Trump's Autocratic Methods: Strength or Vulnerability?

The pattern is by now all too familiar: with every power grab Trump tries – from a fraudulent speech about voter fraud to appeals to his supreme court to let him rig the midterms – a debate kicks off about whether these moves are signs of strength or of desperation. Maybe we keep getting caught in this debate because the question is badly posed. So much of what is distinctive about Trump’s governance during his second term can serve the consolidation of an autocratic regime and at the same time create particular vulnerabilities for the regime. We have to become better at identifying these weaknesses, as opposed to being shellshocked by Trump’s brazenness every single time.

Aspiring autocrats operate differently in the 21st century; in previous eras, they had little hesitation about unleashing violence and committing massive human rights violations. Today, they try to fool both domestic and international audiences into thinking that democracy and the rule of law still exist. The recently deposed Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was a master of this technique; he spent many years performing what he called “the peacock dance” to convince the European Commission (and Chancellor Angela Merkel) that he wasn’t creating a kleptocratic autocracy.

This contrast between what the social scientists Serguei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have called “fear dictatorships” on the one hand and “spin dictatorships” on the other is empirically proven: there really is less violence, according to Guriev and Treisman, than in the 20th century. But elaborate efforts to fake democracy do not change the fact that violence is always kept in reserve: Putin dropped the mask entirely in 2022 and now has no hesitation to be seen as the violence-prone dictator who in one sense he always was.

It is crucial to understand how Trump differs from these patterns: unlike Orbán, for instance, he was never constrained by international institutions and other powerful capitals (let alone “international public opinion” – even mentioning the term in as self-centered a country as the US seems faintly ridiculous). What’s more, his own modus operandi, from his early days as a New York real estate investor onwards, has always been to simply do things that everyone can see are illegal – the point is to create facts on the ground (think of the demolition of the East Wing) and hope that the other side will settle out of court or just live with a fait accompli.

This method (strategy might be too big of a word) of illegality – and hope for impunity – now characterizes almost the entire administration. More particularly, the Trumpists have figured out that a scandal per year can spell political death, while 10 scandals a day elicit hardly a shrug, because no one, it seems, can keep up. This “flooding the zone” with scandals is in itself a means of generating power – but it also creates vulnerabilities. One never knows whether one scandal – even a relatively harmless one like the reflecting pool disaster, combining grift and incompetence – might not focus the public’s attention after all and become a symbol for the corruption of the regime as a whole, the way that one child abuse scandal – an Orbán ally pardoned a man convicted of covering up abuse – became the symbol of everything wrong with Orbán’s rule.

Every aspiring autocrat faces a trade-off between loyalty and competence. It is no secret where Trumpists have tended to be placed on the spectrum. That total devotion to the leader – including the willingness to lie shamelessly, or at least engage in election denial, as a de facto loyalty oath to Trump sworn in public – can consolidate power. But it also creates a distinct vulnerability, as, sooner or later, the egregiously incompetent will produce terrible outcomes, plain for all to see (at least if an effective opposition party manages to make them plain to see).

Contrary to the tendency of today’s dictators shying away from violence – so as not needlessly to invoke memories of 20th-century authoritarianism and provoke resistance – Trumpists have made a spectacle of cruelty. Again, this can contribute to consolidating power – after all, the glaring impunity apparently enjoyed by the men who killed Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero sends a signal that loyalists can count themselves above the law. The spectacle might also please a Maga audience. But the fact is that, in the end, the ostentatious displays of cruelty have not been popular with the public at large. For now, the administration increases its power by effectively telling people “We can do whatever we want, and you can’t do anything!” But making cruelty a priority also creates images that can be turned against it.

And the shameless corruption? Again, the shamelessness might easily generate a sense of hopelessness on the part of Americans watching unprecedented acts of malfeasance. But, unlike with other aspiring autocrats, the Trumpists are not really creating a coherent system of self-enrichment (the way Orbán did with what came to be called his mafia state – where tricks with public procurement were disguised well enough for many years). Under Trump, everyone just grabs whatever they can as quickly as they can. That inability to build a system is ultimately a sign of weakness; the Trumpists themselves do not really seem to believe that their rule will last, and what Mike Johnson, in a revealing moment, called the Republicans’ “protection program” – the majority in Congress – might be gone this year. Self-confident creators of autocratic kleptocracy would have stayed silent on the point – and been smarter in their approach altogether. To be sure, that is no consolation for victims of cruelty.