgendorffer, the truth and a lie are not ‘sort of the same thing’. Do you actually think there are actual examples of authoritarianism and lawlessness from the other side? If not, how is it relevant to mention that Republicans think there are?
AnthonyB 04.18.25 at 12:24 pm
April 20th would be the perfect date for his Ermächtigungsgesetz.
bekabot 04.18.25 at 2:14 pm
“I do not find this very helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump administration is about.””
Okay then, what would be helpful as a means of understanding what the Trump
regimeadministration is about? I’d really like to know.“Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.”
Have Democrats ever done anything like this? Have the Democrats ever crashed the stock market within a few weeks? Have the Democrats ever made inroads toward crashing the bond market within the same few weeks? Have the Democrats threatened loyal allies with boots-on-the-ground war unless they cede their territories to us? Have the Democrats made a positive point of buddying up with oligarchs and dictators worldwide? Have the Democrats physically trashed the Capitol building? Have the Democrats invited allies over for talks and then gone out of their way to humiliate and diminish them on camera? Have the Democrats ever done this while verbally demanding gratitude? Have the Democrats ever snatched people off the streets in broad daylight, sometimes literally smashing car windows and dragging them out of their cars, then sent them to foreign prisons, dumped them off, shrugged, and left them there? Have the Democrats invited global jailers over for talks and then told them to build more prisons because they were about to be in receipt of more deliveries? Have the Democrats discussed the rendition of ‘home-growns’ (in other words, of citizens) with these same global jailers? Have the Democrats turned the cybernetic infrastructure of the United States over to persons with known fascist sympathies who were born and raised in countries which haven’t always been perfectly friendly to this one? Do Democrats, after having stolen sensitive American paperwork, store it for years in a powder room at a resort? This is only a partial list.
So yes, please tell me, what would aid me in my quest to grok the fullness of the Trump administration? What am I missing? I seem to be having a lot of trouble figuring it out on my own.
LFC 04.18.25 at 3:05 pm
Matt @15
Point taken.
Michael Cain 04.18.25 at 3:44 pm
I am finding that far too much of what the top levels of the executive branch and the SCOTUS are doing makes sense if you assume the goal is the Empire of North America, under Donald the First.
Eric F 04.18.25 at 4:21 pm
@bekabot: Democrats seceded from the Union and started a civil war. In 1861.
bekabot 04.18.25 at 5:32 pm
@ Eric F
Confederates seceded from the Union and started a Civil War in 1861. Try again.
PatinIowa 04.18.25 at 5:35 pm
Sure, I’ll pile on: “Talk to Republicans, and I’m sure they’ll give you plenty of examples of what they say is authoritarianism and lawlessness, from the other side.”
Attempting to prevent us from boiling ourselves to death on a global scale.
Attempting to force integration on the noble descendants of the Lost Cause.
Attempting to provide a minimal social safety net for the ill, the old, and the damaged.
Giving women the vote.
(In Iowa) Allowing married women to get a bank account without the written consent of their husbands.
Forcing institutions of government to take steps to “prove” they do not discriminate particular races and ethnicities. (And other identities.)
Preventing narrow Christian sects from proselytizing children in public schools.
Employing public monies and energy to support scientific research.
Public education.
Attempting to prevent violence, especially sexual violence, against women and human beings whose appearance and sexual behaviors are not “main stream.”
Attempting to give workers a fair opportunity to organize and bargain with corporations without fear of physical violence, workplace retribution, and bad-faith negotiations.
Progressive taxation.
Trade policies that aim to maximize the wellbeing of labor.
Preventing corporations from dumping their garbage in the water. (I live in Iowa. It’s literally pig shit here. Louisiana has different issues.)
Now I and many others would say, “the other side” hasn’t done these things nearly effectively enough, especially now that the Democratic Party has gone all in on free trade. (I’m peeved because my stocks are down. I’m pretty sure there are people who were much more damaged and just as peeved when RCA closed its last plant in Indiana and moved it to Mexico after NAFTA.)
I’m pretty sure none of the Republicans I’ll talk to will be that upset by the murder of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton by good union members of the Democratic Party.
wkw 04.18.25 at 6:11 pm
David Brooks, of all people, is calling for an uprising. Yet CT commenters are stroking their chins going “yes, well, Republicans think bad things about liberals so everything is even stevens”?
