Shakedown Politics, Sabotage, Self-Enrichment: How to Talk About Trump and Musk's Authoritarian Activities
Finding the right language and concepts is key to effective messaging and resistance
Autocrats specialize in bringing the unthinkable into being, and in disappearing people, words, and things that threaten them. Two months into the Trump-Musk administration, as extreme and outrageous events become a daily occurrence, the silence of many is deafening. The U.S. government is censoring the language used in official documents and threatening people into states of self-censorship; others tell me they are “speechless” at the rapid and wrenching changes in United States domestic and foreign policy.
So I decided to write an essay to give us the tools to speak about what is happening to America and its relations with foreign powers, so we can formulate messaging and resistance strategies adapted to our specific realities. I offer four frames and concepts that describe the qualities and operations of this government: Engineered Incompetence, National Sabotage for the Benefit of Foreign Autocrats, Plunder and Shakedown Operations, and Leader(s) Self-Enrichment.
How the U.S. is Innovating the Authoritarian Playbook
I have been warning about President Donald Trump and the GOP since 2016, so I expected the attacks on the legal system, language, civil rights, transgender individuals, immigrants, education, federal employees, and more. Some of this borrows from foreign authoritarian experiences, and some builds on a long American history of racist attacks and policies, as Sherrilyn Ifill’s latest essay shows.
Yet Trump and Musk are not merely creating another autocracy along the lines of Hungary or Turkey, with inspiration from South African apartheid and the Jim Crow South. They are innovating the authoritarian playbook with their power-sharing agreement and their chainsaw and wrecking-ball tactics.
The speed and scope of these authoritarian interventions surpasses the early actions of leaders such as Erdogan and Putin: they resemble the aftermath of the coups I have studied, or a process of regime change, as Anne Applebaum has also suggested.
Even if we understand the long-term dystopian political designs of Musk, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin and other technofascists, we still need language to talk about what’s happening now. We must find the right words to communicate, including to habitual non-voters, the stakes of this new kind of coup and the consequences of unleashing digital shock troops on our federal bureaucracy – the data capture and physical lockouts and purging of staff, including at the nonprofit U.S. Institute of Peace.
No One Elected Musk: Messaging America’s Leaders Number One Problem
How do we talk about the entrenchment of an unelected individual at the head of U.S. government? I always found the Putin personality cult product, Leaders Number One cologne, ridiculous, including for its odd use of the plural. But now the joke is on us because we have an actual Leaders Number One problem.
Instead of one person at the top of the “power vertical,” as it is referred to in Russia, we have two dangerous and damaged individuals making decisions. We have two people speaking at Cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office, and two people meeting with foreign leaders as representatives of the U.S. government.
The normalization of this exceptional situation means that traditional resistance strategies directed at subtracting elite and grassroots support for the singular strongman have to be rethought.
Here is the Leaders Number One duo performing for the press in the Oval Office in February:
Here are four frames for thinking about current U.S. “governance.” They are designed to spark discussion and resistance messaging and postures adapted to the realities of our place and time.
Engineered Incompetence
The news that Sec. of Defense Pete Hegseth and other luminaries of the Trump-Musk administration were using Signal —an encrypted message system, but not an official government channel—to talk about war plans for Yemen bears out this essay I wrote five days before the inauguration. It introduces the idea of engineered incompetence, a state of affairs found in many authoritarian states and now being revealed as a defining trait of the Trump-Musk administration.
The essay was about Hegseth, but the concept applies to DNI head Tulsi Gabbard and many other Trump appointees. As I wrote in the New York Times on Jan. 30:
Authoritarian states abound with examples of engineered incompetence, when leaders appoint individuals to Cabinet positions who lack the skill-set and high-level connections needed to succeed. This makes those individuals more dependent on the leader and creates more space for the leader’s powerful cronies to influence the institution to their own benefit (one could imagine that Elon Musk, who is an interested party due to his many defense contracts, might prefer Hegseth as Secretary of Defense over a tough and seasoned professional).
A Plunder and Shakedown Operation
Authoritarianism is about taking away the rights of the many to give the powerful few unrestricted and unregulated liberties to exploit and plunder the environment, the workplace, and the vulnerable (as traffickers, abusers, and more). Many actions already taken by Trump and Musk, and the personal histories and attitudes of many of their appointees and enablers, seem to further this philosophy and these goals.
