The Permanent Stain
Trump's first year has been a triumph for autocracy in America. And it will last.
ANDREW SULLIVAN
“If someone has the power of the presidency and also has the power to sue and take bribes, then he can do anything to anyone!” - Jesus, to the townsfolk of South Park.
It’s been over a decade now since Grendel emerged from the forest and the metaphors are understandably tired. But a sentence in a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”
Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.
But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.
The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even John “Signing Statements” Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has “ elevated it to another level” (see AP graphic below):
And unlike, say, Putin, who capitalized on (and may well have orchestrated) an actual emergency — a terror attack — to make his first big move, Trump just declares non-existent ones real on Twitter — and presto! — they are real. He knows he doesn’t even have to bother to justify them. He rightly assumes that Americans have less resistance to bald-faced autocratic lies in 2025 than Russians did in 1999.
Trump’s mouthpiece justifies it this way: “President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”
Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.
Meanwhile, America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.
Just this week, Trump unilaterally imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because he disagrees with the country’s judiciary’s indictment of his buddy Bolsonaro, and an extra 25 percent tariff on India (for a total of 50 percent), because India continues to buy Russian oil. “We are in a situation now where he is completely upset by India, and the 25 years of effort to build a relationship seems to be going down in 25 hours,” said Mukesh Aghi, president of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Trump was in a bad mood, it seems. Upset, because India didn’t realize he’d have a sudden realization that Putin had been manipulating him, and hadn’t adjusted its energy needs to Trump’s mercurial whims. So fuck India.
Let’s be perfectly clear: Trump has less than zero constitutional or legal authority to do any of this. Tariffs are constitutionally the Senate’s prerogative, and are applied for reasons to do with trade and industry. For a president unilaterally to use them as a club to coerce other countries on unrelated policies — on a whim unrelated to any Congressional mandate — is an impeachable offense. And yet what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.
Tyrants also need to delegitimize the rule of law, because it may occasionally rule against them, which is, of course, intolerable. So every judicial ruling against Trump is instantly deemed corrupt and political; and every ruling for him is pure justice. He has also used the full weight of the Justice Department to target his personal enemies, impugn honest judges, harass dissenters, and now to accuse a previous president of treason. At the same time, he has pardoned violent rioters, insurrectionists, and corrupt pols on the take. For the sole reasons that they’re on his side. He did so with his usual judicial care and moderation: “Fuck it. Release ‘em all.”
He has seized the pardon power and made a mockery of the justice system, promising immunity for criminals doing his will, and pardoning the violent thugs who attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2021. He has appointed an eager participant in the January 6 riots to the Justice Department (a man who yelled, “Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill 'em” to encourage rioters attacking police officers at the Capitol building), and named a Stop the Steal organizer, Ed “Reek” Martin, as his pardon attorney. This isn’t a strain for the justice system; it’s a giant fuck-you to any pretense of the rule of law.
And this is the man Trump just appointed (and the Senate approved) to be a lifetime federal judge:
[Emil Bove III] emphatically told prosecutors to be prepared to defy or evade court orders, such as the ones that would bar the administration from illegally deporting undocumented immigrants without due process; dismissed a corruption case against a sitting mayor not for sound legal reasons but for political leverage; targeted prosecutors under his command who refused to go along with his unethical instructions to drop cases for political reasons; fired federal prosecutors and oversaw purges of other officials who simply did their duty investigating crimes that happened to embarrass the president.
His appointment — and the Senate’s confirmation — is an open, aggressive declaration that the rule of law is now the rule of Trump.
The next move of a tyrant is to address the discrepancies between his constant lies and the reality on the ground. Trump believes that the economy is booming, inflation is dropping, and growth is surging everywhere. If the data disprove that, the data must be wrong. Trump’s very public firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a clear signal: there will be no reality outside Trump’s reality in this elected monarchy. The Federal Reserve will be next. The legitimacy of all the numbers on which a free society depends to make rational decisions will be dismantled — just as it was under Erdogan and Xi. L’état, c’est lui.
Alongside all this is an assault on the autonomy of universities, the targeting of law firms that may represent those targeted by Trump, the end of free speech protections for non-citizens, and the appearance on our streets of armed, masked, anonymous men and women, with powers to seize anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, and detain them, often for long stretches, even if they turn out to be citizens, or engaged in perfectly legal activity.
