From sending troops to cities and fiddling intel to messing with museums, money, companies and elections, Trump’s authoritarian circus is something Republicans once would have hated
I often hear conservatives dismiss criticism of their spiritual leader as “Trump derangement syndrome.” The implication is that all of this outrage is just hysteria, and what we are living through is otherwise normal. It is sad to see so many people — some of them intelligent — so badly fooled. To set things straight, and in case anyone has been taking a break from the news in August, I propose a briefing on the latest outrageous absurdities.
Think I’m exaggerating? Then take a moment to peruse AQL’s Idiot’s Guide to How Not to Run the Country. It is a public service offered to future leaders, and the action point is simple. Look at the things the Trump administration is doing, and do exactly the opposite — or better yet, steer clear of the issue altogether. Your choice. No other president including Nixon would have behaved this way.
It all comes back to the Supreme Court, whose destruction can be destribed as the original sin: Republicans blocked Merrick Garland in 2016, Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to step down, and Trump got lucky enough to fill the court with hacks. They have since ruled that the president enjoys immunity, one of the worst rulings in what was until recently a functioning democracy. So he assumes that anything he does, however idiotic or illegal, will be laundered by lemmings.
And remember: This is a guy who bragged about being able to get away with a gun murder on Fifth Avenue.
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We could have chosen a huge number of examples, but time is short and everyone is busy. To pare down the list, we applied three filters: No mention of tricking the American people into a tax rise by lying about the nature of tariffs; no foreign policy matters (so we can forgive, for example, the absurd spectacle with Putin, or the freak show with European leaders); and only events of the past month. So without further ado, strap in for a half-dozen of the most egregious exhibits of idiotic behavior by a chief executive in US history.
Shooting the Messenger, The Generals Edition
Trump appears to believe that when someone brings him bad news, that person should be fired. First it was Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, dismissed after a jobs report showed only 73,000 new jobs. Now it is Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who reported that US strikes in June had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months — not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu declared. So Kruse is gone. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered the blow, but no one doubts who ordered it. Another career official punished for honesty.
The logic is ancient, and always foolish. Shooting the messenger never extinguishes the fire — it only ensures no one warns you next time. Reports are tailored to flatter, dangers softened, optimism inflated. The product is designed to protect the analyst rather than the nation.
History is littered with the wreckage of rulers who demanded only good news. Stalin executed meteorologists, economists, and generals whose forecasts did not please him, with the result that warnings of Hitler’s 1941 invasion were ignored and millions died in the opening months. Saddam Hussein’s officers told him only what he wanted to hear about the strength of his army; when the US invaded in 2003, his regime crumbled in weeks. Vladimir Putin, convinced by softened intelligence that Kyiv would fall in days, launched a war in 2022 that has since embarrassed Russia’s military and battered its economy. In each case, lies became policy and the reckoning was catastrophic.
America has its own experience with the perils of politicized intelligence. Analysts warned John F. Kennedy that Cuban exiles could not topple Castro without US military support; those warnings were buried, and the Bay of Pigs became a humiliation. In Vietnam, body counts and progress reports were massaged to satisfy Washington’s narrative, leading to escalation built on illusions and ending in costly defeat. In 2003, the intelligence around Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was cherrypicked, manipulated, or silenced until it matched the political script. The invasion went forward, WMD were never found, and the United States paid in blood, treasure, and credibility.
Kruse’s dismissal fits squarely into that lineage, but what distinguishes it is the brazenness. The consequences will be felt far beyond one general’s career. Once intelligence officers understand that their survival depends on pleasing the president, the system is warped. Analysts will hesitate to report unwelcome findings about Iran, North Korea, or China. Warnings about threats will be buried. Risks will be understated. America will be governing blind.
The cost of such blindness is never immediate — that is what makes it so seductive. For a while, the illusion of success holds. Trump can boast of “obliterated” nuclear facilities, just as autocrats in other lands once boasted of victories that existed only on paper. Fools and acolytes will believe him (and many will pretend, even while knowing it’s a lie, just to drive everyone else mad). But it’s the whole country that will suffers, not just those who want to burn it to the ground. Only an enemy or a traitor could be pleased.
Rigging elections with “redistricting”
American history is no stranger to political chicanery. Gerrymandering, intimidation, and cynical manipulation of the rules have marred the democratic experiment for centuries. But rarely has the rot been so naked as what is now unfolding in Texas. Trump dispensed with euphemism and laid it out with characteristic bluntness. “There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one. Just a simple redrawing, we pick up five seats,” he told reporters in July.
Never before has an American president announced, almost casually, that his party will manufacture congressional seats made of bullshit. Redistricting is supposed to follow the decennial census, a sober and constitutional exercise grounded in population counts. But Trump, backed by Governor Greg Abbott, is demanding new maps in the middle of the decade — because he can.
Abbott has complied, summoning lawmakers to Austin for a special session to execute the president’s will. Democrats, lacking the numbers to block the measure, fled the state in protest. When they returned, House Speaker Dustin Burrows locked the chamber doors and assigned state troopers to monitor them, requiring members to sign commitments not to leave until the vote was cast. Representative Nicole Collier refused, calling it an affront to her liberty and to her constituents. She was then confined to the Capitol, while demonstrators chanting in her support were arrested.
The practical effect of the new map is that minority communities will see their voting power diluted by being bunched into fewer districts. Legal experts warn that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial bias in map-drawing, is hanging by a thread if the “Supreme Court” validates this.
Such shameless cheating must be what Trump meant when he reassured supporters during the 2024 campaign that if he won they wouldn’t even need to vote again. because that’s how far he’d skew the system in their favor.
