Are we on the road to repression? Or ruin?
Time to start taking seriously the other possibility for where Trumpism leads
Donald Trump has every intention of building a lasting, competitive authoritarian regime. He and the people around him want to tilt the playing field of politics so dramatically that they can’t realistically be removed from office. Democracy is a system where, eventually, people in power lose elections. Trump’s statements indicate he wants to get rid of that last bit.
Over the past two months, every American has seen the horrifying truth: he could absolutely succeed.
When pushed, our system’s guardrails — the rule of law, Congress, the courts, the media — have, to various degrees, crumbled rather than held. Turns out they’re not made of granite or marble after all. More like a soft sandstone. Or maybe, more correctly, institutions aren’t made of anything at all. They’re just people. People feel afraid, people fail.
Still, “could succeed” is not the same thing as “will succeed.” There’s always been an at-least-equal probability our democracy ends up strong enough to limp through the next four years, battered but intact.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s also a third scenario, one where our democratic system does not survive intact but is not replaced by a stable, autocratic alternative. One where Trump and the people around him fail to consolidate power in a Viktor Orbán-like regime, but they are also — by the end — not constrained at all by the Constitution or the law.
If that happens, the end result isn’t necessarily repression: It’s ruin.
How far along is the authoritarian project?
In case you missed it, Amanda Carpenter’s status update on the entrenchment agenda is a must-read: How much damage has been done so far?
Her takeaways:
Trump has swiftly advanced his authoritarian playbook to entrench power, but the degree of implementation varies across different elements. As it stands today, Trump’s maximalist and unprecedented deployment of the pardon power remains a major vector of abuse and corruption. So, too, does his approach of ignoring the laws of Congress that establish federal agencies and fund the government. And, the administration's relentless scapegoating of vulnerable communities and aims to clamp down on speech, whether that’s in the form of DEI bans or investigations into critical press coverage, is grave.
On a more hopeful note, there are early signs that the federal courts may rein in Trump’s authoritarian takeovers of government programs in some meaningful ways. Similarly, the alarming steps members of the Trump Administration have taken to make government services and funding (as well as employment) contingent on fidelity to Trump is generating a healthy degree of outcry that, if channeled properly, could translate into widespread political opposition that may guard against authoritarian excesses.
Other aspects of the playbook are still in the early days of implementation, particularly regarding the administration’s potential organization of large-scale operations through the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, whether that comes to immigration enforcement or cracking down on future political protests.
There is absolutely no parallel for the way Trump and Musk have crashed through the federal government. We are all trying to get our head around the damage. And in the wreckage, all of the pieces necessary for consolidation — for autocratic entrenchment — are likely there on the table.
The thing is: Shattering a democratic system of government is a lot easier than building an authoritarian one in its place. That’s why, even though they’re doing all the things we feared and warned they would (and with relatively little resistance to boot), I’m not actually certain they’ve made that much progress towards building a lasting autocracy.
Trade wars, government shutdowns, and the cost of chaos
Before the last two weeks, you could draw a pretty clear line between most of what Trump was doing and what it would look like if authoritarianism took over in the United States.
These days? Less clear.
First, there’s the global trade war. This is real, folks. While every day brings new whiplash in one tariff policy or another, the White House does seem genuinely committed to erecting trade barriers against friend and foe alike with little regard for the risk to the economy.
You don’t need to be a political scientist to know that raising prices on every household by as much as $2,000 isn’t going to help the White House consolidate political power. And yet they seem intent on doing just that.
And what happens if the government shuts down entirely? If the debt ceiling gets breached? As Brookings’ Molly Reynolds pointed out, there’s a jarring dissonance between Congress’ attempts to pass appropriations bills and the growing insistence from the White House that those appropriations are simply guidelines.
I won’t make predictions on whether the government shuts down at midnight tonight (it looks unlikely at this juncture, given Senate Democrats’ decisionmaking). But either way, the White House’s attempt to rip control over spending away from Congress makes shutdowns (or even default) much more likely to happen at some point. By enacting broad, lawless cuts outside the normal budget process — asking Congress to continue funding appropriations without any guarantee the White House will respect them — Trump and Musk are jeopardizing the entire financial foundation of the federal government.
