On the 20th of January 2025, Donald Trump came down on Washington, DC, like a hungry wolf on a shepherd’s sleeping flock. Expectation sat in the air.
Shortly after a threat and lie-filled inauguration speech that will one day rival Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’ 1861 Cornerstone Speech for its infamy, he let loose Elon Musk’s dogs of destruction, and the nation as we knew it began disintegrating before our unbelieving eyes.
Since then, we’ve needed a truck full of Mensa members to keep track of what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen.
This has manifested in a litany of cascading executive orders, lawsuits, court rulings, appeals, upset judges, defiant administration officials, shuttered government agencies, tens of thousands of fired federal employees cruelly tossed into the cold, cuts in mental health services for veterans, the end of life-saving HIV medical services in Africa, and outraged long-time NATO allies.
Like Victor Orban in Hungary and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Trump is quickly building an American version of what professors Stephen Levitsky (Harvard) and Lucan Way (University of Toronto) call “Competitive Authoritarianism” from their 2012 book of the same name. It’s not an out-and-out move to dictatorship. Instead, Trump and other would-be autocrats give the illusion of a free society, a free press, and free and fair elections while whittling away the edges of all three, thereby stacking the deck against all who oppose them. It’s how they stay in power as citizens in opposition continue to believe they have an even chance of triumphing in the next election.
Donald Trump is well on his way to being the next fully paid-up competitive autocrat.
His will not be a static or monolithic autocracy. Trump’s all-consuming and visceral hatred for those he considers his enemies, which is everyone who disagrees with him, coupled with the power of the United States at his disposal, will make for a dynamic and fast-moving rush to kingship without the title.
Dominating everything is his intensely narcissistic need for adulation. Already, five bills have been filed in the House of Representatives to satisfy that need and venerate our 47th president, all geared to curry favor:
- South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, the man who yelled, “You lie!” during a Barack Obama State of the Union speech, wants to put Trump’s face on a new $250 bill in part to “bring attention to the 250th anniversary of the United States;”
- Not to be outdone, Texas Representative Brandon Gill’s bill would put Trump’s face on a $100 bill, replacing that of some 18th-century non-entity named Benjamin Franklin;
- New York Representative Claudia Tenney’s bill would make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday. Currently, only two people have federal holidays named for them: George Washington¹ and Martin Luther King, Jr.;
- John Foster Dulles was a Republican who served as secretary of state during the Eisenhower Administration of the 1950s. Dulles Airport is named for him. But North Carolina Representative Addison McDowell’s bill would rename the airport after Trump and kick the name of Dulles to history’s dustbin. In co-sponsoring McDowell’s bill, his colleague, Pennsylvania Representative Guy Reschenthale, said, “President Donald J. Trump, the greatest president of my lifetime, was just sworn into office for a second term after a historic landslide victory². This legislation will cement his status in our nation’s capital as our fearless commander-in-chief, extraordinary leader, and relentless champion for the American people.” Reschenthale said that with a straight face. It’s the kind of language the Catholic Church uses when nominating martyrs for sainthood.
- Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna, in equally enraptured and giddy prose, proposed legislation last week that would see Trump enshrined on Mount Rushmore. If that happens, and if they could, the four Presidents already there would break apart and dive into the abyss below.
Notwithstanding the euphoria of his congressional subjects, two common imperatives running through the early days of Trump’s second term appear to be ridding the country of people who don’t look like him and advancing the wealth of the already wealthy among us. However, those two imperatives are neither rational in themselves nor applied coherently by anyone in the Administration’s orbit, especially our modern-day, softened-up version of the Brownshirts — DOGE, with Elon Musk enthusiastically playing the role of Ernst Röhm. In one area after another, the contradictions and inner irrationalities of the Trump regime are emerging as planned chaos, all seeming to bounce around each other like beebees in a boxcar and all following the script of Project 2025. You remember the American Heritage Foundation’s 923-page magnum opus, don’t you? The coffee table paperweight Trump said he knew nothing about during the presidential campaign?
In a competitive autocracy, the possibilities of opposition, resistance, dissent, and non-conformity exist for all to see. In fact, they are trumpeted. However, in what threatens America right now, the roots of all four are being poisoned, and Trump’s MAGAverse has claimed the total allegiance of more than a third of the country.
That may be enough. The Nazis’s highest percentage of votes in any election was 43.9% in March 1933, two months after Hitler was named Chancellor. After that, elections were things of the past, and it only took Hitler 53 days to destroy the threadbare democracy of the Weimar Republic.
As of this writing, we are 63 days into Donald Trump’s second term. There are 1,324 days left in it. Think of the colossal harm he can still do.
Of course, those who support him are thinking of all the good he can do for them. They are in for some rude surprises.
Regardless, how successful will our judiciary be in ordering Trump to obey the Constitution? Will the Democrats ever unite around a meaningful and persuasive message of opposition that actually resonates with the American people? Will MAGA’s reach exceed its grasp and cause the movement to implode upon itself? Will our military refuse to obey illegal orders from the Commander in Chief? Will the knee-bending, ring-kissing Republicans in the House ever metamorphose into a co-equal branch of government? Will democracy, as we have known it for 237 years, survive?
It will take a monumental, cohesive, and coordinated effort of the collective American will to reverse our present course.
It may already be too late.
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¹ Known in most of the country as Presidents’ Day, this holiday is officially George Washington’s Birthday at the federal governmental level and is celebrated on the third Monday of February.
² This is false. With a margin of victory in the popular vote of 1.48%, the 2024 presidential election was the 5th closest since 1916. Of the 21 presidential elections since the end of World War II, Trump’s percentage vote total of 57.99% in the Electoral College ranks 12th highest. The highest percentage victory since then in the Electoral College, an actual landslide, belongs to Ronald Reagan’s 97.58% in 1984.
