The Situation: The Five Pillars of Trumpian Repression

The Situation on Wednesday offered friendly advice to anyone seeking to get away with violating a court order.

Today, a lesson in how to do repression.  

In the run-up to the second Trump administration, a veritable cottage industry arose—in media, in think tanks, in universities, and elsewhere—trying to anticipate the modalities of Trumpian authoritarianism.

That Trump had authoritarian instincts was not in dispute among reasonable analysts. One needed only to listen to his speeches to establish that.

But how would his authoritarianism show up in practical governance? Would it be through invocations of the Insurrection Act or involve more exotic presidential emergency powers? Would it involve prosecuting political enemies? Would it be through domestic deployment of the military? In countless papers, op-eds, and scenario-planning exercises, scholars and journalists tried to game out what Trump would do and how his various opponents might respond. 

Suffice it to say, two months into the second go-around, that everyone got it wrong. Or at least, nobody really got it right.

No, it’s not that Trump outfoxed everyone or was playing some four-dimensional chess game or that the analysts missed some obvious way around the Maginot Lines they were imagining. It’s rather that the attack surface for democratic government is just much larger than people tend to imagine, and there are many different ways to express the authoritarian instinct. The defense here is hard. Offense is comparatively easy. The executive branch is vast, after all, and presidential power within it is astonishingly wide, so the president has a huge number of options as to how to make the country less free.

At this point, however, we don’t have to speculate any more. We can actually describe the manner in which Trump has positioned the government for repression—and already engaged in a certain amount of repression—of his political foes. In particular, it’s fair to say that the modality of Trumpian repression has involved less abuse of the criminal process than many analysts expected and much more abuse of government itself. It has involved an emphasis on things the president can do himself, rather than things that involve proving facts to courts. And it has involved a lot of self-injury by way of inflicting shared injury on others. 

Here are the five key pillars of actual Trumpian repression so far:

The first one is a bit counterintuitive and involves an attack on the government’s own power to spend money. One may not think of denuding the executive branch of tens of billions of dollars in spending money as a way of punishing one’s enemies, but it actually operates that way in practice.

Attack federal grant-making—in foreign aid, to universities, to state and local governments, to the medical research community—and you indirectly attack sources of your opponents’ power. It’s not that these organizations are, as the MAGA movement imagines, hotbeds of leftism. But it is true that many of them lean left of center, especially those concentrated in a majority Democratic area such as the District of Columbia. And it is thus also true that defunding tens of billions of dollars in spending on everything from HIV treatment programs in Africa to university research will tend to hit non-MAGA institutions much harder than MAGA institutions. Destroy America’s ability to speak to the world through programs like VOA and its ability to spend money on democracy promotion programs and it’s not Trumpists you are mostly putting out of work.

This move has not exactly been targeted at Trump’s political enemies. It’s not really targeted at all, in fact, but indiscriminately destructive. But the blast radius of the destruction overwhelmingly affects professional activities dominated by either liberals or traditional conservatives of the sort Trump has marginalized in Republican politics. Think of it as targeting one’s political enemies by carpet bombing the institutions in which they operate. Yes, you’ll kill a lot of your own people too, but who cares?

This strategy has another effect: It causes those organizations that survive—or hope to survive–-to get on board with your rhetoric and programmatic activity. Want to get thousands of organizations to drop DEI programs? Go after a few federal grantees who have DEI programs.

The second pillar has been the internal retributions and restructurings within government itself—most importantly, in the power agencies of the Defense Department, the FBI, and the Justice Department. The president’s power is at its apex in the context of running the actual government, not in the interface between government and citizen. So eviscerating the internal oversight mechanisms of a variety of different agencies and firing politically suspect prosecutors, FBI agents, and military lawyers served two functions simultaneously. They make clear to the bureaucracy that there is room only for yes-men and yes-women in wielding power, and they thus position the government to comply with future commands to go after enemies and protect friends. 

This has been accompanied by clear statements by the attorney general that the Justice Department works for Trump himself and also that there is no room for not working cases because of conscience objections. The cumulative impact is to make clear to the workforce that the entities represent the man, and that there is no room within them for people not down with that mission. 

The third pillar has been the overt creation of a zone of impunity for political allies and friends. The Roman dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla had the motto “No better friend. No worse enemy” on his grave. And while the administration so far—with one possible exception—does not yet appear to be deploying criminal authorities against its political foes, it is making clear, overtly and without apology, that one value of friendship with the administration is criminal impunity. 

The pardons of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists is the most visible and dramatic sign of this, but it is far from the only one—and pardons are not the only mechanism either. The acting deputy attorney general personally ordered the dropping of a major corruption case against the mayor of New York, prompting the resignations of a number of Justice Department officials. And the administration engineered the freedom of an influencer and accused sex trafficker in Romania as well. Note that this pillar works in tandem with Pillar #2. Forcing ethical prosecutors into behaving unethically in cases like these is one way of getting rid of them.  

The fourth pillar is non-criminal legal pressures on a variety of universities, law firms, news media outlets, and others. Using criminal authorities is actually hard. Suspects have constitutional rights. Those apt to be political foes tend to get decent lawyers. And the judiciary holds the government’s feet to the fire in criminal matters with a political tilt.

By contrast, stripping law firms of their security clearances, a matter over which the president has near-plenary power, or suing press organizations or blocking federal money to universities is comparatively easy. The president’s powers are stronger here, and while the targets might sue, the litigation is more costly to them than it is to the administration. These types of coercive pressures also operate much faster than criminal charges, and the organizations thus tend to capitulate. A law firm in a protracted battle with the federal government, after all, loses clients quickly. But what does Trump really lose if the courts ultimately side with the law firm? 

Critically, the repressive quality of these non-criminal moves always suggests the possibility of a criminal investigation or some other, more onerous, form of repression. The message is unsubtle: I don’t even need the criminal law to destroy you, but it is there if and when I need it. 

Finally, fifth, these non-criminal actions have been accompanied by the administration’s willingness to deploy liberally overt threats of criminal investigation or prosecution. The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, a man named Ed Martin, has taken the lead on this, repeatedly sending letters to those he wishes to intimidate or simply tweeting about what he means to look into. Leaving aside the dubious legal ethics of such behavior, the coercive quality is clear, particularly in combination with the internal purges described above and the repressive actions taken with non-criminal authorities. The administration, even as it moves against entities in the non-criminal space, reminds them—often in public—that criminal investigations may not be far behind. 

This list is not exhaustive. There are undoubtedly other means of exacting pressure on opponents as well. I call these instruments pillars of repression because they are all being used at scale and in public. The administration does not seek to deny their use. And for the most part, it doesn’t even seek to deny that the purpose is retributive vis a vis the political activity of its foes. There are certain exceptions here—as where the administration conducts its positioning of the Justice Department for weaponization as a response to weaponization by the previous administration and its insistence that the Jan. 6 pardons remedied a grave injustice. But in the main, it is not hiding what it’s doing. It is (1) defunding its perceived enemies, while (2) positioning the criminal justice apparatus to go after them, (3) letting its friends escape justice, (4) menacing its enemies with punitive administrative action, and (5) always reminding them that it can do more.

Say what you will about Trump. He’s not hiding the ball.

The Situation continues tomorrow.