Read more: Russ Vought’s Article I takeover
Put differently, Trump is using the threat of economic catastrophe to try to force both congressional Republicans and Democrats to surrender their control over the spending power. So far, Congress is surrendering. But what if, at some point in the next four years, it stops doing so?
Trump wants Congress to give him a blank check on spending. It’s either that or refuse to write a check at all. By definition, that makes a “no check” vote more likely to happen eventually.
Things are going to break
Chaos and disruption go hand-in-hand with the authoritarian project. But they’re not always synonymous. In fact, things like tariffs and service cuts and government shutdowns are probably harmful to Trump’s grasp on power. If the economy crashes and government programs that people rely on (or just enjoy, like national parks) stop functioning, voters will notice.
And look around. You’ll see ever more moves just to hobble government, not to replace it with an autocratic alternative.
The Trump Administration fired hundreds of forecasters at NOAA and the National Weather Service with potential calamitous impacts on things like weather forecasts and home insurance markets. Cuts at the FDA are already leading to potential delays in drug development. Mass layoffs and chaos are crippling the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which protects against things like cyberattacks and ransomware. Tuberculosis, the deadliest infectious disease in the world, is surging because of the attempted USAID cuts (that wave of illness is certain to echo back to the United States). DOGE is preparing to attempt to fire 40% of the staff at the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates dams and water infrastructure across the west (I live directly downstream from one of these dams. Maybe you do too, might be worth checking).
Things are going to break.
How to respond to the threat of ruin?
For some, this might sound reassuring — that Trump is already self-sabotaging by crashing the economy and maybe other things. But for the pro-democracy opposition, a future of ruin makes an already daunting task even greater.
Those of us who believe in liberal democracy need to think beyond just how to resist repression and state coercion. We also need to be working towards how to win, politically, in the almost-inevitable chaos to come. And then, how do we rebuild a coherent new institutional order out of the wreckage?
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a provocative piece last week on a related thesis: Toward a theory of civic sede vacantism (gift link).
As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, the courts — even in their current degraded state — play a key, important role. But they’re just a tool in a larger contest that is fundamentally about public opinion. There are good odds the final decisions in the courts will themselves be corrupt and unconstitutional, at least in part. So it’s not that courts don’t matter. They do. A lot. But we shouldn’t be thinking we’re going to wait on what any court decides. That’s only a half step from waiting to hear what Donald Trump decides. I keep hearing right minded or semi-right minded people say, well we’re going to see if this stuff is constitutional. I reject the assumption. At the margins there are questions about what’s constitutional. We’re way past the margins. The fact that we’re operating way outside the express text and logic of the Constitution, and no president in history has thought any of this stuff was possible, is plenty to answer the question. We’re waiting to see if the courts will follow the Constitution. And there’s a good chance they won’t.
I’ve said this a number of times. We’re embarked on a vast battle over the future of the American Republic, in which the executive and much of the judiciary is acting outside the constitutional order. That battle is fundamentally over public opinion. We’re in a constitutional interregnum and we are trying to restore constitutional government. The courts are a tool. Federalism is a big, big tool, the significance and importance of which is getting too little discussion. But it’s really about public opinion. And that means it’s about politics. The American people will decide this. That’s what this is all about. Waiting on the courts is just a basic misunderstanding of the whole situation.
I don’t pretend to know what that winning political strategy looks like (other than “probably not this”), but here’s a few thoughts on how to proceed:
More is more. One of the benefits of being “the opposition” is that (outside of specific settings, like Congress) not all opposition strategies have to be the same. Slowing the authoritarian movement and building power in opposition can happen through a bunch of different (lawful) tactics. As long as we’re not actually crosswise with each other, let’s spend more time trying more strategies and pushing the envelope.
