Gaming Out the Descent Into Autocracy, Part 2

A sobering look at the choices available to Trump.

Portland, August 9th, 2020

Last time, we discussed a key question that has mostly gone ignored since the U.S. election. How far can a leader like Donald Trump, who is explicit about his authoritarian aims, actually go in realizing them? 

In How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a template for answering this question. To achieve an authoritarian breakthrough, they show, an aspiring autocrat must fulfill three imperatives.

The first is to “capture the referees,” or the state bodies empowered to “investigate and punish wrongdoing by both public officials and private citizens." These consist of the courts, law-enforcement, intelligence organs, and any agencies responsible for taxation and regulation. The second is to sideline—through bribery, coercion, or other means—any actor capable of opposing the ruler. Potential sources of resistance include the media, civil society, business leaders, opposition parties, and dissenters in the ruling party. The third task is to rewrite the rules to the leader’s advantage.

Whether Trump and his clown car of buffoons will accomplish all this is an open question. But we can hardly rely on their incompetence to save us. As such, it is worth asking whether a would-be autocrat like Trump could establish authoritarian rule in the U.S. We must also examine how he might accomplish that goal, given the constraints and opportunities he would face. What obstacles stand in his way and what are the weak points he can exploit?

For small-d democrats, including the Democratic Party, the old playbook of campaigning and vote-getting will not be a feasible option if free and fair elections become a thing of the past. Heading off the coming lurch toward authoritarianism may require a different set of tactics entirely. To figure out what these are, we must identify the avenues of resistance that will likely remain available as well as the ones that Trump can render obsolete.

At first glance, the outlook appears grim. But it is not preordained. To see why, let us take a closer look at the three authoritarian imperatives outlined by Levitsky and Ziblatt.

Capturing the Referees

During most of his first term, Trump deferred to institutionalists when it came to staffing his administration. This was a key mistake that proved fatal to his authoritarian ambitions. Contrary to his expectations, officials such as deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein took their oaths of office seriously. They ended up thwarting the president from turning the Department of Justice (DOJ) into his personal bludgeon.

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These moves, if handled skillfully (a big “if”), can transform the federal government into an instrument of Trump’s will.

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This time around, Trump and his allies are determined to avoid that scenario. “The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” declared John McEntee, who, when not making teenage girls uncomfortable in online chats, assists Trump on personnel matters. “What we’re trying to do,” adds Russell T. Vought, who will get a top personnel role in the White House, “is identify the pockets of independence [in the executive branch] and seize them.”

Unfortunately, there is no law that would prevent them from achieving this. Trump can stack the top ranks of the DOJ with committed loyalists, circumventing any Senate resistance through recess appointments and the Vacancies Act (which allows him to choose among current officials for temporary-acting posts). Once in place, these appointees can scrap existing rules which limit political interference in federal investigations. Trump, meanwhile, can sign an executive order allowing him to fire nonpartisan lawyers and FBI agents at will and replace them with ideological lickspittles.

Trump also plans to resurrect Schedule F, an executive order he signed near the end of his first term that would reclassify independent civil servants as political appointees. “I expect 50,000 will be the minimum number of career officials to be reclassified,” predicts Don Moynihan, a political scientist and expert in public administration. “We currently have 4,000 appointees,” he adds, “so, yes, this is an enormous change.”

These moves, if handled skillfully (a big “if”), can transform the federal government into an instrument of Trump’s will. The only question is whether he can lure away enough incels from their Roblox mass-shooting reenactment rooms to fill the tens of thousands of newly vacant posts.

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With an army of loyalists at the ready, any seat of resistance faces the prospect of intimidation and reprisals. Trump plainly intends to dish out such treatment, and there is not much that can stop him from doing so, at least at the federal level.

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As for the federal judiciary, it is all but captured already. Thanks to his previous appointments, Trump now has a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. Four of the twelve federal appellate circuits are solidly Republican with additional ones to follow as he places more likeminded nutjobs to the bench. With the Senate’s cooperation, he can pack existing courts with additional justices or even add brand new circuits. If all else fails, he can rein in errant judges with intimidation and death threats. (If you believe he is above such tactics, the burden is on you to make the case, considering his record.)

