Donald Trump’s Steps Down the Well-Trod Path to Authoritarian Rule

Consummate rule-breaker Trump follows The Rules.

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In 2015, it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious political force. Shocked pundits took to calling his campaign unprecedented. In using this word, they did their readers a disservice.

Only those who had been paying no attention to the global authoritarian revolution could imagine that Trump had no precedent. In reality, the decade before Trump’s rise saw the world swept by a particular species of authoritarianism — an entertaining but hollow form of plebiscitarianism, one that replicates, spreads, and consolidates itself through the new technologies of the 21st century.

Many Americans saw Trump as something entirely unfamiliar to their political experience and thus wholly unpredictable. I didn’t. I’d spent the decade before his rise in Turkey, reporting on the rise and consolidation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s regime. Trump evinced in me not surprise, but déja vu. I’d experienced every stage of phenomenon Trump represented a decade before it reached American soil.

Turkish politics strike most Americans as distant, alien, and irrelevant to them. But they are not. Erdoğan was following a template pioneered by Vladimir Putin and used by dozens of aspiring Caesars around the globe. Millions have now lived through this authoritarian cascade, in a long list of countries from Hungary to the Philippines.

I wrote the following “rules” just before Trump was elected for the first time. They were the prologue to what I imagined would be a book, one that warned Americans that Trump was anything but unprecedented. But publishers weren’t interested: They thought Trump was just a flash in the pan — and they thought nothing that I described could ever happen in America.

As Trump prepares to take power again, these rules — whether you see them as prescriptive or descriptive — seem worth revisiting.

Your Goal

Amass as much power as much as possible within the formal parameters of a liberal democracy.

The Rules

1. Begin with a voice

You are the providential conduit of the “real people” in their struggle against a nebulous class of “elites.”

2. Rewrite history

If the lessons of history suggest your ideas will lead to disaster, change history, not your ideas.

Remember: The people have been robbed of their greatness by a series of catastrophes and betrayals.
Remember: The authoritarian past wasn’t that bad. Or if it was, it wasn’t our fault.
Nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia!
The acknowledgement of responsibility for historic crimes is self-hatred, or a lack of patriotism that is dangerous to the health of the polity.
Examples you can follow:
Don’t worry, hardly anyone remembers history well enough to know better.

3. Magnify ethnic, racial, religious, or class divisions

Or all at once, if you can swing it. Just make sure people are hopping mad at each other.

4. Magnify fear of foreigners and outsiders

The Jews are always a good target, but if you don’t have enough, try Muslims.
Whoever they are, they’re demonic in their sexual rapaciousness.
They’re raping our women, taking our jobs, cooking with weird-smelling spices, reproducing like rodents, sucking the welfare state dry, and flushing baby wipes down toilets even though they’ve been warned it will clog the pipes. They’re a fifth column, they’ve infiltrated our government, they won’t learn our language, they’re sponging off welfare, they’re terrorists, and they’re screwing up the whole grade curve by studying so much.
Remember: The hordes are always at the gate.

5. Destroy public confidence in elites and institutions.

Helpful ideas with a proven track record:
- These institutions have been involved in a dastardly plot.
- They’re corrupt. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. If you keep repeating it, people will believe it. (Besides, it’s usually true enough.)
- Blame them for everything, even things you did. (No one remembers these details.)
It helps if your institutions and elites discredit themselves. But whether or not they do, there will always be some screw-up you can conflate with the whole. Make it your symbol of elite depravity and institutional corruption.
Remember these time-tested principles:
- No abstract ideas. Appeal to the emotions.
- Constantly repeat a small number of things, using the same simple phrases.
- Criticize your opponents incessantly.
- Pick out one special enemy for special vilification.
- Label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans:
  1. These must evoke responses that the audience has already internalized..
  2. They must be capable of being easily learned.
  3. They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations.
  4. They must be boomerang-proof.
Destroy confidence in the idea of objective truth:
- Muddy the waters so thoroughly with lies, counter-accusations, and projecton that people conclude nothing is true and everything is possible.
- Train them to believe they’ll never figure it out anyway, it’s all too complicated, and who knows who’s telling the truth — so they may as well go back to watching the game.

