It IS Happening Here
Trump’s autocratic project isn’t some threat on the horizon. It’s our current moment.
After a day of frantic jockeying, House Republicans managed to eke out passage of a budget resolution last night, after President Trump made phone calls to several conservative holdouts unhappy with the level of spending cuts in the package to flip their support. One such former holdout, Rep. Tim Burchett, later told reporters that “It’s not everything I wanted, but in this game, you’re either at the table or on the menu.” Which at least shows an admirable clarity about how Trump operates. Happy Wednesday.
The Autocratic Project
by William Kristol
The Trumpist assault on liberal democracy features several lines of attack.
One, of course, is the centralizing and personalizing of power within government. As Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc., recently remarked,
[Trump and Musk] are seeking to traumatize and terrorize the civil service, and government workers more broadly, which includes the military, in order to create . . . a civil service that is loyal to Trump. . . . The idea [is] that you have to take control of state institutions and you have to make them work for you personally rather than for the people or the nation. . . . This is something that every illiberal leader elected and unelected sooner or later thinks they need to do.
But the autocratic project extends beyond the government. Autocracy seeks to undermine not just a free government but a free society. Autocracy isn’t just about personal power, or the power of a political movement over the institutions of government. It’s about extending that power to institutions outside of government—to businesses, to the media, to civic associations.
The individual steps towards autocracy can seem petty and personal. But their significance goes beyond that. Retaliation or retribution against one individual or institution is a way to intimidate many others. It’s a way to induce much broader compliance. It’s a way to encourage what Tim Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”
So, for example, excluding the Associated Press from the White House press pool wasn’t just about punishing the Associated Press for its editorial choices. It was about sending a chilling message to other news organizations who might choose to defy Trump in some way or other. And indeed last night a Trump aide posted that the New York Times’s Peter Baker would be excluded from the pool too, for the temerity of raising concerns about the White House’s media restrictions.
It’s easy to multiply such examples of attempted autocratic advances.
We saw another yesterday afternoon, when President Trump signed an executive order suspending security clearances for any attorneys at Covington and Burling who were involved in representing Special Counsel Jack Smith. The order also directs federal agencies to limit interactions with lawyers from Covington and Burling, and to assess any government contracts with the firm to align “funding decisions with the interests of the citizens of the United States.”
Covington and Burling has been accused of no illegality or even impropriety. The firm simply has a client the president doesn’t like. In a free society, this should not be a ground for targeting by the federal government. But that’s the point: to collapse the boundaries that limit arbitrary government action or help preserve the overall rule of law.
As it happens, we were given a clear and helpful explanation of this autocratic project in an NPR interview yesterday morning with David Pressman, our most recent ambassador to Hungary.
Pressman, correctly I think, balked at describing what has been happening in Hungary under Viktor Orbán as “democratic backsliding.”
“It suggests somehow that political leaders are trying to climb up Mount Olympus and are slowly slipping backwards,” Pressman told NPR’s Leila Fadel. Rather, “the prime minister has made a very deliberate set of choices and actually turned around and headed in the opposite direction.”
Pressman explains how Orbán took Hungary in that direction.
“The first tool was essentially constructing a system where institutions are captured and then creating an architecture of rewarding and punishing,” he said. “It’s a clear message to anyone that the costs of disagreeing, the cost of engaging is so high. And as a result of that, a lot of people choose just not to.”
The intimidation goes hand-in-hand with corruption. Orbán transferred public assets to friendly oligarchs. His closest childhood friend has become the country’s single wealthiest individual. As Pressman says, “It became very lucrative and attractive to be a Fidesz loyalist. And simultaneously it became existentially challenging to exist if you were somehow outside the Fidesz, or the Orbán party system.”
Pressman goes on to describe the cost paid by those who seek to challenge this system. He spotlighted the case of a conservative, but independent newspaper in the country called Magyar Hang. It’s often critical of Orbán. It has to print the paper in neighboring Slovakia, because no firm in Hungary will risk doing so.
So what lessons does Hungary have for us? Here’s Pressman:
Well, I think that institutions are just not as strong as we often think they are, and they’re only as strong as the bravest politicians amongst us. And I think the lesson that I left Hungary with is that the messaging in Hungary, it’s not like it’s this super sophisticated political messaging. It’s just that they’re able to control the medium of communication to such a degree and repeat the same thing over and over again, that people become beat down and people become chilled from engaging in that kind of discourse. And at that moment, when that happens, and that was certainly the case in Hungary, democracy is at risk.
The United States has stronger barriers to autocracy than Hungary. But as we can see when we look around, they may not be as formidable as we hoped. It would be foolish to assume our barriers will easily stand up under the Trumpist autocratic assault. It would be foolish not to see that here, too, democracy is at risk.
