“The poster child for autocracy”: how to understand Trump’s regime

Author and legal expert Kim Lane Scheppele explains Trump’s power grab and what can be done to stop the destruction of American democracy

Trump’s official portrait….

On Tuesday, I went to the Frontline Club in London for a debate on how Britain has enabled kleptocracy around the world. I heard about how London’s reputation managers, PR firms, accountants, and - as we know well at Democracy for Sale - lawyers have fuelled global corruption.

I often go to events like this. I find them oddly hopeful. At the end there is almost always a discussion about what we can do to change things.

But this event felt different. The panel was terrific - Oliver Bullough posing questions to John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec and Tom Mayne, who have co-authored an excellent new book on our enabling industry - but there was no escaping the sense that the laws and rules that might stop the kleptocrats were being ripped up in front of us.

Earlier that day Donald Trump had officially disbanded the US’s world-leading anti-kleptocracy taskforce. The president has halted the prosecution of Americans accused of bribing foreign officials.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump doesn’t want to stop kleptocracy. His real estate deals have often been tainted with corruption. As has his family’s: Trump’s son, Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner are currently involved in a very controversial deal to build a luxury hotel on a NATO bomb in downtown Belgrade.

Trump’s attacks on anti-corruption institutions are part of a much broader assault on the federal government. Alongside ‘first buddy’ Elon Musk, the president has taken an axe to the rules and regulations that are supposed to constrain his power.

So for this newsletter, I thought we should talk to someone with a deep understanding of what Trump is doing.

That’s why we have been speaking to Kim Lane Scheppele. Kim is a legal scholar, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, and an expert on backsliding democracies.

Kim has first hand experience tracing the destruction of democracy first in Russia and then in Hungary - and she warns that there are now signs of danger in the United States. I think it’s a really important conversation at this moment.

Peter: How would you describe what is happening in the US right now? People like historian Tim Snyder are calling it a 'coup' are being used - is this accurate?

Kim: Frankly, I don’t spend a lot of time on labels. Labels can blind you to what you’re actually seeing and I think that what we’re seeing is a mash-up of many things.

Most people don’t call what elected governments do coups because the way that elected governments came to power was legal. But this is also not a normal government because the president is making dangerous outsized claims about the extent of presidential power and acting on those claims so fast that the courts and congress cannot keep up.

I think that this is a rapid collapse of checks and balances into an autocratic power center that operates partly by law (so what I call “autocratic legalism”) and partly outside the law (so rogue). Instead of calling it a noun like a coup, I think we should stick with adjectives like dangerous and lawless.

Peter: Steve Bannon famously talked about "flooding the zone with shit"'. What do you think is most worth paying attention to? Is there anything that is not getting enough attention?

Kim: We should divide what the Trump administration is doing into three buckets.

First, are the shiny distractions that are bait for the media. Buying Greenland and owning Gaza are outrageous proposals for a president to suggest, but very unlikely to be realised.

Trump and Musk are experts at distraction by tweet. But most of what they say is designed precisely to draw attention away from other things without posing (at least not now) a real risk of realisation.

Second, there are the actions that cause pain. This includes the brutal campaign of immigration enforcement which is leaving millions of people in fear. It includes the sudden abolition of all of the programs that integrated the federal workforce, leaving many people of colour feeling like they are being cast back to Jim Crow.

It includes the assault against people whose sex or sexuality are non-binary or transgendered who are in danger of losing hard-won rights. It includes the people abandoned by the programs run by USAID who have been left in the lurch all of a sudden.

Cruelty is a hallmark of this government and their targeted harm to vulnerable people is outrageous. It’s important to pay attention to, lift up and help those who suffer from this government’s cruelty.

But the third bucket contains the actions leading to the consolidation of autocracy. Bullying Congress into rubberstamping unqualified people to high positions in this government, threatening to not obey court orders, decimating the federal workforce (and cowing the rest) as well as retaliating against anyone who tries to get in the way are the hallmarks of dictatorship.

If you’re worried about losing democracy, this is the bucket to focus on. Some of it will be technical and hard to explain. Why, for example, is the ‘Fork in the Road’ memo dangerous? It was sent to all government employees urging them to quit while promising them benefits – but it turns out that there is no legal authority whatsoever behind it and it is merely a fake-news ruse for cutting the federal workforce.

Why is rescinding the memo that froze all federal spending not really responsive to the court order that told them to do that? Because the point of the court order was not the fate of a piece of paper but the fate of government funds, which still have not all flowed again.