(The rules above may be followed sequentially or simultaneously. But do not skip this essential work of rewriting the past, inculcating the populace with hyper-nationalism and irredentism, and discrediting the elites, who are not “political opponents whose ideas you criticize,” but “idiots and traitors.” These steps are essential.)

6. Win the election.

However narrow your victory (and however achieved; if it was rigged, accuse the other side of rigging!), it was an overwhelming mandate for every one of your policies.
The people who didn’t vote for you are traitors. Screw them.
Your party would be nothing without you. Don’t tolerate any backtalk.

7. Secure the executive.

Target numero uno: the Interior Ministry (or equivalent). Neutralize the watchdogs. Get rid of the inspectors. Office of ‘Ethics’? What is this, a philosophy class? What a waste of taxpayer money! (Did you remember to destroy public confidence in the institutions?)
Get control of the statistical agency. You have no need for unpleasant news.
Does it regulate industry? You need to control it. Loyalists only.
Does it decide who gets audited? Staff it with your boys.
Neutralize the intelligence agencies. You don’t need their advice, and you sure don’t need their questions about your friends.

8. Fill the judiciary with your loyalists.

Smear and discredit any judge who seems too independent.
Change the rules for judicial appointments. Call it “cleansing the Communist holdovers in the judiciary.” (If you were never ruled by communists, pretend you were and call them “radical leftists.”)
When judges issue rulings you don’t like, it’s “a judicial coup,” a “judicial autocracy,” “against the will of the people,” and cause for sweeping legal reform.

9. Empower a loyal oligarchic class.

Loyalists get juicy government contracts and tenders. The more loyal, the better the rewards.
Create sweet little tax loopholes for them, too. Don’t worry, no one’s going to look at the fine print.
Ensure the regulatory environment is favorable to their interests. (Did you remember Rule 7?)
Focus on the oligarchs who own the media!
Remember: Stay positive! The punishment for crossing you should be awful, but the rewards for being your crony should exceed anything these mooks could ever dream of achieving on their own. Spread it around! Investors will always prefer profits to political fights.

10. Neutralize your enemies.

Punish the unsubmissive with punitive taxes and spurious lawsuits. Use charges of tax evasion. Or something else! Whether they’ve done it or not, the legal fees and the stress will be punishment enough.
No government contracts for them, obviously. Use your power over the regulatory agencies to ruin their businesses, too. (Might they be polluters? Is their product harmful to the nation’s youth?)
Don’t hold a grudge. If they come around to your way of thinking, their problems go away.
It should be easy and rewarding to support you and really unpleasant to oppose you.

11. Cultivate some thugs.

You need some lowlifes with a taste for wet work.

Remember: plausible deniability.
They should be smart enough to take the initiative when they hear about an unpatriotic judge or a lying journalist, but dumb enough not to demand a cut of the action.

12. Turn the legislature into a rubber stamp.

Legislators are like rats in a Skinner box. Use rewards and punishments liberally until they know what to do without being told. For punishment, smear and harangue (remember, you are the people, so anyone who defies your will is defying the will of the people); find candidates to run against them and use party money to finance their bids; accuse them of working for foreign paymasters — if you do this right, they’ll be afraid to leave their houses for fear one of your thugs will get it into his head to rid you of your problem. (It’s excellent if this happens once or twice: It really encourages the others.)

But never forget your friends: Make sure patriotic legislators get a cut of the action.

