The Weakness and Incompetence of American Authoritarianism

And why it needs to be continually highlighted.

Photo by Vic Alcuaz on Unsplash

Earlier this week Henry Farrell produced Henry Farrell-levels of sagacity on the question of Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses and how they can weaken rather than strengthen his illiberal control of the federal government.

Authoritarian rulers devote a lot of time to preventing unrest from breaking out. Their best strategy for survival is to actually be popular. But that is hard to keep up. Acceptable substitutes include preventing people from discovering how unpopular the regime is, controlling media (to prevent coordination), and deploying the threat of physical violence to intimidate.

The problem with all of these strategies is that the ruler can do none of it on their own. Even the threat of violence, when looked at closely, requires some degree of willing coordination among the soldiers and policemen. That is why dictators are so careful about how they treat their armed forces. Authoritarians need to worry about the masses, but even more about their own coalitions.

More generally: struggles for power are struggles over the means of coordination. Who is capable of coordinating better, wins. And want-to-be authoritarians and mass publics face different coordination problems….

The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make her success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.

Farrell devotes the bulk of his essay to why Trump’s desire for absolute power causes him to alienate critical elements of his coalition, thereby weakening his grip. His arguments are well worth reading, but the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to focus instead on Trump’s uneven efforts to make his authoritarian power-grabs seem like a fait accompli.

It is extremely important for the Trump White House to present his brand of authoritarianism as inexorable and inevitable, precisely for the collective action reasons that Farrell (and I) have articulated this past year. The more that Trump can spin his actions — and the second and third-order effects of those actions — as successful and popular, the more he can deflate his political opposition.

The easiest way to do this is to claim broad popular support for these actions. The trouble for Trump is that none of what he is doing is remotely popular. The latest AP-NORC poll shows this: “Overall, 39% of adults approve of the way Trump is handing his job as president and 60% disapprove. Roughly 60% of the public feels Trump has gone too far in imposing new tariffs on other countries, using presidential power to achieve his goals, and in using the military or federal law enforcement in U.S. cities.” Gallup’s numbers are similar.

A second-best strategy is to highlight when allies or rivals acquiesce to his dictates. This is why the submissive actions taken by Paul Weiss or Columbia University or Paramount or Disney matter so much.¹ They allow Trump to proclaim victory and dispirit other organizations uncertain about whether to risk resistance.

In many of these instances, Trump is threatening or employing the prosecutorial and regulatory powers of the state to cow civil society actors into compliance. The added benefit for Trump, however, is that with these victories under his belt he can try to push the boundaries of his power further, issuing new threats or proclamations — things like, “when 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech” — in the hopes that his targets acquiesce without a fight:

The fallback strategy is to bluster and bluff enough to cause other actors to capitulate. Even if Trump lacks the legal authority to do what he’s doing, maybe his prior actions can intimidate fearful and risk-averse elements of the opposition to do what he wants them do to. This is the power multiplier: past incidents of successful coercion can bolster the credibility of future coercive threats.

There is an unusual tacit alliance here between Trump and some of his opponents in this arena. Just as Trump likes to brandish threats as a means of getting what he wants, some of his most ardent opponents also want to highlight the scary nature of Trump’s illiberal power grabs. When Zack Beauchamp warns in Vox that, “Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America. I mean this literally,” he’s trying to highlight the dangers and stakes at play in the hopes of mobilizing small-d democrats. There are times, however, when I worry that such warnings about creeping fascism in America can cause citizens to lose hope in the American experiment.²

What is therefore worth stressing is the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has been unable to autocrat its way out of a paper bag. To be sure, Trump has cowed some institutions into submission, and he has a few competent subordinates eager to carry out his pet peeves edicts. But he has also appointed some of the dumbest, most craven motherfuckers on the planet, and these underlings have no idea how to autocrat.

The events of the past week alone reveal how this administration is unable to walk and crack down on opponents at the same time. And the reason this should be highlighted is to point out to those ordinary citizens opposing Trump that such resistance is meaningful — indeed, the odds are quite good that this administration will, quite likely, self-destruct. Past success does not translate into future success — particularly as Trump continues to sabotage his own state.

So consider the following sample. First, here’s Trump claiming that his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times will be successful:

Trump can try to bluster all he wants — the court ruling that rejected his lawsuit is pretty damn entertaining. The Washington Post’s Scott Nover wrote it up:

U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, issued a scathing ruling on Friday, lambasting the president and his lawyers for the lawsuit.

“In this action, a prominent American citizen (perhaps the most prominent American citizen) alleges defamation by a prominent American newspaper publisher (perhaps the most prominent American newspaper publisher) and by several other corporate and natural persons,” he wrote. “Alleging only two simple counts of defamation, the complaint consumes eighty-five pages. Count I appears on page eighty, and Count II appears on page eighty-three.”….

In addition to the legal issues at hand, Merryday bemoaned the writing.

“The reader of the complaint must labor through allegations, such as ‘a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady.' The reader must endure an allegation of ‘the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass’ and an allegation that ‘the false narrative about ‘The Apprentice’ was just the tip of Defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.’”

The judge said every lawyer should know that a complaint is not a “public forum for vituperation and invective” nor a “megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.”

The judge said a new complaint may be filed within 28 days and must be under 40 pages long.

