America learns about "personalist regimes" the hard way
Truth Social posts are no way to run a country (or war).
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Remember how there were endless fights over whether it was appropriate to say President Trump was a fascist? Well, that one seems pretty well-settled now.
But Trump’s second-term swath of destruction doesn’t only prove that the fascist moniker is apt. It also shows that America is living under a personalist regime, and it’s wrecking us.
Consider the whiplash of Tuesday’s genocidal threat to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization, one that hung in the air all day while everyone desperately hoped he’d reverse himself before his self-imposed deadline. Everyone knew full well that the outcome would be based completely on Trump’s whims, not part of any larger military strategy. It wasn’t going to be the product of robust, informed debate among cabinet officials. The world had to just wait to see where Trump’s vibes landed circa 8pm Eastern time.
Trump’s agreement to a nebulous ceasefire, one where he doesn’t even seem to be sure what the terms are, was, of course, a vast, worldwide relief. But while everyone else was still reeling from spending 12 hours in a state of sorrow and worry and fear, he had already moved on.
A few hours later, Trump was already excitedly posting about how the United States would be helping with traffic in the Strait of Hormuz: “There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will.”
What?
Trump’s sunny mood continued into Wednesday morning, where he floated that the United States would somehow co-administer the strait with Iran, presumably so he could get some of the $2 million per ship fee inexplicably given to Iran as part of the ceasefire: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Again, what?
In 24 hours, Trump seesawed from being prepared to enact a literal genocide on the Iranian people to deciding the Iranian government was his business partner. This radical reversal makes sense in Trump’s head and really nowhere else, but since there’s no one stopping him and no guardrails around him whatsoever, everyone has to treat this as rational behavior and move on.
Except we just can’t. Anyone who isn’t in thrall to Trump isn’t able to turn on a dime and switch from “hell yeah, genocide” to “business partners.” But this is what it’s like under a personalist regime, where power is concentrated in a single person, a leader not accountable to the military or to a political party. Personalists gut those institutions, instead making themselves the sole arbiter of government policies and actions.
It feels distinctly un-American to discuss the president in these terms — not Trump specifically, but the very nature of our democratic structure, which is supposed to be insulated from this sort of thing thanks to Congress, an independent judiciary, and the separation of powers. But what we’ve learned is that those things function as norms, not laws, and if Congress and the Supreme Court simply step aside and abdicate their power, then it’s all Trump, all the time. And when you look at Trump’s second term in particular, you can see that his behavior pretty much ticks all the personalist regime boxes.
American carnage goes global
Personalists are the rulers most likely to have risky foreign policies and to start wars, which is pretty much all Trump has done since retaking office. That aggressiveness stems in part from personalist authoritarians already being cut-throat and not averse to using force. But it’s also because they hollow out any institutions that could impose consequences and surround themselves with servile minions who will not challenge them.
Trump’s unprecedented, unjustified, and poorly planned attack on Iran has brought this into sharp focus, even before his threat to destroy the country entirely. Shortly before starting the war, Trump met with a small group of advisers that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, telling them he wanted to attack Iran in tandem with Israel. Hegseth understood the assignment. He not only backed Trump’s plan but also soft-pedaled the risks rather than being forthright about the possibilities of risks like Iran closing the Strait and the war engulfing the Middle East.
As the war spiraled out of control, Trump engaged in a manic back-and-forth of threats followed by walkbacks, an ever-shifting landscape that included assertions that the US was engaging in productive talks with Iran, while Iran denied any talks were occurring at all. Popping off on Truth Social isn’t diplomacy, but the entire war now revolves around whatever Trump feels like posting next.
That also means that for other countries, negotiating with a personalist strongman like Trump is a fool’s errand. It’s not simply that his word means nothing, but that he reverses decisions based on nothing but whims. Tariffs get increased, decreased, removed entirely, revived, and so on, a pattern he’s managed to continue even after the Supreme Court blocked him from one way of imposing them. These aren’t deliberate decisions taken in conjunction with trade and economic experts in his administration. It’s just Trump singlehandedly creating international chaos whenever the mood strikes.
Trump can do this because he’s surrounded himself in his second term with nothing but sycophants.
Gone are the so-called adults in the room from his first term, hardline Republicans who nonetheless believed in the basic contours of American democracy. There’s no room now for a James Mattis as defense secretary or Christopher Wray as FBI director. Instead, there’s Hegseth and Kash Patel for these roles.
It’s not just that people like Hegseth and Patel are loyalists, absolutely devoted to Trump. Yes, appointing loyalists is a necessary feature of a personalist regime, but the loyalty that Trump demands is of a particular kind: agreeing to believe the same lies he does and act with the same fervor in enacting vengeance on anyone who doesn’t.
When Trump was putting together his second term nominations, candidates were asked about whether they agreed with Trump’s assertion that he won the 2020 election and how they felt about the January 6 insurrection. Neither of these things, of course, has anything to do with whether someone is qualified for any particular high-level government job.