13. Get the military under your thumb.

Never take your eye off of them. These are the guys with the guns and one day they’ll be the only ones who can stop you. Get rid of anyone who might be tempted to “save democracy.”
- Now is the time — don’t wait.
- Do not allow yourself to be swayed by sissy considerations like “military readiness” or “morale.” What good is a ready military that topples you?
- Replace the top brass with people who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of. The more unqualified, the better. If you promote total losers, they’ll insert burning embers in their orifices for you: You’re the only reason they’d ever get this chance to lord it over all the people who told them they’d never amount to anything. (This will give them an especially keen nose for anyone who needs humiliating or firing.)
Note: If the military is popular, this can look all wrong. Did you remember to destroy confidence in this institution? It helps if they’ve staged a coup before, or lost a few battles or even a war (even if this was actually the fault of the politicians). Blame them for that. If they’re heroes, though, be sure to thoroughly tarnish their records before you purge them.
If you’re really worried, accuse them of plotting a coup. Make sure the accusations are lurid. Follow this up with show trials. (Did you remember to fill the judiciary with your loyalists? No one will bother to read the indictments carefully to see if they even make sense.)

14. Gain control of the media and turn it into a non-stop propaganda machine.

Bang on and on about the left-wing bias and treasonous instincts of the journalists. Repeat this until no one believes a word they say.
Transform state media into a partisan cheering section (obviously).
Harass and fine private media into a shadow of itself and let regime loyalist oligarchs purchase the carcass.
Demonize journalists to the point that no one much minds if they disappear under mysterious circumstances. (Let your thugs handle this.)
Arrest a few pour encourager les autres. Soon, you won’t need to censor them — they’ll do it themselves.
Make sure the tech bros understand which side of the bread is buttered: You’ll need them to make sure ugly stories just disappear.

15. Harass civil society.

Who needs these lunatics whining about “civil rights?” Audit their taxes. Say they’re funded by foreigners. Or controlled by George Soros. Whatever they are, they’re enemies of the people.
They’re probably backed by some off-the-reservation oligarch whose life you can make miserable. Dry up their funding.
Note: Do not be too heavy-handed with this. Persecute elites, not ordinary people. You want ordinary people to check out completely and watch sports. If you persecute people like them, they’ll start paying attention. (If you’ve smeared and delegitimized the elites properly, ordinary people won’t care if you persecute them. They’ll love it, in fact.)

16. Reorient your foreign policy toward Russia.

Russia’s a special friend who will do your dirty work for you so you can keep your hands clean. They’ll spy on your opponents and leak the emails. They’ll help you get your message out on social media. They’ll harass your critics. If some up-and-coming politician is giving you a pain in the ass, they can give him a hideously disfiguring skin disease. No one will ever be able to pin it on you. (Did you remember to neutralize your intelligence agencies?)
No need for a paper trail or a phone call. Just wash their back and they’ll wash yours. It will drive your enemies nuts that they can’t find the smoking gun.
If anyone wonders what’s up, call them a conspiracy theorist.
Send your friend a little thank you note by surrounding yourself with people who understand Russia’s point of view. Everyone likes to be understood. (Don’t overdo it, though.)

17. Create chaos, confusion, and a sense of permanent emergency.

Keep your enemies off-balance, exhausted, demoralized, and baffled. Make sure no one knows what’s really happening.
A million conspiracy theories must be swirling at all times so the real conspiracies just blend into the noise.
The more you lie, the more column inches will be devoted to debunking the lie and the fewer journalist hours will be spent on figuring out where all the money’s going.
The wilder the lie, the more it will drive your enemies out of their minds when all of your followers repeat it like bleating sheep. The more contempt your enemies feel for your followers, the more likely they are to slip up and reveal that contempt.