A Tradition Unlike Any Other
by Joe Perticone
It’s a familiar story by now: A Republican speaker enters a vote series without having thoroughly counted the support for a given piece of legislation, most often having to do with health care, the budget, or just keeping the government lights on.
Such an occurrence happened again last night, but this time in a unique way. Republicans were set to vote on a budget resolution outlining their agenda for President Trump’s signature legislative package. The resolution doesn’t cut anything or spend any money—it just tells who’s who what to do. That’s why the preferred line coming out of yesterday’s Republican Conference meeting was this resolution “doesn’t even mention Medicaid.” Technically, true! It just instructs the committee that oversees Medicaid to find $880 billion dollars to cut (take a guess where that’ll be).
When lawmakers hit the floor Tuesday night, leadership held a previously scheduled vote open well past its expiration, signifying that they didn’t have the votes. Then, at the last minute, they pulled the budget resolution vote from the schedule after realizing at least four Republicans would oppose it for reasons of long-ignored fiscal conservatism: the resolution would not make a dent in the national debt. Democrats and Republicans exited the chamber and headed back to their offices and got in their cars to go home. But suddenly, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared the vote to be back on, forcing everyone to rush back. This indicated he flipped enough of the holdouts through promises or good, old-fashioned flattery from Trump.
A few Democratic lawmakers made surprise returns to make the GOP’s margin for error that much thinner. Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-Calif.), who had been out after knee surgery, hobbled back into the chamber. So did Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.), bringing her month-old son, Sam, along with her. But it wasn’t enough.
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) was the first of the four Republicans to reverse course. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.)—who earlier in the day declared herself a “hard no”—flipped soon after. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) sat patiently praying on the floor until at the very last moment, begrudgingly moved from a “nay” to a “yea.” Only Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) stuck to his guns and voted against the resolution. It passed 217-215.
As noted by my Bulwark colleague Sam Stein on last night’s YouTube reaction, this is a familiar pattern for the GOP. They are regularly in disarray until at the last minute, when they aren’t. While Tim Miller and I disagreed with Sam as to whether this counts as a “win” for Johnson, it’s a safe bet that we’ll have to replay this episode many more times in the near future. In fact, we’ll do it again in about two weeks when government funding runs out on March 14.
Quick Hits
HERE COMES THE CRISIS: District Judge Amir Ali is out of patience. The judge, who ordered appropriated USAID funds temporarily unfrozen two weeks ago, said in court yesterday he still has no reason to believe the Trump administration is complying with his order. “I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali berated government lawyers. “Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursements of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13?” A Department of Justice lawyer replied: “I’m not in a position to answer that.”
(The lawyer might not have been, but we are: Multiple USAID sources have told The Bulwark recently that at least a major portion of these funds do indeed remain frozen.)
Ali said the administration has until the end of Wednesday to comply with his order. Maybe they’ll even do so. Maybe they’ll find a novel way to keep the funds frozen that technically isn’t in defiance with the court (as is currently the case with the NIH). Or who knows: Maybe they’re ready to kick off the let’s-end-judicial-review constitutional crisis they’ve been preparing for months. Elon Musk spent last night tweeting repeatedly about how “the only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges.” Which path does that sound like?
POWER TO THE PEOPLE?: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her press briefing yesterday that the White House Correspondents Association will no longer select the outlets who participate in the president’s traveling press pool. “We are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations,” Leavitt said. “Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team.”
Sure enough, today the White House kicked HuffPost and Reuters out of the press pool and instead gave slots to right-wing outlets Newsmax and the Blaze.
As breaks from precedent go, this one isn’t particularly surprising to see. Team Trump has taken significant steps to kneecap the press’s ability to dictate the terms of its coverage of the administration. This announcement, for instance, comes after multiple actions taken at the Pentagon in recent weeks to make media access more difficult. It even sells as MAGA red meat, White House correspondents having a general reputation as a prim, officious, status-obsessed bunch.1
Still, it’s an alarming development. A government that gets to choose the reporters that cover it closely isn’t a government that’s likely to be covered closely at all. And it’s in keeping with one of the administration’s most poisonous stated beliefs: that the will of the people is solely vested in the person of Donald Trump himself. The president awarding himself so much control over his press coverage and calling it giving power back to “the people” is an absurdity; that so many Americans find the statement downright commonsensical doesn’t bode very well.
Cheap Shots
Especially me. —Andrew
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (again), ** what's happening now is what the great and good American people signed up for. **
Stop and think about the tremendous amount of damage that has been done already, and then consider that MAGA loves all of it. They love punishing the press. They love abandoning Ukraine. They love destroying the very framework of our government from the inside. And they sure as fuck relish the idea of throw "dem illegals" in concentration camps. The consequences of all of this are going to reverberate long after Trump is worm fodder. The free world is never going to trust us again, and to be fair there's no reason why they should.
"“the only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges.”
let's start with Alito, Thomas and Cannon.