Welcome to Autocratic Backfire
Imposing their will on the nation and the world is what matters to strongmen, but destructive policies made in an echo chamber have consequences
Many people are now waking up each day and opening news apps with trepidation, thinking, “Now what? What crazy and upsetting thing will this Trump administration do today?” This is not surprising. President Donald Trump, unelected co-leader Elon Musk, and his Cabinet of fanatics have brought new levels of instability and chaos to American governance and the world.
America is living through a compressed arc of the process of autocratic capture and, now, with President Trump’s inane tariffs tanking the economy, the process of autocratic backfire as well.
Autocratic capture describes the executive branch’s attempts to control and politicize the judiciary, the media, and government institutions, turning them into tools of the leader and his cronies.
Autocratic backfire occurs when narcissistic leaders have insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with sycophants and loyalists. No one will tell them the truth, and religious collaborators tell them they are in office by divine will, and so they also end up believing their own propaganda about their invincibility, genius instincts, and infallibility. Then the stage is set for them to make momentous decisions on the basis of erroneous beliefs or personal ideological obsessions.
Normally the cycle of leaders amassing power and creating an echo chamber that leads to faulty policy takes years to develop, but America has accelerated this cycle.
Autocratic Capture
In less than 90 days, we have experienced what in other countries has evolved over several years. The scale and speed of change in America has no parallel in the early years of the governments of autocrats who came to power via elections, such as Vladimir Putin or Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
At the administrative and institutional level, what we are experiencing resembles the aftermath of a coup, in which drastic changes to the state and its personnel are executed quickly and the autocratic aggressors avail themselves of the element of surprise to destabilize and disorient the opposition and the population.
The Trump-Musk Sabotage America Syndicate has operated at a dizzying pace to wreck government as we knew it and remake it into a power-consolidation, personal-enrichment and foreign autocratic-empowerment vehicle.
To throughly kneecap the ingenuity, well-being, and productivity of America as a democratic nation, and isolate the nation from beneficial circuits of knowledge exchange, they have paralyzed medical, scientific, environmental and other research by pulling federal funding, dismantled public health systems to create the conditions for mass outbreaks of disease, gone after universities and imprisoned foreign students, rolled back national defenses against malign foreign influence and cybercrime, and fired competent people who don’t fit the MAGA vision of America as an autocratic White Patriarchal Power.
In February, I forecast that the magnitude of chaos and corruption would eventually cause a reckoning with Trumpism in America. The unexpectedly robust popular participation in more than 1,300 Hands Off! protests held on April 5, together with negative business and financial community reactions to the disastrous tariffs, suggest that disenchantment with MAGA is already growing.
Autocratic Backfire
“Mussolini is always right” was the slogan in Fascist Italy, but Mussolini ended up being very wrong because, like other autocrats, he was able to act on his worst impulses, such as initiating capricious or ill-timed military engagements that could not be sustained and which bankrupted the economy.
Yet in Italy and Nazi Germany, it took being bombed by the Allies in World War Two to start the disintegration of the personality cults and the emergence of the population from the cocoon of propaganda. ”The Führer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it,” said a German woman, formerly an admirer of Adolf Hitler, from her bomb shelter in 1944.
Autocratic backfire often results in military or economic disasters, and authoritarian history is full of policies and projects championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect.
Mobutu Sese Seko caused a debt crisis with his kleptocracy and massive projects for the Congo River. Idi Amin ordered the deportation of the entire Asian community in Uganda in 1972. This community was the backbone of commerce and business in Uganda, and soon Amin had to invite them back to stave off the business and financial disasters wrought by his decision. The deleterious consequences of “Erdoganomics” in Turkey are a more recent example.
Both Mobutu and Amin ended up fleeing into exile, but the consequences for the autocrat depend on how entrenched he is, the strength of any remaining democratic opposition, the existence of media outlets able to tell the truth about the outcomes of his policies, and the robustness of his personality cult.
The other element causing autocratic backfire is the lack of planning and the capricious way these bad policies are often implemented. Strongmen specialize in doing unexpected things, and because they are accountable to no one they also have made unpredictability and upheaval a feature rather than a bug of their mode of governance. As related by the political scientist Mansour El-Kikhia in his book Libya’s Gaddafi: The Politics of Contradiction, the Libyan tyrant took chaos to an extreme, repealing entire legal frameworks of the Libyan state from one day to the next.
Trump and his “Beautiful” Tariffs: A Case Study of Autocratic Backfire
While President Trump does not lead a one-party dictatorship —today you don’t need to suppress other parties to exercise authoritarian governance— in his temperament and attitudes he is in the tradition of leaders past and present who “have ideas of grandeur, think that they have the answer to complicated problems and in a sense lose touch with reality,” in the words of Amin’s personal physician, Dr. David Barkham.
This is one of many reasons Trump is a protagonist of my book, Strongmen, and we should never forget how chaotic and destructive Trump’s first term was, and how many warnings we had from informed people about his dangerous methods and character.
In August 2016, before Trump even took office, former CIA head Michael Morell published a New York Times op-ed which listed these habits and qualities as making Trump unfit for office:
his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.
These exact qualities are how we arrived at the tariffs, which economist Lawrence Summers has termed “masochistic” for their wipeout of a robust economy.
For weeks, I had worried that the extraordinary empowerment of President Trump was leading him into a dangerous state of mind —a state that autocrats normally reach only after years in power. The high-profile capitulations of law firms, universities, media companies, and other elite sectors, the ease with which his collaborator Musk has been able to capture the data and financial systems of a superpower, and Trump knowing that he has immunity for official acts, courtesy of the Supreme Court, have left him feeling omnipotent and also infallible.
This is when authoritarians do risky and idiotic things, such as threatening to take control of Greenland “one way or another,” menacing Canada, a major trade partner, or engaging in nonsensical economic policy measures on a grand (and grandiose) scale.
Trump’s insistence on barreling forward with the tariffs, despite warnings from many economists that they could inflict huge harm to the American and global economy and to world trade, is a another example of how autocratic intransigence and unwillingness to listen to others create real-world misery —misery that has political consequences in the long run.
Yet for the strongman, safe in his bubble of narcissistic willfulness and fantasy, being able to impose his unorthodox and highly personal policies on the world is what matters. When Trump writes that the tariffs are “a beautiful thing to behold,” I hear his satisfaction at forcing dozens of foreign countries to experience his power.
But I also hear the sound of another case study of autocratic backfire in the making. While the form it will take and the timing are uncertain, if history is any guide, a reckoning will come. .
Thank you for this. Isn't one of the reasons this is happening so quickly here compared to other autocracies is the absolute disinformation/lying campaign on social media and right wing media fed by lightning speed algorithms which is a relatively recent development in information decimation? One group of voters believes in this cultish reality and the rest oof the country is appalled and scared. What do we do about that? It seems paramount.
Excellent post that is spot on. I'm concerned that Trump's chaos-making is his prescription for declaring a national emergency/martial law. We shall see.