The audacity has triggered a counter-move. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation launching a special election to redraw his own state’s congressional districts — this time to give Democrats five new winnable seats. Unlike Texas, however, California cannot simply legislate the change. Since 2010 its maps have been drawn by an independent commission, which means voters themselves must approve any alteration. In November, Californians will decide whether to temporarily override the commission.
Democrats, who actually have been far less enthralled than the GOP by gerrymandering, have framed the plan as a necessary response to Texas, a refusal to cede the battlefield unilaterally. Barack Obama endorsed it as “smart and measured.” Representative Lateefah Simon of the Bay Area dispensed with restraint: “I will organize every single day until we get to that special election so we can fight these bastards in Texas and all over.” Polling suggests a majority of Californians are inclined to approve the measure. It’s ugly, and shows how Trump is dragging everyone into his gutter. Thus the country could find itself in a gerrymandering arms race, one state’s partisan maneuver begetting another’s.
Nationalizing massive companies
Trump has never had much use for ideological consistency, but the deal he just struck with Intel may be the clearest evidence yet that the Republican Party has abandoned one of its foundational myths: the creed of small government and free markets. Just weeks after threatening Intel’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, Trump announced that the US government will own 10% of the chipmaker. The stake comes from converting billions in grants Intel had been promised under the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act into equity retroactively. In effect, it is a shakedown of a public company that makes a mockery of capitalism.
That move would once have horrified Republicans. Since Ronald Reagan, “movement conservatives” have railed against government interference in business. They demonized regulation as socialism, fought taxes as theft, and wrapped laissez-faire economics in the flag of American freedom. Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and countless others built careers on the premise that markets work best when Washington stays out of the way.
Now a Republican president boasts about nationalizing part of a crown jewel of Silicon Valley, albeit a struggling one in decline, and Republicans cheer him on. Once allergic even to mild consumer protection rules, they embrace state power to punish and reward companies at will. It’s like something from The Onion.
The GOP’s shift is not really about economics, of course. It’s just about power.
Taking over cities by force like in a banana republic
Of course crime in America is bad, and has been so forever. There are many reasons for it, including the suicidal Republican insistence on allowing easy access to guns by any psychotic off the street. But Washington, DC has just posted its lowest violent crime rates in 30 years. Still bad — but there is no way to claim that it is “worse than ever” without lying through your teeth.
Yet Trump invoked emergency powers on August 11 to seize control of the police and flood the capital with National Guard troops flown in from red states. He could do so only because of DC’s peculiar legal limbo: until 1964 its residents couldn’t even vote for president, to this day they have no voting members of Congress, and under the 1973 Home Rule Act the president can take command of the Metropolitan Police in an “emergency.” The clause was for riots and always assumed no president would abuse it. Throw such assumptions out the window.
Trump says Chicago is next. “Chicago is a mess,” he declared. “You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out, probably next.” He had not spoken to outraged local officials like Mayor Brandon Johnson, who had just celebrated historic progress in lowering crime.
Moreover, unlike Washington, Chicago is a city in a US state where local police answer to the mayor, who answers to the governor. Without state consent or a drastic invocation of the Insurrection Act, Trump has no power there. What his threat reveals is boundless appetite for control and the complicity of a Republican Party that once railed against federal overreach and has been reduced to a collective MAGA lickspittle. Here, too, Trump acts with such confidence because he assumes the Supreme Court will bless his every excess.
Woke overreached; Trump does so even more absurdly by defending slavery
Conservatives long mocked “wokeness” as an obsession with guilt and nonsense, and it was, along with immigration issues, a rightly effective ploy. But Trump has managed to overshoot even more outrageously than the fake debate over bathrooms. He now rails against the iconic Smithsonian Museum, an American treasure, for focusing “too much” on how bad was slavery, an American disgrace.
The Smithsonian’s exhibits are the product of scholarship, designed to preserve the record and tell the truth. Trump’s demand that museums “celebrate American exceptionalism” is not patriotism but censorship that seeks to turn history into propaganda. As with the other authoritarian power grabs above, that the Republican Party allows this — the same party that once thundered against government meddling in schools and culture — is a tragicomedy.
The assault on the Federal Reserve
Finally, Trump has turned his sights on the Fed. On Friday he threatened to fire Governor Lisa Cook over a baseless mortgage-fraud allegation peddled by a political ally. The real issue is that she has not delivered lower interest rates. Her ouster would open yet another Trump appointment, giving him near-total sway over monetary policy.
Trump cannot legally fire Lisa Cook just because he dislikes her or wants lower interest rates. By law, Federal Reserve governors serve 14-year terms and can only be removed “for cause,” meaning real misconduct or incapacity. No president has ever ousted a Fed official over policy disputes, and if Trump tried, Cook would almost certainly sue. The courts — and ultimately the Supreme Court — would have to decide whether “for cause” means disagreement with the president. If they sided with him — which, again, is what he is assuming, for absolutely everything — it would shred the Fed’s independence, rattle global markets, and undermine faith in U.S. economic management.
She has said she won’t be bullied; good for her.
The Fed’s credibility rests on independence. When presidents fire governors for refusing to juice the economy, they undermine the entire system. The world has seen what happens when leaders capture central banks in places like Turkey, Argentina and Venezuela: currency collapse, runaway inflation, capital flight. America is not immune. If investors believe U.S. data is cooked and the Fed is politicized, the dollar will suffer, markets will wobble, and Americans will pay.
Trump’s campaign is an assault on the very foundation of modern economic stability: the idea that money must serve the nation, not the president.
All of this — from top to bottom and all across — is outrageous and bad for the country. I have always known that democracy has a problem when things get too complicated and people do not or cannot pay enough attention. But it is truly disturbing that Trump retains even the significant minority support that he does. Even if the woke madness annoyed the hell our of most people, and despite the failure of Kamala Harris to project gravitas. None of that justifies any confusion about this savage attack on America. Houston, we have a problem.