18. Humiliate or destroy people who are better fit to be leaders.

Call it “taking on the oligarchs” or “draining the swamp.”
Associate the opposition with foreigners, associate foreigners who keep banging about “human rights” with spies, associate spies with George Soros, associate George Soros with Jews, etc.
Remember: Foreigners are meddling in your “internal affairs” and the opposition are traitors.
Don’t forget: Your country is always under attack, from without and within.
Entertain, entertain, entertain!
- Bread and circuses! Your opponents are humorless. Bunga Bunga!
- Remember, the more attention is focused on you, the less your opponents can get their message out.
- Special tip: Bad economic news? Something else you don’t want people to notice? Say something wildly offensive. Journalists are dumb and easily manipulated and they will fall for this over and over. You can do this for years and they’ll never cotton on. Announce that you think women are good for nothing but cooking and hanging curtains. Watch the bad news disappear in a cloud of indignant editorials about your sexism.

19. Be on the safe side when it comes to elections

If you’re doing this right, you don’t need to rig the vote. You’ll be legitimately popular. (Or popular enough. Remember: If you win an election by just .000003 percent, it means you can do anything.)
But just to be safe, change the voting rules in a way that disqualifies just enough of your opponent’s base that you’re taking no chances.
And, if all that is not enough, remember: It’s not who votes. It’s who counts the votes.

20. Take control of the central bank.

Make foreign banks absorb the losses for your bad policy decisions. Everyone will appreciate this. Everyone hates the bankers.
An election coming up? Juice that economy, baby! Let the future take care of itself.

21. Dissent is okay. But not too much.

If an opponent gets too popular, you need to cut him off at the knees, but by this point, your options are limitless.
- Buy him: Every man has his price.
- Arrest him on charges of kiddy-fiddling: No matter what he says, he’ll never get that stink off of him.
- Whack him.
Protests? Let them blow off steam, unless it looks like it’s really getting serious, in which case, use non-lethal weapons but aim them at their eyes. It will die down once you blind their leaders.

22. Rewrite the Constitution

Seems like things are going well! Alas, the Constitution says you can’t stay. So you still have work to do:

Just let your high court “reinterpret” any irksome provisions like term limits.
Jigger the Constitution so that opponents have no hope of coming to power through democratic means. Call it “vastly overdue constitutional reform.”
Snap referendums, by the way, are superb for this. It’s the will of the people.

And voilà: You’re done. Elections still happen, but they’re denuded of everything that makes elections meaningful.

Hail Caesar!

Donald Trump Nazi balloon. Photo credit: Victoria Pickering / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED)

Shruggers, Rationalizers, and Revolutionaries

The sequence of “rules” I’ve presented presumes the initial acquisition of power is legitimate, via something like a free and fair election. And so it appears to have been in 2024: Real voters, some 77.3 million of them, pulled the lever or filled in the bubble for Donald Trump.

A great deal of ink has been devoted to the question “What were they thinking?” Here’s my admittedly categorical contribution to that exegesis.

Trump’s voters may be divided, roughly, into three groups.

The indifferent. Some portion of the electorate pays almost no attention to politics. This group voted for Trump for normal electoral reasons. Maybe they wanted lower prices and less immigration. Maybe they had fun at one of his rallies. Maybe Kamala Harris reminded them of some Torquemada from HR who made their lives miserable. They wanted a course correction, not a revolution.

Some of them are the people who flunk tests like these:

Some are a bit more informed, but they’re busy. They don’t keep up with the news day-to-day. Whatever the case, they don’t yet realize that they’re getting a revolution, not a course correction.

The Revolutionaries: These people pay a lot of attention to politics — and they sincerely believe the United States is so rotten and corrupt, so worthless and illegitimate, as to warrant wholesale destruction. They sincerely believe we need a second American Revolution.

It isn’t clear to me what kind of government they would prefer. Some species of libertarian monarchy? A theocracy? A very different interpretation of the US Constitution, one in which we pretend the past two and a half centuries never happened?

Far more haven’t really considered the question: They just want this system of governance razed to the ground.

They believe the system they want will spontaneously emerge from the rubble, that anything that emerges in place of the current arrangements would be better, or they just don’t think about it. Some are careful theoreticians of the Revolution — they’re on Flight 93, they know what time it is, and they think Curtis Yarvin is the ne plus ultra. Others just feel it: a deep, grunting rage.