Plunder also describes the activities of many foreign autocrats, who seize private assets, drain resources from state agencies, and exfiltrate the money offshore (a Putin specialty). Autocrats exploit labor, natural resources, and bodies with impunity, because they have amassed enough power to do so.
Shakedown politics is the other frame for considering this administration’s “approach” to domestic and foreign policy. The Oval Office spectacle arranged by Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the general tenor of their “diplomacy” —submit to Putin’s demands or we take half of your rare earth minerals— is one example; the demands made of Columbia University —comply or say goodbye to your $400 million of federal funding—are another.
In the corruption chapter of Strongmen, I mention the “overlap” between the methods of organized crime and authoritarianism. It is significant that Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist who is not given to hyperbole, has written several Substack essays on Trump’s “gangster boss” behavior towards Ukraine, warning that Taiwan could be the next “victim” of “Trump shakedowns.”
Why are we normalizing this by using the frame of traditional foreign policy to talk about Trump’s actions?
A National Sabotage Effort, for the Benefit of Foreign Autocrats
Trump and Musk are trying to eradicate or re-engineer entire government entities and agencies crucial to the national future, such as the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. This ambition to uproot and destroy government at scale usually happens in situations of regime change or collapse.
This is not the “small government” envisioned by neoliberals, libertarians, and old-school conservatives; this is the desire to annihilate all those parts of government that serve the people (at home, or abroad, as with USAID) and remake the institutions they do retain, like the intelligence sector and the judiciary, as entities that serve the leader(s) and his allies.
This sabotage of the country in vital areas such as public health, education, scientific research, and climate crisis mitigation, injects chaos and uncertainty into what was, just a few months ago, one of the world’s strongest economies. The eventual degradation of the population through policies that promote disease, impoverishment, and disaster can be termed a biopolitical intervention.
It’s obvious who benefits from all of this: Russia, China, and other autocratic powers that have long wanted to take America down and can move in to dominate where America’s footprint is erased. Trump and Musk are the vehicles of that process.
A Leader(s) Enrichment Vehicle
Corruption should be front and center in messaging about this “administration,” not least because Trump and Musk are refreshing the old autocratic scam of claiming to pursue “anti-corruption” reforms but actually enacting measures that facilitate corruption and stand to enrich them and their cronies. Hungary is an example of the consequences. The “spectacular enrichment” of the family and inner circle of GOP muse Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, has now become the subject of a documentary.
Trump is in this tradition. As for other authoritarians, the idea of conflicts of interest is foreign to him. He spent almost one-third of his time during the years 2017-2019 visiting Trump-branded properties. During his first term, he likely received more than $13 million from China and other foreign nations, while Ivanka and Jared Kushner made as much as $640 million.
That may be nothing if the leader enrichment machine that has geared up since Jan 20 works smoothly. Unelected co-leader Musk is poised to make more billions from U.S. government contracts, while Trump has his crypto business and whatever foreign partnerships and products may be in the works. Olga Lautman’s Tyranny Tracker newsletter has a daily press digest focused on corruption activities.
America may be innovating the authoritarian playbook, but we can find the language to communicate frankly with others about the nature and activities of this government. That way we can develop effective messaging and mount a resistance campaign adapted to our specific situation.
Israel has a different political system than ours and faces multiple crises we don’t have the experience to understand fully from afar. Still, it’s stunning to observe how little public opinion and mass opposition demonstrations every day matter to the Netanyahu government. (His approval among all Israelis is below 30 percent.) On the contrary, he’s on a roll to destroy all checks and balances on him.
I fear we have the same mindset in the Trump regime - no matter how public opinion turns against the destruction of democracy and accountability, the billionaires and autocrats can buy outcomes and oppress opponents. How do we navigate a corrupt, lawless, powerful government and change the trajectory back to a Constitutional Republic?
Authoritarian or cult? Doesn’t an authoritarian need the mental capacity for his depredations? Jim Jones imposed strict loyalty and his word was law. Trump seems to be doing the same … or allowing others to do it in his name. Or am I unnecessarily stuck on semantics?