As someone who has occasionally embodied Reviewer #2, Merryday’s understandable laments brought a smile to my face.

The bad lawyering continues with the Justice Department’s ongoing failure to secure convictions — or even indictments — of Americans protesting the deployment of National Guard troops in American cities. The Guardian’s Sam Levin documents the DOJ’s latest failure:

A Los Angeles protester charged with assaulting a border patrol agent in June was acquitted on Wednesday after US immigration officials were accused in court of lying about the incident.

The not guilty verdict for Brayan Ramos-Brito is a major setback for the Donald Trump-appointed US attorney in southern California and for Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who has become a key figure in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 29-year-old defendant, who is a US citizen, was facing a misdemeanor and was the first protester to go to trial since demonstrations against immigration raids erupted in LA earlier this summer.

Border patrol and prosecutors alleged that Ramos-Brito struck an agent during a chaotic protest on 7 June in the south Los Angeles county city of Paramount outside a complex where the Department of Homeland Security has an office. But footage from a witness, which the Guardian published days after the incident, showed an agent forcefully shoving Ramos-Brito. The footage did not capture the demonstrator assaulting the officer.

The jury delivered its not guilty verdict after a little over an hour of deliberations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Bovino testified earlier in the day and faced a tough cross-examination from public defenders.

Bovino was one of four border patrol agents who testified as witnesses, but was the only one to say he saw the alleged assault by Ramos-Brito, according to the LA Times. Videos played in court captured the agent shoving Ramos-Brito, sending him flying backward, and showed the protester marching back toward the agent, the paper reported. The videos did not capture Ramos-Brito’s alleged assault.

There were multiple factual discrepancies in DHS’s internal reports on the protest….

A spokesperson for Bill Essayli, the US attorney appointed by the president earlier this year, declined to comment on the acquittal. Border patrol officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry and requests for comment from Bovino.

Essayli’s office has aggressively prosecuted protesters and people accused of interfering with immigration arrests, with more than 40 cases filed in June and July. But prosecutors have repeatedly dismissed some of the felony charges soon after filing them….

Meghan Blanco, an attorney who represented Mojica, said it was significant that jurors did not believe the statements of such a senior official.

“These jurors had the opportunity to listen firsthand to the CBP officer overseeing enforcement nationally and could not have found his testimony to be credible,” said Blanco, a former federal prosecutor. “It is a bad sign for the federal government. They are doing everything they can to try to legitimize their prosecutions, and thank God the jury and the public are seeing right through it.”

This story is an additional reminder that ordinary citizens have often proven to be more civic-minded than the large institutions that are ostensibly supposed to be civic leaders.

One would think that with such bad lawyering on display, the Trump White House would decide to scale back its ambitions. That would be incorrect — instead, Trump is firing the lawyers who cannot successfully bend the law in his direction. The New York Times explains one example:

The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.

Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him….

Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”

Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor….

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department, had privately defended Mr. Siebert against officials, including William J. Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who had urged that he be fired and replaced with a prosecutor who would push the cases forward, according to a senior law enforcement official….

Mr. Blanche, like Mr. Siebert, questioned the legal viability of bringing charges against Ms. James, according to current and former department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about internal discussions.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent correctly diagnoses the meaning of this episode to Trump’s larger authoritarian project:

All this is grist for the bigger idea that Trump is a politically weak and ineffectual president who’s simultaneously consolidating autocratic power in areas where he has more flexibility to do so. As Jonathan Bernstein notes, Trump’s record in lower courts is terrible, which is part of a larger dynamic in which he constantly loses on many fronts where he faces real opposition. Indeed, there’s a kind of split screen here: Trump can appear “strong” by ordering troops into cities and blowing up little boats in the Caribbean Sea, and his sycophants can boast about it to puff him up further….

The James affair shows that on other fronts, Trump is running into deep institutional resistance and the sheer unwillingness of many key actors to wholly abandon the rule of law on his behalf. Yes, Trump may replace the prosecutor, but then he’ll have to get this sham past many layers of courts and a jury. It’s unlikely to happen. And this Supreme Court could always find a way to let Trump remove Cook, but that will likely prove temporary. Thus far, this whole “mortgage fraud” scam is utterly failing to advance his broader authoritarian project. And there’s no reason to think that will change anytime soon.

This will be an ongoing problem for Trump’s authoritarian push. Whether it is the dubious legality of U.S. military attacks on suspected cartel boats in the Caribbean or the dubious competency of the CDC’s new vaccine panel or the dubious ability of Trump to remove the broadcast licenses of any television network, this administration continues to beclown itself in its authoritarian power-grabs. And in the beclowning, I find optimism about the future of American democracy.

It is true that in other areas, Donald Trump is expanding his power. But each time he tries and trips himself up in the process, his failure needs to be advertised. Civil resistance works. Combined with the inevitable economic downturn, it is what will bring his regime crashing down to Earth.

1. This applies to quasi-autonomous institutions within the executive branch as well, which is why David Ignatius’ recent column about Pete Hegseth’s evisceration of the JAG corps is so disturbing.

2. There is another group of folks who sound like this as well, the folks who believe that the American experiment was always a rotting hellscape and are now just embracing the chaos. As far as the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is concerned, those folks can just piss right off.