Picking inexperienced supporters offers another benefit to the head of a personalist regime: their fancy high-level jobs are dependent solely on their abject fealty to Trump. To be fair, any presidential cabinet appointee in any administration serves at the pleasure of the president. But there is no situation in which, for example, Trump would want to fire Kash Patel for being disloyal but would realize that Patel’s steady, seasoned leadership was best for the FBI.
So, it doesn’t really matter that Patel is objectively bad at his job. It doesn’t matter that Hegseth decided to fire multiple experienced senior officers in the middle of a war. They aren’t there to effectively and efficiently run the DOD and the FBI. They’re there to say yes to Trump, no matter what.
Hegseth and Patel aren’t alone in their incompetence wrapped in fealty. Indeed, it’s tough to name a second term Trump cabinet appointee who appears to be the person genuinely most qualified for their job. Even those with some level of government experience, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are there because they’ve made clear they will never get crossways with Trump. Lower-level picks like former Trump personal attorney Alina Habba and former Trump personal attorney Lindsey Halligan were chosen for their unvarnished willingness to prosecute anyone Trump demanded they prosecute.
In a personalist regime, it isn’t just high-level government officials who are chosen for their partisan loyalty rather than their experience. Rather, government employment becomes a patronage system rather than a civil service one. Jobs are doled out as rewards to cronies and supporters rather than having a core of experienced, non-political civil servants that remains intact no matter who is president.
Trump has been gunning to dismantle the civil service since his first term, when he created Schedule F, a new job classification that stripped civil service protections from any job with a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” He wasn’t able to realize his vision of a dismantled federal workforce right away because he lost the 2020 election, and Joe Biden immediately repealed Schedule F. But when Trump got back into office, he picked up right where he left off.
Schedule F is now Schedule Policy/Career, and the Office of Personnel Management has already finalized the rule, which could reassign as many as 50,000 civil servants to non-protected positions where they could be fired at will. In a real personalist regime touch, no one yet knows exactly which jobs this would apply to, and the only person who gets to make those designations is Donald Trump.
Additionally, all job applications for any federal job at grade 5 or above on the General Schedule, a relatively low rank on the federal government’s method for defining job requirements and pay scales, now have an explicit loyalty test essay question: “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”
Even Trump’s vast corruption, his use of the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his companies, is a feature of a personalist regime. Trump has merged his public office with his personal business interests, creating a situation where the best way to get something from him — a pardon, a government contract, a favorable foreign policy — is to fatten his bottom line. He’s neatly combined his private family cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial, with his presidential ability to scuttle most oversight and regulation of … cryptocurrency businesses.
So, foreign governments and convicted crypto felons have poured literal billions into the Trump family coffers, but let’s not overlook the media companies that ponied up 10 figures to settle sham lawsuits Trump brought in his personal capacity as a way to ensure favorable treatment from Trump in his presidential capacity.
It can (and did) happen here
Another fun personalist regime feature? Attacking and undermining the independence of their country’s central bank.
Trump tried to fire one Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook. He repeatedly threatened to fire the chair, Jerome Powell. He had his minions gin up allegations that Cook committed mortgage fraud and unsuccessfully attempted to subpoena Powell, only to have the subpoenas tossed when a federal judge ruled that they were issued only to force Powell to give into his demand to cut interest rates. Powell will be replaced with Kevin Warsh when his term ends in May, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined to rule out the possibility that Warsh would be investigated or sued by the DOJ if he doesn’t follow Trump’s wishes on interest rates. Much like Hegseth, Bessent understands the assignment.
Thanks to the functional collapse of American democracy, all three of the world’s major national powers — Russia, China, and the US — are now all helmed by personalist strongmen. Having the most powerful people in the world unfettered by guardrails, untroubled by experienced advisers, and uninterested in keeping their word will make for some brutal, volatile years for everyone.
We always assumed we had enough democracy in place to avoid having our own Vladimir Putin, but we were wrong.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of Nir & Rupar, though a guest host will be taking my place this week (I’m enjoying some family time in Oregon). The next new edition of the newsletter drops Monday morning.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
Trump is nothing more or less than the mouthpiece for the id of tens of millions of voters, a true demagogue. We've seen this before, it's been as constant as the tides. There was the Silent Majority, the Moral Majority and now MAGA.
Something peculiar happened after Reagan, the Laws of Newton were suspended, the tide never receded. Each successive political cycle has given us ambitious candidates who looked at Reagan and said we want that, his popularity, his sentimental view of America and his embrace of wealth as a metric of superiority.
Now, here we stand on our islands, separate from one another as the tide continues to rise, some of us literally desperate to survive, others thinking the crocodiles will not come for them. Whether the planets resume their stately courses and the tide recedes is an open question.
And our strongman is incompetent to the point to where we need the US to be placed under conservatorship.