Why was letting Musk’s minions into the most sensitive central databases of the government dangerous? Because the data might be compromised, yes.But perhaps even more important are the signs we are getting that they rewrote the code that affects future uses of the data. Stealing data once is terrible, but setting up a system to steal and alter data forever is worse.

This third bucket is what we should pay even more attention to – because it is how we lose democracy.

Kim Lane Scheppele

Peter: You have spent a long time working and writing about Hungary. Do you see parallels between Hungary’s “illiberal democracy” and Trump’s America?

Kim: Orbán has been to US conservatives what Sweden once was to American social democrats. In a small country, far, far away, there is proof of concept that one’s political philosophy works.

American conservatives have embraced Orbán for his anti-woke agenda and for winning election after election in the heart of Europe. But what I worry about most is not the ideological affinity. Orbán is really no ideologue and neither is Trump.

Ideology brings people in but in the end, both are transactional; the ideological flourishes are for the masses not for the elite. In the heart of government, Orbán already has and Trump is quickly acting to consolidate power in very few hands.

The connection consists not merely of mutual admiration, but also direct coordination. Orbán’s English-language think tank the Danube Institute has a formal agreement with the Heritage Foundation, author of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump 2.0.

Project 2025 has in large measure copied Orbán’s plan for taking over a government. First you defund everything your opponents do. Then you purge the civil service of those who are not loyal to you. Then you threaten the media with economic sanctions so they fall in line.

You pack the courts; you cow the parliament. All major actions of state are designed to cut off any form of accountability to anyone outside the tight inner circle. The point of all this is to shove public money into private pockets. Orbán is teaching all of those things and the Trump team are not dull pupils.

Peter: What did you make of Trump - and Elon Musk - effectively abolishing USAID? Did USAID really promote democracy around the world? Or was it used to achieve US foreign policy goals? How significant is shutting it down?

Kim: The abolition of USAID is part of the campaign of cruelty, a disaster for all those who benefited from the agency’s good work as well as those who have devoted their careers to this work. So it belongs in ‘bucket two’ above.

But it is also a cautionary tale for others. Over a weekend, Musk and his minions could – as Musk gleefully acknowledged – put a whole government agency through a wood chipper. Perhaps the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is next? Or the National Weather Service? The treatment of USAID demonstrated to the federal workforce that this could happen to any agency, so they had better toe the party line. That’s what puts it into ‘bucket three’.

But then, to the substance of what USAID does. Of course, there is a sense in which any government’s foreign assistance to another country raises questions about everything from coups to colonialism. And US foreign assistance does not always have a history of being benign or politically neutral.

But since the end of the Cold War, US foreign assistance has been largely devoted to humanitarian relief and democracy promotion. Some of that democracy promotion – for example the grants to Hungarian media outlets in rural areas – probably had the goal of destabilising the Orbán government. Ditto with assistance to the Venezuelan opposition.

But most of it enabled governments to do what they wanted to do but didn’t have the resources to accomplish – for example, to protect the Brazilian Amazon or to provide humanitarian assistance to Colombians displaced by civil conflict.

The US has been one of the leading democracy promoters in the world and now it has become the poster child for autocracy. Not only is the leadership in the White House toxic to the US’s democratic legacy, but so too is the abolition of this agency which has been America’s best face to the world.

Peter: What can be done to stop Trump and protect US democracy? Do you see any reasons to be hopeful?

Kim: Trump is exceedingly dangerous because he presently controls all levels of government at federal level. He not only occupies the presidency but aspires to be able to give direct orders to the entire federal bureaucracy – including agencies that are supposed to be politically independent – through what some call ‘unitary executive theory.’

Trump has bullied and threatened Congress so that his own party is afraid to stand up to him, and since they control both chambers at the moment, the Democrats have few levers to pull to control anything.

He packed the Supreme Court, which may show itself again to be a loyal ally as lawsuits filed to challenge Trump’s first weeks of action work their way up the legal food chain. The opposition has few places to stand from which to push back.

So the opposition will have to use the organised networks still available to them. Litigation from ‘blue states’ (that is, those that did not vote for Trump) is already being effective, and working from independent state governments to challenge federal programs may provide some resistance.

Professional associations of lawyers, scientists, health personnel and more may be able to push back on the issues where they have expertise. Alternative media are springing up (like my own affiliated substack, the Contrarian) with critical coverage that the legacy media don’t seem to want to run.

America has a long tradition of civic activism and private network organisation – and that network seems to have come alive that past week. So democracy will not go down without a fight.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs and Director of the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Her latest book, Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law, is forthcoming, published by Harvard University Press.