Saboteurs: Destroying America for Autocratic Gain
With Trump's 2014 thoughts about the advantages of wrecking America
“We don't have the language to describe what we're seeing right before our eyes,” observed New Republic columnist Greg Sargent, responding to a fellow Bluesky user who remarked on the novelty of an American “gangster government.”
If you often feel at a loss for words right now, that’s understandable. Significant new elements are in play, along with classic autocratic tactics. The sabotage of America by a sitting U.S. president is a tragic and history-making innovation.
In many ways, the Trump administration is continuing authoritarian tradition. Whether it is the expansion of executive power at the expense of the independence of judiciary, financial, civil service, and other government entities, turning public office into a vehicle for self-enrichment, or the dependence on lies, the trajectory is familiar.
Some of the language that comes to us from the past and present of autocracy is helpful: the kleptocracies, mafia states, dictatorships and other governments that persecute and steal from their people, use them as cannon fodder, and drive them into impoverishment as the leaders and their families and cronies become fabulously wealthy.
Yet the speed and scope of the Trump administration’s authoritarian interventions is unusual. The chaos and the wrenching changes in foreign and domestic policy far surpass those of the early months of leaders such as Erdogan and Putin.
There is also the new kind of coup perpetrated by DOGE, which has become a parallel civil service that still answers to a private citizen, Elon Musk, and is entrenched in dozens of government agencies. That will be studied for years.
An Unprecedented Operation of Sabotage
How do we understand and talk about the unprecedented holistic design by the Trump administration to seemingly inflict harm on American business, health, knowledge production, science, and everything else that made us “the envy of the world,” to quote an October 2024 essay in the Economist?
The classic autocratic goal of consolidating power is part of it. If you intend to rely less on elections to stay in power, you are not afraid to slash funding for disaster relief, child cancer, or basic social assistance.
In March I started to think about sabotage as a narrative frame to discuss the attacks from within by the Trump administration and DOGE.
Few are aware that Trump has reflected for years on the power grab opportunities presented by an America going to ruin. Here is his chilling and telling quote from a 2014 Fox News interview. It gives perspective on why Trump might welcome and facilitate a national downturn, and on his current preventive deployment of state security forces in American cities.
“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the economy goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we were when we were great.”
But domestic power consolidation is only half of it. The most shocking and tragic part is that this sabotage of America by a sitting U.S. president is also designed to benefit America’s adversaries —countries that for years have sought to displace America as a global military and economic power.
To that end, everything that brought America prestige and soft power in the world and goodwill (such as USAID) must be destroyed, and the domestic population led into states of ignorance, disease, and chaos. China and Russia can step into the resulting voids of influence and commercial opportunity and move in to dominate the many spaces where America’s footprint has been purposely erased.
Action Item: Educate Others
It is frightening to realize that a U.S. President seems to want to take down America, and is approaching this project of ruination at a scale and with an intensity I have only seen among revolutionaries, ideological fanatics, and leaders of puppet states.
It can seem like the plot of a political thriller, and many across the political spectrum will prefer to dismiss it until the toll of the wrecking ball, engineered incompetence, and sabotage becomes impossible to dismiss.
But we must persist in being carriers of the truth, however upsetting to others our words might be. As conditions worsen and more people can begin to relate to what we are saying, the stage will be set for the collective moral and political reckoning that will be the first step to restoring our democracy.
Here is what I wrote three weeks after Trump’s inauguration. I think it has held up well. I hope it gives you encouragement to act for justice and democracy, wherever you are located in the world.
The corruption and entitlement will be so extreme that the eyes of many will be opened, not just to the lies that are at the heart of MAGA, but to the end goal of allowing the very few to profit at the expense of the many. More will come to realize that “drain the swamp” and “government efficiency” are covers for fraud and plunder operations.
And then, one day, there will be a reckoning. It will come after the revelations and realizations of the terrible damage done by this autocratic government to the social safety net, to data privacy, to our well-being, to the very concept of human dignity in labor and life.
The economic model is that of private equity, with the U.S. as a captive country in the mandibles of a spider.
Once the value (power and money) has been extracted and the population is helpless and impoverished, it can be run by an authoritarian and/or Christian oligarchy. That oligarchy is waiting in the wings.
Trump knows he's not the endgame. He's just the spider.
One day there will be a reckoning…