On the USA’s authoritarian transition
Good morning from Washington, where we are alone again in a winter of our discontent, “made inglorious bummer by this son of Queens,” as I observed on December 6, 2020, a month before Trump’s apparently final act on the world stage enshrined him in ignominy.
We are now all made to watch in a new play, full of sound and fury, made for television in scripted performances that surprise, excite, or incite.
I am walking & cycling more, working out all of the different emotions I’m feeling after 2025’s first chapter in American history.
Grief, rage, fear, uncertainty, & doubt burden hearts, minds, & spirits across our union. Remembering our history reminded me of what we have overcome. We the people now have a long road ahead.
Once than four years later, Trump is once again in power and commanding our attention with a flood of official statements, orders, and extraordinary acts designed to outrage, overwhelm, exhaust, and demoralize the people he putatively serves and remake the government of the people that’s been built over the past two and a half centuries.
It’s a lot, all at once.
Yesterday, Trump surprised the world with a proposal at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Israel, proposing that the United States of America would “take over the Gaza Strip,” move the 1.8 million Palestineans who live in the devastated territory to neighboring nations, and demolish and redevelop the region as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
As Amanda Taub reports, forcibly displacing the Palestinian people after a year of bombing would “unquestionably be a severe violation of international law” and a war crime.
Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity. The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime
In theory, Congress will not allow the President of the United States to carry out a war crime, as opposed to supplying weapons and military aid to a government who is doing so. In practice, we don’t know. It’s grim.
Americans and people around the world are watching and waiting to see how all of our elected leaders respond to an imperial presidency in the courts, legislatures, streets, and civic spaces online and offline where power and politics are now shared contested.
Later today, there will be more news conferences and a protest in Washington, as Trump’s authoritarian actions are finally activating the immune systems of democracy after the shock of his re-election traumatized hearts and minds across our body politic.
For two weeks now, Trump and his second administration and Elon Musk have set about remaking our government by the people by testing the limits of our laws and Constitution with “blatantly unconstitutional“ acts and illegal impoundment of funds. So much is happening at once, by design.
Instead of using control of both houses of Congress, the White House, and a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court to repeal laws and dissolve agencies, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
They are removing websites and public records on them from the Internet and social media, dimming the lamps of knowledge that generations of stewards have created, turned on, and maintained for their fellow Americans.
That censorship of public knowledge is damaging core civic infrastructure of our republic, seeking to enforce a great forgetting. I’ll have more to say and share about what people are doing preserve data, soon, but much depends upon defending our ability to know what’s happening in our government and society, from public health to public safety.
Trump and Musk are attempting to dismantle by executive fiat the living institutions Congress created, impounding funds and freezing grants and payments in violation of the laws Congress enacted.
There is no precedent in U.S. history for an unelected oligarch holding this level of power and direct influence over agencies that regulate his businesses. Musk has not divested from his conflicts of interest, which are insoluble.
This White House has not disclosed any ethics waiver, nor any other /disclosures on the barebones Wordpress blog over at WhiteHouse.gov. YouTube has the archive of official actions, but that isn’t linked.
An administration once again is gaslighting us about being transparent while appointees gags agencies and civil servants and ignores press inquiries and FOIA requests.
As Sam Stein reported, Trump’s government has been built on secrecy: “White House operations have so far defined not by the spotlight they’ve commanded but by the secrecy they’ve imposed. The sheer scope and lack of transparency around the current transition is unprecedented.”
Musk meanwhile is describing publicly reporting the identity of the men he hired at DOGE as a crime and seeking to involve the Justice Department in an explicit attempt to chill journalism.
His actions at the direction of President Trump are being described as an administrative coup or bureaucratic coup or digital coup by many astute commentators, but the use of coup implies violence that has so far been missing at the agencies. An “autocratic takeover” that parallels how Musk remade Twitter feels closer to the truth, right down to the compelled data access we are seeing at the Treasury.
While “it's hard to explain the significance of political appointees accessing the Treasury's systems and locking out civil servants, as danah boyd wrote, “regardless of the legal dynamics, turning over access to the core systems at the heart of an administrative state to a wrecking ball is really really bad.”
Trump has behaved as an authoritarian leader from day one, just as he has since 2015. He hasn’t changed, but he has changed American society and our tolerance for authoritarianism.
When a corrupt demagogue shows you who he is and tells you why he’s applying the autocrat’s playbook to undermine the ability of Americans to share public facts and engage in self-governance, believe him.
Post-truth is pre-fascism. It may be later than you think, depending on what your civic information diet has been these past years.
As David Kurtz wrote in Monday, “the lawless events of the past 72 hours accelerated what has since Trump’s second inauguration been the most rapid tear-down of the nation’s constitutional structure that Americans have ever witnessed.“
The free and transparent flow of government information to the public is being strangled, making any such accounting increasingly difficult. Fear and uncertainty contributed to a degraded information environment in which rumors were rampant.”
The ability of the public to tell fact from fiction is already breaking down, as Musk’s chaotic, confusing tweets lead Members of Congress and the news media to believe the IRS’s new Direct File system was taken offline (nope) and that the 18F software shop at GSA had been deleted (not yet) and falsely report the breathless claims of online influencers as fact.
I fear this is all going to get worse, but we must not get numbed to what’s happening.
”In an authoritarian transition, what everyone thinks is normal is the authoritarian transition,” observed historian Timothy Snyder. “Journalists have a responsibility to ask whether they are doing enough to record the strangeness or novelty of what politicians do."
Just so.
Journalists need to respond to the authoritarian playbook differently than business as usual, but so does everyone with a social media account. Autocrats flood the zone with lies, misinformation, & half-truths. Verify before you amplify.
And if you aren’t shifting away from social media messaging to Signal for messaging and calls for anything remotely sensitive, please consider it. The hack of American telecom companies is serious and not resolved.
Stay safe, all, keep paying attention, bearing witness, and calling your representatives in Congress to uphold and defend the Constitution and the rule of law.
