Wrecking America So That Autocrats Can Prosper: My Q1 2025 Forecast

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Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place today, Friday, Feb. 14, 1-2pmET. It is Valentine’s Day and this meeting will be a gift for all of us. Our guest, Graci Harkema, is an international public speaker and best-selling author of Rising: From a Mud Hut to the Boardroom—and Back Again. The book tells the story of her journey from the Congo and adoption by a missionary family to her inspirational work in the United States. She lectures to Fortune 500 companies and small businesses on resilience, inclusiveness and having the courage to be our authentic selves at work and in life. She has been featured in Forbes, Harvard Business Review and Medium.

If you are feeling depressed or discouraged, remember that whatever happens we will go through it together. As I wrote in my last essay, I truly believe that the magnitude of ruin and chaos and corruption will cause a reckoning that will lead us to a more just society and a reimagined democracy. In the meantime, we have work to do, and we have to take care of ourselves and each other.

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Today I am sending you the Q1 2025 forecasts I sent to Lucid’s premium subscribers. This tier of subscribers has a small-group zoom with me after I send out my quarterly forecast. Normally this is paywalled, but given the gravity of what is going on and our need to understand and see forward as much as possible, I am releasing it to everyone. If you want to upgrade to this tier of membership and receive future forecasts, you can choose premium in the menu of choices using the button above.

Keep in mind that I wrote it four days after the Inauguration.

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Here are a few Q1 2025 forecasts, made with this caveat: This is a very volatile time given the Blitzkrieg of executive orders and other actions that seek to quickly transform America and its relations with foreign powers. Many of these actions will stand, but others are already being challenged in court. There will be a tidal wave of litigation in the future that will prevent implementation of some measures.

The point of the volume of these executive and other Republican actions, independent of their individual content, is to stretch our resources thin, make it difficult for us to focus and prioritize, and overwhelm us to the point that we want to give up. The increase in threat and possibilities of physical violence –the release of the Jan. 6 thugs was an effective action in this regard—is also a deterrent to pushback for many people.

There is a logic that unites what is unfolding. I will be writing about some of this for Lucid in the coming weeks, but I wanted you to have the preview.

A unifying theme of the actions taken by the new Donald Trump administration and its Project 2025 and other allies is wrecking the United States as a democratic power, to the benefit of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and other autocratic adversaries, and creating the conditions for the U.S. elites and oligarchs to prosper.

This goes beyond the destruction of democracy as a political system: the kneecapping of public health, disaster response, climate crisis mitigation, and global influence (through the suspension of foreign aid) affect every area of civil society and government. Putin’s dream is to make the United States into a version of 1990s Russia: Trump and his allies seem to be motivated by a similar goal.

I have no words for the multiplying tragedies set into motion, in the fields of science and medicine and climate alone, by the cancellation of NIH funding, the silencing of public communications about disease outbreaks, and the rollback of support for green energy initiatives.

The main immediate aim, of course, is the consolidation of executive authority. America will now experience personalist rule, which is a form of authoritarian governance that rotates around consolidating the leader’s personal grasp on power, with loyalty to him valued way more than competence (as the appointment of Pete Hegseth as Sec. of Defense shows). The purpose of personalist rule is to rearrange government and society to allow the leader and his allies to enrich themselves, and convert institutions into tools of their personal corruption, retribution and revenge schemes.

The leader’s private legal and financial situations also figure into the formulation of national and foreign policy. International affairs are often “privatized,” as personal relationships of autocrats are managed behind the scenes, meaning who is the Secretary of State or the Ambassador can matter less (one reason Trump appointed Marco Rubio, a man he has viewed as “little Marco” in the past, to this key post).

This was the situation with Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin. Berlusconi shut out the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from most dealings with Russia, relying on private visits to manage the deals and the dialogue. I recount this in detail in my book Strongmen, and it is an example to keep in mind when considering Trump’s relationships with Netanyahu, Putin, Kim, Xi, Orban, etc.

Trump and Xi during Trump’s first term. Nicholas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.

The Trump administration’s assaults on democratic institutions and civic society will boost autocracies and anti-democratic parties around the world. Republicans have long been immersed in transnational networks dedicated to wrecking democracy and now this can be an official part of foreign policy. America will increasingly be part of this autocratic axis.

Jump-starting America’s participation in anti-democratic internationalism is also the rationale for the choice of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI; in this framework, her ties to Hindu nationalism, the Kremlin, and the former Syrian dictatorship are assets, not liabilities. Even if she is not confirmed, look for someone else with similar (if more muted) sympathies to come into that position.

John Sipher, a former CIA agent, and General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the CIA and the NSA write that “chaos, incompetence and a move toward cronyism” will prevail if Gabbard becomes DNI, with “intelligence designed to protect American lives…twisted to fit Mr. Trump’s personal interests.”

These situations will mark governance more generally, to the huge detriment of American power in the world and Americans at home. It’s evident that every destruction of climate policy is a gift to Xi and China, which can move forward with its capture of the energy space, just as rerouting part of the U.S. military to domestic concerns and reducing its presence as a democratic guardian abroad will encourage Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and other leaders to act on their imperialist plans.

We will also witness how authoritarians also promote moral and civic collapse by decreeing the end of quaint democratic ideas of conflicts of interest, professional ethics, respect for differences, and solidarity. The purpose of purges of the civil service is to shift the bureaucratic and governance culture in this direction rapidly.

In the end, authoritarians ask us not just to betray each other, by getting people to see their compatriots as enemies, but to betray ourselves as well. Trump may have used ritual humiliation to complete his ownership of the GOP, but his targets stepped onto that stage voluntarily and accepted their self-abasement as the price of remaining in power.

And even the mightiest supplicants, such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, will find out that no one is safe with a strongman, no matter how much money you give him and how many lies of his you allow to circulate. Elon Musk is an exception due to his high degree of enmeshment for years with the U.S. government (through defense and other contracts), and the unfortunate dependence of that government on his products and inventions, which is a situation independent of Trump.

This is not a pretty picture, but it’s important that we are prepared and understand the logic and just what we are up against as defenders of democracy at home and abroad.