Thanks for trying JQ. I think the energy needs to go back to figuring out dispensation. 90 days can be used constructively.
William Berry 04.18.25 at 7:32 pm
@26 (Eric F): Democrats seceded from the Union and started a civil war.
That’s pathetic.
If you’re going to comment here, you’ll probably need to try (a lot) harder.
Adam Swift 04.18.25 at 7:32 pm
What is known about how the US army would be likely to act in various scenarios? Trump is Commander in Chief but presumbly there is a deep-seated commitment to upholding the Constitution, no? I asked this of Adam Przeworski on Substack but he said he had no idea. If Trump simply refuses to accept the results of the mid-term elections, what happens then?
AnthonyB 04.18.25 at 8:58 pm
The Commander in Chief is not ex officio a member of the military. He does command, as the military is under civilian control. Let us hope the military will refuse to obey illegal commands.
Alex SL 04.18.25 at 9:26 pm
Regarding the questions of the midterms and whether Trump simply gets bored at some point, one problem is that once certain red lines have been crossed, an authoritarian has to cling to power out of fear that the other lot will prosecute them. Even if, on recent evidence, the Democrats would probably only conduct an investigation that drags on until Trump has died of old age, the paranoid authoritarian mind projects revenge-seeking onto their opponents. Part of Trump’s motivation to stand for 2024 was clearly to make legal troubles go away, and he succeeded. Anybody who isn’t effectively immune from consequence due to being a billionaire or an ICE officer could potentially face actual legal repercussions, like Paul Manafort or some of the January 6 rioters did before Trump pardoned them.
Given all of the blatantly illegal and corrupt actions taken by the current US government, everybody from Trump down to Musk’s least qualified DOGE intern can be assumed to be sweating at the idea of a Democrat being in charge of federal agencies and police. They will be extremely motivated to make it impossible for that to be the case ever again in their lifetimes. We will see how exactly they attempt to go about it, but unless they are even dimmer than I think, they will try to not let it get to the point where whether or not to accept an adverse election outcome becomes the issue. The shenanigans that US voters have long tolerated as completely normal will likely be ramped up: closing voting stations in Dem-leaning areas so that voters have to queue for hours until they give up, randomly purging voter lists, requiring forms of ID that Dem-leaning voters are unlikely to have, making early voting difficult while having elections on a working day, and, of course, gerrymandering.
In addition, it seems likely to me that they might look into arresting at least some Democratic candidates. As one of them said recently (forgot his name, sorry), if all those sent to El Salvador are terrorists, then anybody who speaks out against sending them to El Salvador is aiding and abetting terrorists, and there is your legal justification for criminalising the opposition. What is more, and without making any claim here that both sides are equally bad (they really aren’t), many politicians are at least slightly corrupt. It should be trivial to find something in the realm of “sure it is technically illegal, but everybody is doing it, and it is so minor that it isn’t in the public interest to prosecute” and prosecute only Democrats for it.
And thus my prognosis remains: there will continue to be elections, but the MAGAs will be highly motivated to make it impossible for Democrats to win. Especially once they have committed so many crimes in office that that becomes a question of self-preservation.
somebody who remembers the elimination of the "woke generals" 04.18.25 at 9:55 pm
the armed forces are now firmly in trump’s corner, after he purged the military and pentagon of the “woke dei” leadership. when the order comes to drone strike ocasio-cortez’s apartment building it will be followed without hesitation and without remorse. it’s over. eric f’s vision of democrats as the ultimate and permanent enemy of america will be taught in every school as the only history permissible. books that say anything to the contrary will be burned. no exceptions.
Guy from Europe 04.18.25 at 11:23 pm
I took that statement to be ironic.
GeoX 04.19.25 at 12:40 am
Um, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this:
Democrats seceded from the Union and started a civil war. In 1861.
…is meant to DEMONSTRATE how Republicans have nothing. If the “In 1861” sentence isn’t meant to emphasize how ancient and irrelevant this example is, I don’t know what it’s doing.
John Q 04.19.25 at 3:17 am
wkw @29 You’re right, but I thought I should use what minuscule influence I have for one last warning. Assuming things go badly as expected, I will forswear comment on US domestic politices, and stick to dispensatio