This feels like a police state because only in police states do governments deploy masked anonymous armed men — now with no age limits! — patrolling the streets with the power to arrest and detain. And yet many Americans shrug. Just as they shrug at the construction of vast detention camps in the US — all proof that expediting deportations is not the real goal; the goal is the presence of an ominous gulag to deter would-be illegals, and, as a bonus, to hold over citizens as well. This is classic state terror: the amassing a huge punitive powers answerable only to one man, who is by definition never wrong. It was precisely against this kind of power Americans once staged a revolution. Now they want the king back — as long as he’s their king; their Red Caesar.
This is why it’s worth recalling Ben Franklin’s pinpointing of the essence of tyranny: arbitrary power. There is no sane or reasoned argument for suddenly throwing a wrench into the entire wind power sector, for example; there is just Trump. There is no underlying principle behind the various dizzying tariff rates — just Trump. There is no rationale for gutting American scientific research or taking $500 million away from mRNA vaccine research; it’s just a way for Trump to hurt lefties on campus. The sudden seemingly random assaults on longtime allies — threatening Denmark over Greenland, sticking Switzerland with a sudden 39 percent tariff, telling Canada they should become a 51st State — are the essence of arbitrary, absolute power, based on nothing but one man’s thrill at bullying those weaker than himself, and having them prostrate before him.
The terrible uncertainty this generates is a feature, not a bug. A tyrant makes it impossible to plan or predict a business or a life outside of his control or surveillance. He makes it impossible to get through the day without hearing his name or seeing his face. And Trump is fast dismantling neutral institutions, reality-based research, legal neutrality, and economic predictability ... in order to disorient, and in that disorientation, paralyze resistance. The relentless thoroughness of the campaign to end liberal democratic life and replace it with a strongman cult has been staggering.
What still stands in his way? The Supreme Court may yet surprise us. Yes, I know it has allowed egregiously aggressive power grabs to continue by silently stymieing the lower courts; it has been friendly to the unitary executive case; and it famously backed limited presidential immunity. But Trump’s theft of Congress’ tariff and taxation powers is so outlandishly unconstitutional, such a massive return to 1773, that SCOTUS may have no option but to strike down Trump’s core economic policy. Then there’s the faint chance that the House may turn Dem next year. That’s why the sudden redistricting push in Texas is underway — which will, of course, further delegitimize the Congress as a democratic institution, deepening cynicism, which in turn further empowers tyranny.
The question, it seems to me, is how Trump might respond to a real SCOTUS setback, or to a House he doesn’t totally control. And the answer to that we already know: he will assault the court’s legitimacy, threaten the Justices with mob violence, refuse to end the tariffs, and — of course! — claim the 2026 elections are rigged. The same, I think, applies to his term limits. He will attempt to defy them along the lines of his beloved thug-tyrant, Bukele. And if that open assault on a clear Constitutional amendment doesn’t fly, which may be a stretch even for MAGA vandals, it still won’t be over.
If a Democrat wins in 2028, Trump will call the election rigged and illegitimate, and will re-stage 2020 on behalf of a successor — with the full weight of the federal government behind him. If a Republican wins, Trump will remain POTUS the way Putin stayed president after making Medvedev “president” in 2008. Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go. He must either have a family member succeed him or a puppet. Don Jr or JD — Trump’s Medvedev.
The stain of this will therefore be deep and permanent. It already is. Trump intends to use the 250th celebration next year as a Putin-style glorification of his reign. By then he’ll be riding in the Qatari jet that the Senate just allowed him to keep permanently. Tyrants also demand permanent monuments to their glory. So having paved over the Rose Garden, Trump is now intending to add a massive 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom to the White House itself, forever cementing it as a palatial symbol for his new monarchy.
I will be told I’m being excitable again. That I suffer from TDS. That this will pass, notwithstanding its horrendous precedents, its shredding of legal and constitutional and democratic legitimacy, its growing domestic army, its multiplying domestic internment camps, its delegitimization of the liberal democratic system, and its protean, venomous irrationalism. And I sure hope it will. God knows we have been through trials before. History is a great perspective.
But I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
But in history — as the Dishcast details this week — individuals and their characters are also critical. And have we ever had a president this hostile to the rule of law and constitutional government, to the legitimacy of the other party, to the norms of liberal governance, and to the most basic decency most humans are capable of? And with this stamina, energy, and demagogic talent?
I don’t think so. I think this is how a republic dies. If it is still, except on paper, alive. |