This group grasps full well that the nominations of Kash Patel to lead the FBI, Tulsi Gabbard to lead our intelligence community, and Pete Hegseth as defense secretary make sense only when we assume that Trump seeks to capture and corrupt the most powerful organs of the state and transform them into personal weapons of authoritarian repression. They say, “Good.” (Health and Human Services [HHS] is not a standard play at this stage and I don’t have the faintest idea why Trump wants RFK Jr. to lead it: Perhaps he just loves the idea of bringing back polio.)

This group may be further subdivided into cynics and dupes. The cynics know full well that every word out of Trump’s mouth is a lie, and they don’t care, so long as he destroys everything. The most ambitious among them mean to ride this rollercoaster to the point of total chaos, throw Trump overboard, hijack the revolution, and appoint themselves Emperor (of the Solar System, in Musk’s case). Some have no idea where all of this is going, but they damn well mean to make buck out of it. (Where is it written that revolutionaries have to take vows of poverty?) They see Trump’s base and the federal government as a pair of spurting cash cows.

The poor dupes, on the other hand, are flatly delusional:

The more the media screams that Trump’s nominees are unfit and dangerous — the more articles they publish listing the many ways their appointment would destroy the agencies they head — the more excited Group 2 gets. This is exactly why they voted for Trump. They want these agencies destroyed. They want it all destroyed.

The Rationalizers: These are the reasonably well-informed people who have convinced themselves that, despite his rhetoric, Trump will govern in the manner of a traditional Republican, and, to the extent he doesn’t, he will be contained by the guardrails of custom, the Constitution, and his Cabinet. Ben Shapiro is the Group 3 archetype.

They point to Trump’s first term, which they think was a success, and aver that none of the disastrous things people predicted came true — even though, in fact, they did. They liked the tax cuts, the deregulation, the Supreme Court picks, their stock portfolios, and the Abraham Accords.

They concede Trump’s a wrecking ball, but they think he’ll only wreck things they want him to wreck, like DEI and Drag Queen Story Hour. They figure he won’t do much damage to anything important. People in this group are apt to dismiss the things Trump says as “mean tweets,” tell detractors that we’re just hung up on “aesthetics,” and dismiss January 6 as “a riot.” Often, they sincerely believe that because Trump frightens Democrats, he must also frighten America’s adversaries.

They tend to hold that nothing Trump has done or might do rivaled a list of Democratic failures that include, inter alia: indulging rioters in the wake of the murder of George Floyd; coming up with the slogan “defund the police”; inciting a crime wave by means of that slogan; foisting transgenderism on schoolchildren; misgoverning American cities to the point that humans have taken to crapping in the streets; funding the research that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic; lying about it under oath; pumping Iran full of cash; handing Afghanistan to the Taliban; opening the southern border; turning the Ivy League into a hotbed of terrorist apologetics; everything that falls under the heading “DEI”; indulging campus antisemites; concealing the extent of Biden’s infirmity, and then having the chutzpah to insist they vote for a candidate who insists everything is hunky-dory — someone so polled, focus-grouped, and strained through a sieve by a boardroom of Jen Psaki clones that only her occasional lapses into gibberish distinguished her utterances from those of ChatGPT.

They voted less for Trump than against the Democrats — and more broadly, against the Establishment, which they also charge with starting and losing two wars, the financial crisis, the destruction of the American middle class, and just being incredibly annoying.

The difference between this group and the second group is that this group did not sign on for a revolution. They neither wanted nor expected one. But they so badly wanted to punish the Democrats and the Establishment that they talked themselves out of seeing the evidence that they were getting one.

Normalcy bias is a well-studied cognitive phenomenon. (It’s also contagious: If people around you are saying, “Hell no, I’m not going to evacuate, we’ve been through plenty of tornados, we’ll be fine,” you’re far less likely to save your own life.) America has never seen anything like Trump before. To make it make sense, Group 3 put everything he said and did through a translator. By “seek vengeance,” he meant “succeed.” By “withdraw from NATO,” he meant, “get our allies to spend more on defense.” By “appoint RFK Jr. to lead HHS” he meant “I don’t know, but he wouldn’t do that.”