Embrace healthy competition. Similarly, it’s clear that we need innovation and new energy, both in responding to the White House and in building future political movements and agendas. Some degree of competition — between tactics, leaders, visions, and platforms — can help the best strategies and leaders rise to the top more quickly.
Find the human touch. Back to the whole “institutions are just people” thing — that’s a critical lesson in ways both negative and positive. The opposition needs to get better and more comfortable with both humanizing the harm of authoritarianism and presenting political alternatives in unscripted, emotionally resonant, human terms.
Build momentum, strength, and movement consolidation over time. This struggle will extend beyond the next two (or even four) years, but the midterm and presidential elections will be the key inflection points. Let’s keep those timelines in mind. Over that period, the pro-democracy opposition needs to (1) slow the erosion of democracy to the greatest extent possible and ensure that Trumpism can still be removed through free and fair elections; (2) assemble a coherent opposition coalition with identifiable leaders and structures for decisionmaking; and (3) build a political movement that can not just win Congress and the White House, but embark on a sweeping reconstruction program responsive to the likely ruin.
Those things need to happen in roughly that order. And they all need to happen.
The cracks are showing
This was a terrible week for Elon Musk. Numerous lawsuits against him and DOGE are progressing quickly, with one judge forcing them to turn over extensive records about their activities. (Details that, according to a New York Times investigation, the group is frantically trying to cover up in an effort to hide mistakes). Another SpaceX test flight blew up. And, most importantly, the so-called “Tesla Takedown” protests are clearly hitting their intended mark.
How does one know the protests are working?
Because the company’s stock is tanking. “We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” wrote JP Morgan analysts.
As a result, as Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic: Elon Musk looks desperate.
[Y]ou ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event — during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism — was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply — almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak — on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.
Purely anecdotal, but my father was a longtime Tesla superfan. He told me this week that he can’t be seen driving his anymore — he’s selling, whatever the price. And he’s not the only one. Where I live there are just over 2,000 almost 2,200 almost 2,400 Craigslist posts of used Teslas for sale (compare that to 50 listings for Chevy Bolts). The value of some models has apparently collapsed by over $20,000.
Maybe it wasn’t so smart to try to finance an autocratic project with the sales of EVs distinctly popular among people opposed to the autocrat.
What else we’re tracking:
As of writing, Mahmoud Khalil remains detained. As Rachel Goodman and Shalini Goel Agarwal explain, Trump’s attempt to deport him is part of a much broader, even unprecedented, assault on the First Amendment.
The top lawyer at the IRS was removed, per the Washington Post, just as DOGE seeks access to taxpayer records. Reminder: in his first term, Donald Trump demanded that the IRS audit his political enemies.
I recommend this piece by University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan: Trump and Musk are building a new spoils system.
Speaking of corruption, the DOJ is considering cutting most of the lawyers in the unit responsible for investigating and prosecuting public corruption cases.
Meanwhile, according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s family is in talks with crypto exchange Binance about taking on a stake in its US arm — just as its founder and largest shareholder, Changpeng Zhao, pushes for a presidential pardon on money laundering charges. For a primer on pardon abuses, see: Checking the pardon power.
A federal judge ordered thousands of federal employees fired in the “probationary purge” be rehired. (Last week, Erica Newland, Jules Torti, and Ellinor Heywood highlighted this and other key federal civil service lawsuits in Dear Civil Servant.)
Two recent pieces worth reading on electoral systems. One, Willie Webb on Black substantive representation under “winner-take-all”; and two, Steven Hill on how to democratize New York City.
Are you a reporter? Listen to this masterclass on how to ask simple questions of the Trump Administration by NPR’s Michel Martin.
What you can do to help:
A heads up from Anna Dorman:
Members of Congress are on recess next week, which means most of them will be back home in their districts — a great opportunity to make your voice heard! Check your representatives' website or give their office a call for information on events they are holding.
Find yours here.
Scary but clearly explained and honest. Thank you for this
It's time to take to the streets, folks! There are demonstrations tomorrow (sat, 3.15) in every state capital and DC. Search 50501 and your capital's name for details.