Authoritarian regimes tend to dismantle democratic checks and balances over years, not in an instant. Think of Orban, Erdogan, or even Putin’s comparably swift ascent to total power.
Autocratic rulers typically use a single pillar of power as a launch pad: a parliament majority, the military, or secret services to then gradually take over the other levers of governance and state coercion.
They subdue step by step all forms of federal and local government, instrumentalise tax authorities, the police and state security, coopt the military, silence and decapitate independent media, and purge academia and education. Their power grab is usually ideologically sanctified.
The hardest part in most instances is to synchronise judicial power. Erdogan, ruling the country first as prime minister in 2003 and then as omnipotent president, had to stage-design a military coup in 2016 to dispose of thousands of still stubbornly independent judges. Netanyahu still wrestles with his supreme court. Trump’s junta, however, is teaching autocrats elsewhere a lesson. His administration is just ignoring unfavourable judgments without further ado.
“What can judges do?” is the new mantra. They have neither police nor military force at their disposal, the thinking goes. As all political actors are on board, from Congress to every government department, this is sadly true. Street protests must not be feared: rule-busting is Trump’s mass appeal.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution, devastating China’s society and economy from 1966 until the death of the Great Leader in 1977, had the declared goal to rid the system of “old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits”.
Mao mobilised the Chinese youth and students to smash the system. Schools and universities were closed, academics and intellectuals were robbed of their status and marched off to the countryside tilling fields and cleaning latrines. The Chinese Communist Party itself was not spared. Above all towered Mao Zedong, venerated and deified by the youthful Red Guards he piqued with glee.
The United States are gripped by a similar fever today. The destruction wreaked by Trump’s stormtroopers looks like acts of senseless destruction and self-harm. Led by billionaire Elon Musk’s constitutionally inchoate Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE), institutions with a proud history of serving domestic and foreign policy goals are wiped out, gutted or transformed into instruments of suppression.
USAID, an organisation overtly fighting hunger, disease and poverty in developing countries, while covertly projecting US influence and aiding foreign policy aims like Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, was put to the “wood-chipper” (Musk). So was Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the propaganda outlets spreading America’s idiosyncratic message of freedom and democracy. The Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment was unceremoniously closed. Established by Nixon, it was the department of strategic forward-thinking: giving frank assessment of America’s military strengths and weaknesses, analysing long-term threats by its possible opponents.
The list goes on. More than 200,000 civil servants have been shown the door in a matter of weeks, about 9% of the workforce. (This includes, inter alia, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Body, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Education, the Federal Drug Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Aviation Authority, the National Institute of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency.)
The Trump junta does not want to be loved. It wants to be feared. Abroad, and at home- Andreas Weitzer
Ostensibly meant as a cost-cutting exercise, this haphazard vandalism of public services is culturally motivated. Civil servants and the military, which is downsized too, have to relearn that they owe loyalty to the leader, not to the bourgeois constitution. It also matters little that the remaining public servants will be ill-motivated and disoriented.
This is for the better. Because the country will now be run like a crime syndicate, where ethical demands for equity, fairness and justice have no place. These dated values are now replaced by loyalty, fear and nepotism. Professional, squeamish bureaucrats would worry about conflicts of interest, corruption, or abuse of power for commercial gain, while this is the whole point.
The President of the United States, presenting on the lawn of the White House a Musk-manufactured Tesla car and urging the assembled press corps and his fellow Americans to buy one, would have seemed incredulous only a few weeks ago.
This form of gangster capitalism is also at the core of foreign policy. Commentators, including myself, have wondered how Trump’s seemingly chaotic, outsized tariff impositions could possibly help to reduce the lamented trade deficit; how tariffs could serve America’s multi-national corporations, its exports or its domestic manufacturing base; how tariffs could foster reindustrialisation by eager foreigners; how tit-for-tat tariff wars could be avoided; how the US consumer will be shielded from inevitable price rises. How the stock market could absorb continuously bad news. I erroneously thought these things mattered.
But they do not matter at all to the Trump syndicate.
What matters are the establishment of spheres of influence. This is not based on flimsy ideology. It is purely transactional. The world consists of shop owners and crime gangs. The shop owners will be charged protection money and their businesses taxed to misery. Other crime gangs have to be accommodated by allotting them their own, undisputed turf while demanding at least formal loyalty, or destroyed, because their power is too threatening to allow for riskless coexistence. The first is Russia, the second is China. The others, all of us, are the shop owners.
This is what Trump’s tariff policies try to achieve. At first, they are a source of income. Which is good, because fellow gang members shouldn’t be taxed too harshly. Some of the costs will be borne by foreign exporters, either by profit suppression, or devaluation of currency, which will make their consumers poorer. Another part of the cost will be borne inevitably by the US consumer, who will be poorer then. Yet this doesn’t matter, because consumption has to be suppressed in any case, to finance rapid domestic industrialisation. The aim is not “friend-shoring”. The aim is complete autarky, with the shortest possible supply chains.
Where this is not possible, the colonialisation of foreign territory will become a necessity. Thirdly, tariffs are a means of harassment to achieve other than fiscal results. They are unsheathed or sheathed merely to terrorise, to force obedience. They always carry the veiled threat of real violence, of military intervention. The Trump junta does not want to be loved. It wants to be feared. Abroad, and at home. To this end the thinkers behind Trump have worked out a masterplan. This plan and what it means for our US dollar investments and the dollar hegemony I will illustrate in my next column.
Andreas Weitzer is an independent journalist based in Malta.