Sidelining Key Players

Having captured the referees, Trump will be free to turn them on his opponents.

For starters, he has made no bones about unleashing military force against protesters. His violent crackdowns in Portland in 2020 offered a prelude, and it is foolish to doubt he will try again. He has also threatened to prosecute his enemies, which is a viable prospect so long as he brings the DOJ to heel.

Mass-deportations are also on the agenda. According to Stephen Miller, the incoming White House deputy chief of staff, the administration will construct “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers”—concentration camps, in other words—as temporary waypoints to facilitate large-scale expulsions. The idea, confirms Homan, who will help direct the program, is “to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

With key federal agencies under his thumb, Trump can make these plans a reality—and on a far grander scale than in his first term in office. Any person, organization, or institution that stands in his way faces potential retribution.

The likely targets are listed in Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second term which some of his cabinet nominees had a role in crafting. Local election officials who refuse to “find the votes,” district attorneys who decline to criminalize homelessness, and business owners guilty of hiring minorities are, according to the authors, fair game for criminal prosecution. Any public school that refrains from teaching students that white people are special, moreover, may find itself on the wrong end of a federal suit.

If Trump’s own words are any guide, there will be criminal investigations of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Liz Cheney, and others. Such probes might not result in prosecutions, much less convictions. But “the process is the punishment,” as the saying goes.

If the federal government cannot provide the requisite muscle, Trump plans to deputize state and local law enforcement. Whether the job is to manhandle protesters or round up immigrants, there will be plenty of degenerate cretins on hand to assist him. Among them are neo-Nazis and white supremacists from groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, whom Trump can also deputize.

One of the tasks assigned to them would be to tame any holdouts in the federal branches. Judges who refuse to retire, for instance, might receive visits from the police or rightwing thugs. The same applies to wayward legislators and independent-minded bureaucrats.

Take it from Vaught, the Project 2025 author who is slated for a cabinet post:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

With an army of loyalists at the ready, any seat of resistance faces the prospect of intimidation and reprisals. Trump plainly intends to dish out such treatment, and there is not much that can stop him from doing so, at least at the federal level.

Rewriting the Rules

Once he captures the referees and sidelines the key players, Trump can change the rules to entrench his power. The imperatives are twofold. The first is to eliminate any mechanisms of accountability. The second is to cripple democratic procedures and rights to the point of irrelevance.

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The lengths to which an American autocrat could go would shock the sensibilities of most people.

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The Supreme Court has already done much of the job for him. Over the past decade, the Roberts majority has gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the pivotal law responsible for making the hollow promise of multiracial democracy a living reality. In the process, the rightwing justices have effectively voided the Fifteenth Amendment, which bars electoral discrimination on account of race.

But that was only the start. Last summer, in what is perhaps the most shameful Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott, Roberts and his collaborators wrote the rule of law out of the Constitution.

In Trump v. United States, they discovered that the president is, in fact, an elected king, thereby eviscerating centuries of precedent. Presidents, the majority ruled, are immune from prosecution for all “official acts.” Which acts, in particular, qualify as “official” is a matter they deemed too trivial to consider, leading many experts to conclude that it means any crime committed by a Republican president.

Dissenting justice Sonia Sotomayor did not mince words about the implications. The decision, she wrote, “reshapes the institution of the Presidency” and “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

Thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump will take office with all the latitude afforded a dictator, at least from a legal standpoint. From there, he will try to further rig the democratic process—not just elections per se but the rules around campaign finance, political organizing, media freedom, and civil society. A pliant Supreme Court will likely help him to this effect. So will control of both houses of Congress, if he can keep them in line.

How Authoritarian Will It Get?

To be sure, the United States is not about to become a totalitarian hellscape à la Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR. Authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War era have tended to be less ambitious in their efforts to eliminate societal autonomy and independent thought. Still, the lengths to which an American autocrat could go would shock the sensibilities of most people.

Next time, we will examine the possible end-points of Trump’s plans over the short- and medium-terms. We will also consider what, if anything, democratic-minded Americans can do to stop him.

Other entries in this series:

Gaming Out the Descent Into Autocracy, Part 1

Trump Can Be Stopped