But to square this circle, they had to discount the quite abundant evidence that Trump is malignant, sociopathic, utterly insane, profoundly authoritarian, extraordinarily dangerous, determined to destroy our entire system of governance, unconstrained (and unconstrainable) by custom or Congress, surrounded by a cohort of vile toadies — each pursuing their own deranged psychological, ideological, or economic agenda; many of them tied to Russia in a profoundly sinister way — and equipped, this time, with a plan. This takes up a lot of psychological energy, I’m sure.

If you’re in this group, I’m curious: Did you perhaps feel a twinge of queasiness when Trump announced his cabinet picks? Or have you managed to rationalize it away already? “They’re just trial balloons,” “The Senate will never confirm them,” “The bureaucracies will probably just ignore them?” If so, that’s fine. It’s not like I won’t have a million more occasions to say, “I told you so.”

The Trump Nominees (See Rule 7)

To everyone who’s not engaged in highly motivated reasoning, it should be obvious that what Trump’s doing isn’t random. Authoritarian capture in the 21st century is nothing if not predictable. Many a goon has trudged up the steps of this ladder before.

Yet I still see people who aren’t quite getting it. Some think Trump has selected people like these just to flip the bird at the world, or subject the Senate to a loyalty test. Yes, that’s part of it, but not the whole thing or even the main thing.

The main thing is that this is Step 7: He needs these places under his control so they don’t get in his way when he starts robbing us blind and ensuring he never, ever, loses his grip on power.

We’ll soon see if he’s already turned Congress into a rubber stamp. I figure the day Trump is inaugurated, he will, first, pardon himself, then he’ll pardon everyone who attacked the Capitol on January 6. If some uppity senator gets it into his head to vote against Trump’s nominees, Trump will send out the bat signal on Truth Social: “This RINO is LETTING US DOWN. He is very VERY BAD for our country. I have a TOTAL MANDATE for my nominees.” The death threats begin, and the senators cave. (It’s exactly why they didn’t convict him, after all.) Besides, Elon Musk says he’ll fund a primary against anyone in Congress who utters a peep against Trump’s agenda.

Speaking of Musk, let me call your attention to this paper by Timothy Graham of the Queensland University of Technology and Mark Andrejevic of Monash University: A computational analysis of potential algorithmic bias on platform X during the 2024 US election. If you still use Twitter, you won’t be surprised to learn that on the day Musk announced his support for Trump, engagement with the tweets from MAGA accounts suddenly soared, and those with Democratic-leaning accounts collapsed.

The implicit threat of violence coupled with Musk’s money and propaganda machine could well be sufficient to persuade the once-dignified and noble United States Senate to put RFK Jr. in charge of HHS. We all know if it were a secret vote, they wouldn’t approve even one of those nutjobs, no less all of them.

Get used to hearing these words, spoken by Trump’s House elf; you’ll be hearing them a lot:

Remember, they just delivered a mandate to the president, an overwhelming popular vote victory, and of course Electoral College victory, and they have sent the message that “America First” policies are— should be the rule of the day.

An overwhelming popular vote victory? As of this writing, Trump took 49.7 percent of the vote and Harris took 48.3. To say the people overwhelmingly voted to put Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our intelligence agencies and Elon Musk in charge of everything else might be a stretch.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s agree that 1.4 percent is overwhelming and prepare, accordingly, to be overwhelmed. Let’s see if Trump gets away with it, as he has gotten away with everything else. If he follows The Rules, he shouldn’t have too much trouble.

Published with the permission of Claire Berlinski. A version of this piece originally appeared at The Cosmopolitan Globalist.

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Donald Trump’s Steps Down the Well-Trod Path to Authoritarian Rule

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