The Trump-Vance Campaign as Rehearsal for Autocracy
They can condition Americans to accept Fascism in the future, but they cannot take away our ability to vote in the present to continue our democracy
In the lead-up to this fateful election, I wanted to step back and reflect on the meaning of the two campaigns that represent such starkly different visions of America. With Donald Trump’s desire to be a dictator so central to his platform, this election is a referendum on whether Americans want to continue to live in a democracy, or whether they prefer some form of “strongman” rule.
Yesterday’s essay argued that the Harris-Walz campaign has laid the foundation for a pro-democracy movement of the type America has long needed. It offered space for Republicans who oppose MAGA, creating some flexibility in a rigid bipartisan system, and it affirmed common values of patriotism, rule of law, and decency in the face of an existential threat to our democracy.
Today’s essay contends that the Trump-Vance electoral effort is not just a disinformation and radicalization vehicle under the guise of a campaign, but also a rehearsal for autocracy: a preparation of Americans for the kinds of corrupt and violent acts and callous states of mind that have supported autocracies abroad.
I wrote about the plans of Trumpism as a “counterrevolution” in an essay for The New Republic, and we have a good idea of what this American autocracy would like to do. It would start with a likely declaration of a state of emergency on or around “Day One” —this phrase being the Project 2025 and MAGA codeword for authoritarian takeover. We can easily guess what the trumped-up grounds for this emergency would be: non-existent Marxist and “radical left” threats, fake immigrant invasions, invented plots from Democratic “enemies within,” aided by foreign “globalist warmongers.”
The bureaucratic “army” (Project 2025’s label for its cadres of politicized civil servants) could then deploy to “dismantle the administrative state” —a Bannon phrase become code for the destruction of liberal democratic models and institutions of governance and the creation of some form of autocracy.
We also have a sense of what the outcomes would be over time: the suppression of reproductive and voting rights, the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence, the oligarchic plunder of the environment, the reversal of economic prosperity, the targeting of critics for prison and perhaps execution by firing squads —a recurrent Trump fantasy—the possible use of the military against protesters and for mass deportations, and many more tragedies familiar from the history of authoritarianism.
We know this because the aggressors have gone out of their way to advertise their plans. Authoritarians often tell you what they are going to do as a form of intimidation and a method of conditioning. Treating extreme ideas and acts as normal, whether by envisioning and calling for the repression of targeted groups (Trump has done this consistently at his rallies) or making casual references to deporting 15 million people (as Project 2025 does in its training manuals for “conservative governance”) makes the exceptional and unthinkable into the expected and familiar, helping those cruelties and repressions to be accepted in the future.
The pre-authoritarian takeover rationalization among followers that “he’s only joking” becomes the post-authoritarian takeover rationalization that “he told us he was going to do that and now he’s keeping his word.”
George Conway’s remark on X that we might think of the Trump campaign as “a kind of DEI program for sociopaths” refers to this mass conditioning to cruelty, but the Trump-Vance campaign has rehearsed autocratic mentalities and power arrangements in myriad ways.
The most obvious example has been the use of campaign rituals such as caucuses, rallies, and conventions, to cement Trump’s control over GOP elites, including through practices of ritual humiliation.
Who can forget that chilling August 2023 debate among contenders for the Republican nomination? During that debate, which Trump did not bother to attend, the Fox News moderator asked those present whether they would support the former president’s candidacy even if he became a convicted felon –a question that proved prescient.
All of the contenders except former New Jersey and Arkansas Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchison raised their hands, totally undercutting their own power as Trump competitors. The public display of submission to the leader, even and especially if he is not present (that was the genius of the Hitler salute used in Nazi Germany), is a staple of authoritarian leader-elite dynamics.
It was the real point of the event as orchestrated by Trump-loyal Fox, and it set the tone for a campaign that has trotted out powerful Republican elites to lie for and about Trump on command, rehearsing the kinds of party-leader dynamics that mark autocracies around the world.
The campaign has also boosted Trump’s personality cult. Authoritarians need the population to believe that they alone are qualified to lead the party and the nation. Thus is born the theme of TINA (There Is No Alternative).
TINA is why there is never talk of successors among authoritarians, no matter how incompetent they become. It is why party politics devolves into performances of loyalty —loyalty being something that must be earned every day and every hour. TINA is why, as Trump degenerates before our eyes, his subordinates must be ever more slavish in their displays of institutionalized lying about his competence and what he will do for America, lest the whole project of anticipating an anti-democratic future to be realized by Trump falls apart.
Elections, of course, are all about giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders. They are inevitably about the future: people vote for candidates who talk about what they will do for communities, cities, and the country. Yet elections happen in the present, and our actions in the present are what determines the future.
Trump may fantasize about Americans never having to vote again, and he and his allies may have prepared millions to act like Fascists if he gets back into office. But we are not there yet, and I hope that we will never be.
Each one of us can cast our ballots, because right now, right here in America, we are a democracy. And all the prophecies and threats and propaganda of Trump and MAGA cannot change that.
IMO, Project 2025 is NOT conservative in any way. It is radical. I'm glad we have the opportunity to vote, and I have done so. I have no clue how to deal with reality if trump wins this election. I hope to God he does not.
I'm currently reading accounts by holocaust survivors and the contrast with current politics and rhetoric is surreal, it's almost like a time warp. like Ruth says, we are not there yet, we have the ground work laid to maintain and strengthen our democratic society and confidence in our fellow citizens to see the choice clearly and to choose wisely.