A Wannabe Authoritarian Hard At Work

We are living through the playbook

By now you’ve likely heard about President Trump’s press conference yesterday, in which he blamed diversity programs at the Federal Aviation Administration for the tragic crash over the Potomac Wednesday—without a shred of evidence, naturally.

Well, as if we needed a reminder that things can always get dumber, it turns out that the program to offer FAA careers to people with disabilities—the program Trump specifically decried yesterday—was a Trump administration initiative from 2019.

Happy Friday.

---

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Scapegoating Minorities, Purging the Security Agencies

by William Kristol

Wannabe authoritarians have sought power in many places and at many times, and their modus operandi is no great mystery.

How do you undermine a healthy democracy? Scapegoating minorities is a good start. How do you consolidate power? Purging the security agencies is a key to success.

From the moment he came down the escalator in Trump Tower, Trump has understood the political utility of scapegoating minorities.

In the world according to Trump, immigrants, especially immigrants of color, account for the misery, the carnage all around us.

Who’s responsible for the plight of “Real Americans,” for the unprecedented oppression and persecution of the straight white Christian men who once reigned supreme in our fair land? Minorities.

What small group can be an easy object of a Two Minutes Hate, to use Orwell’s conceit from Nineteen Eighty-Four? Transgender individuals.

What programs can we blame for any disaster? How about DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion?

In the first two weeks of his second term, Trump has accelerated the demonizing and intensified the scapegoating. Immigrants have been a singular target of many of his executive orders. But so have transgender individuals, and so too have diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Yesterday from the White House podium, Trump blamed DEI programs for Wednesday night’s terrible aviation disaster in Washington. This was an utter invention by Trump. But brazen lying is part of the authoritarian playbook, and he ran the play shamelessly.

The scapegoating that is so important to weaponizing grievances and undermining civic spirit in a democracy—and then to winning power and maintaining public support—is flourishing under Trump’s direction.

And the purges, especially in the power agencies, that are so important to securing governmental power for the aspiring authoritarian, are underway as well. First we had the dismissal of nearly a dozen career prosecutors at the Justice Department. Last night we learned that key senior career employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation—“executive assistant directors” who oversee criminal and national security investigations—as well as high-ranking officials in field offices, have been told to resign or retire by Monday. “The massive law enforcement bureau is being run by an acting director and an acting deputy director,” the Washington Post explained. “It is highly unusual for senior staffing changes to be made under such circumstances at the FBI, a law enforcement agency that is supposed to be insulated from politics.”

This morning, we were treated to another quasi-purge. The top career staffer at the Treasury Department was expected to resign because he objected to Elon Musk’s attempts to access sensitive information related to payments from programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Such purges are highly unusual. The attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power was also highly unusual. The mass pardons of hundreds of violent supporters of the president was highly unusual. The nomination of utterly unqualified but utterly obedient apparatchiks like Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel to the highest positions in key security agencies is highly unusual.

But none of this is unusual for wannabe authoritarians. It’s a pretty standard part of their playbook. It may simply seem unusual here in America because we have limited experience with attempted authoritarian takeovers of power in our democracy.

Until now.

---

Quick Hits

GABBARD’S FAILED PLEA OF IGNORANCE: Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence has a hazy recollection of the violent, anti-American thugs she meets. Per the Washington Post:

In her confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, senators repeatedly pressed Tulsi Gabbard on her highly scrutinized trip to Syria in 2017, where she met President Bashar al-Assad and others, including a Syrian cleric who had previously threatened to unleash suicide bombers in the United States if the American military intervened in his country.

When asked by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) whether she was aware of the threat made by Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, who was then Grand Mufti of Syria, Gabbard—President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence—answered: “I was not and had not heard that until today.”

But documents reviewed by The Washington Post indicate that Gabbard was aware of Hassoun’s threats soon after she returned from her controversial visit to the country in January 2017.

What’s it called when you knowingly and materially lie to the Senate?

---

DON’T CALL IT A BRIBE: Chris Hayes raised an interesting question the other day: “Can the president just spend all his time in office suing people and then use the litigation as a ‘legal’ way of accepting bribes via ‘settlements’?”

As a legal matter, I’m sure you could find someone to make a good argument that a favorable settlement could be a bribe—but then again, it would be up to Congress to impeach the president for bribery, and we all know that ain’t happening. So, practically, it doesn’t matter if it’s bribery or not.

That appears to be the conclusion Paramount’s lawyers have reached, too. The New York Times reports:

When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet.

Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

Among the various ways Trump devised for people to shovel money into his pockets, this one seems cumbersome, slow, and very public. But if it works it also has the added benefit of utterly humiliating every journalist who works at CBS.

---

WHAT’S IN A VOTE?: The Tennessee General Assembly, in which Republicans control a supermajority, just approved an immigration bill that would, among other things, make it a crime for local elected officials to vote for “sanctuary” policies. “Tennessee has long banned such policies,” explains the Tennessean, “which generally limit how much local or state governments are willing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.”

Just one Republican voted against the measure.

The bill is likely to face litigation for violating the Constitution. Again, it criminalizes a vote. It also violates basic logic: If a city council member is taking a yes-or-no vote, but to vote yes is a crime, is it really a vote?

---

Cheap Shots