Why I Call Trump a "Competent Authoritarian"

Never Underestimate Him as a Propagandist

When Katie Phang interviewed me the other day on MSNBC, she was surprised that I called Trump a "competent authoritarian." It’s not a common take on the former president, whose failures are legion. And yet as a propagandist he has pulled off a rarity: convincing tens of millions of people of his lies —big and bigger— while operating in an open society with a pluralistic media environment. Most leaders who succeed at mass deception on this scale work within autocracies, not democracies.

Many of Trump's setbacks are delivered by the courts. Most recently, his lawsuit against CNN for defamation was dismissed by U.S. District Raag Singhal. As reported in Deadline, Trump objected to the use of the "Big Lie" term to describe his claims about the 2020 election, claiming that this created "a false and incendiary association" between him and Adolf Hitler's propaganda operations. Singh ruled that the use of such terms was a matter of opinion, not fact.

My Jan. 25, 2021 CNN op-ed, which was quoted in the lawsuit (along with statements by CNN journalists), holds interest as an exposé of Trump’s propaganda methods. It argued that Trump followers had been primed to believe the Big Lie by the thousands of smaller lies Trump told since 2016 about the corruption of American election.

As I wrote, "A leader’s Big Lie has no power and makes little sense on its own. It has traction only if the public has been fed many, many smaller lies. It relies on a larger network of falsehoods told by the leader and reinforced by his government officials and compliant media. The Big Lie works because it is part of an established alternate belief system – an edifice of lies, assembled piece by piece."

Since 2021, this "alternate belief system," has gained millions of additional adherents. Trump renewed older Republican claims about the corruption of the "deep state” and yoked them to his cult of victimhood, making them central to his effort to convince Americans that the "deep state" has a vendetta against him in particular.

Supporters show the media the party line of “witch hunt” at a Trump rally in Waco, TX, March 2023. Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images.

In doing so, Trump follows the authoritarian template of trying to convince the public of the bias and corruption of the press, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and any other institution that can expose and prosecute his crimes.

Authoritarians must also destroy the public's trust in such institutions so they become the sole reference point and the only person who can save the nation. This is one foundation of the leader cults that are crucial to the success of such propaganda operations. Trump's cult is amazingly robust considering the length of time he's been out of office.

Looking at Trump’s campaigns of mass deception through a comparative lens is also revealing in terms of his competency as a propagandist. As I wrote in 2021, Trump "had disadvantages with respect to the foreign autocrats he so admires. He had no state media, like China’s Xi Jinping...He had to govern and run for reelection in an open society with a relatively robust free press. Moreover, although he succeeded in making journalists into hate objects for many of his followers, he could not revoke or destroy the First Amendment."

Considering all that, he has had significant success. His followers are now indoctrinated to an extent that they see whatever happens to him as confirmation of his original claims that he is uniquely persecuted by a tyrannical Democrat regime. This is why each indictment merely boosts Trump's popularity with GOP voters. And it is why, in the wake of his indictment for mishandling classified documents, he has been able to convince almost half of Republican voters that he never had classified documents at his private residence (despite audio and other evidence to the contrary).

As I wrote in Strongmen about this century-old propaganda playbook: "The decay of truth and democratic dissolution proceed hand in hand, starting with the insurgent’s assertion that the establishment media delivers false or biased information, while he speaks the truth and risks everything to get the 'real facts' out. As his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him."

Even GOP elites, who know perfectly well that he is a serial liar, now espouse those falsehoods as party dogma. Defending Trump and validating his alternate worldview is now a full-time job for the Republican Party. Making party elites complicit with his crimes has ensured that they repeat his lies faithfully: they see their destinies as tied to his, and are personally invested in helping him to stay out of jail.

It's also a symptom of the cult environment that no other strong contender for the presidential nomination can emerge. The slogan in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy was “there is no alternative.” That’s the case in America today as well.

As for Trump’s grass-roots supporters, he has taken millions of them closer to a situation that the philosopher Hannah Arendt identified as critical for the success of authoritarian rule. As she wrote in the Origins of Totalitarianism, "the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”