Our Semi-Authoritarian State
Are we a democracy or a dictatorship? No one knows.
1. The F-Word
America maintains the trappings of democracy. We can speak freely—most of the time. The rule of law applies to many, though not all, people. We are scheduled for national elections in two years and they might be free and fair.
But when you look under the hood, you see that we’re pretty far down the road to soft authoritarianism. Not quite Hungary, yet. But the same zip code.
I want to share three stories that illustrate just how far gone the America of 2015 is. And I want you to keep in mind that these are just from the last week.
(1) Signal. The big problem with yesterday’s Atlantic revelation isn’t that nearly every high-level official (with the exception of Trump and Musk1) was practicing poor operational security in the planning and execution of a military operation. That’s just stupidity and people in government do stupid stuff all the time.
The big problem isn’t even that the vice president and several cabinet-level appointees were using an off-the-books electronic channel to communicate in violation of the law.
Reminder: The Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act require preservation of official communications within the executive branch. As the National Archives explains it, the PRA,
Establishes preservation requirements for official business conducted using non-official electronic messaging accounts: any individual creating Presidential records must not use non-official electronic messaging accounts unless that individual copies an official account as the message is created or forwards a complete copy of the record to an official messaging account. (A similar provision in the Federal Records Act applies to federal agencies.)
The Signal chat we saw is a clear violation. Also, the style of communication in the Signal chat suggests that this was not a one-off.
But that’s just criminality and people in government break laws all the time.
No, the big problem is that, as Bill noted this morning, no one is even pretending that the Department of Justice will conduct a good-faith investigation and, if warranted, prosecute this apparent law-breaking.
The written law does not apply to this administration—and the entire country accepts that fact.
This is what happens in dictatorships.
2. Nomenclature. Over the weekend Oliver Darcy did an interesting bit of reporting. He looked at TV coverage of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico last week.
[E]very channel danced around what precisely to call the body of water they splashed into. . . . [N]ot one of the outlets could muster up the courage to simply refer to it as the Gulf of Mexico, the water feature’s name since the 16th century.
Instead, television news organizations tied themselves in knots, performing linguistic gymnastics to stay out of Donald Trump’s crosshairs . . . On ABC News, “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir referred to “spectacular images from off the coast of Florida.” On the “NBC Nightly news,” anchor Lester Holt spoke about the astronauts “splashing down off the Florida Gulf coast.” On the “CBS Evening News,” it was referred to simply as “the Gulf.” And on CNN, anchor Jake Tapper tried to seemingly have it both ways, noting the U.S. government refers to it as the “Gulf of America,” but the rest of the world calls it the Gulf of Mexico.
In fact, I could only one find instance on a television newscast where a journalist referred to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico. During an appearance on MSNBC, NBC News correspondent Tom Costello used the term, but then quickly corrected himself, almost as if he had realized he was forbidden from doing so. “Six hours from right now, there will be a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, before backtracking. “Sorry, however you want to call the Gulf. It will be splashing down in the Gulf.”
Suffice to say, none of this was an accident. Television news organizations have standards departments that think hard about these sorts of issues and issue guidance about the network’s positioning on them. In other words, each of the outlets made a willful decision to forgo referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. While it may have been performed in a subtle manner, make no mistake: It was still an act of submission.
Darcy likens this submission to the Chinese government’s insistence on referring to Taiwan as a “province,” and not an independent state. His point is that, in both cases the government has made a decree about how words must be used, and the countries’ media have complied.
But it’s actually worse than that.
At least the Chinese Communist Party can say it has a longstanding claim on Taiwan, which literally broke away from the mainland after a civil war. That’s a territorial dispute based on history and fact.
No one, anywhere in the world, referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” until January 2025 when Donald Trump declared it to be a subject of maximum importance.
Not only was there not historical or factual reason to call it the “Gulf of America,” but no one, even in the dankest corners of Dark MAGA, thought about using this term before Trump uttered it.
How do we know that? Because Trump was already president for four years and neither he nor anyone else in America ever used it then.
Until Trump invented it, the term “Gulf of America” did not exist.
But Trump did invent it. And now the power of the federal government insists that everyone use it. And even the supposedly independent media complies out of fear of retribution.
This is what happens in dictatorships.
3. The Lawyers. Trump is conducting a pincer movement against the judicial system. On one side he is attempting to bully judges into giving him his way.2
On the other side, he is attacking the legal profession itself by attempting to make it difficult for lawyers to represent clients who displease him. That’s what Trump’s executive orders targeting individual law firms are about. He’s trying to make it so that when the government uses the law to prosecute people, his targets have a smaller pool of elite lawyers to draw on for their defense.
Don’t believe it? In internal communications, the chair of Paul Weiss justified the firm’s decision to capitulate to Trump this way:
[O]ur firm faced an existential crisis. The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people and our clients.
Represent the wrong clients—or employ the wrong lawyers—and Trump will destroy your law firm and hence your ability to make a living.
Again: This is what happens in dictatorships.
2. Strategic Ambiguity
It’s not accurate to say that America is now a dictatorship. Instead I’d describe it like this: