Trumpism Is Not Inevitable

But if Trump and Musk are going to be defeated, it has to start now.

It’s a time for taking the tiny wins where you can get them. On Friday, The Bulwark published a piece spotlighting the story of Scott Curtis, a FEMA chief of staff who took Elon Musk’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer—and then was fired anyway. Hours after the story went up, Curtis received an email from FEMA: His firing was being reversed. Happy Monday.

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It’s Not Too Late

by William Kristol

On Thursday, Donald Trump apparatchik Kash Patel was confirmed by the United States Senate as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On Friday, Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, began to purge the military. The firing of the chairman of the joint chiefs got the most attention. But perhaps more significant was the unprecedented firing of the service JAGs in order to replace them with lawyers who, presumably, will find any and all of Trump’s orders to the military to be lawful.

On Saturday, Trump urged Elon Musk to “get more aggressive” in the project of destroying our nonpartisan civil service and converting it to an instrument of Trump.

And on Sunday, Dan Bongino was installed in the traditionally nonpolitical post of deputy director of the FBI. Bongino is a particularly clownish Trumpist, but as Charlie Sykes likes to point out, a clown with a flamethrower is still very dangerous. So are clowns at the top of our nation’s principal law enforcement agency who have utter disdain for the rule of law.

So Trump’s autocratic takeover is proceeding apace. His effort to break any institutional resistance and to ensure personal fealty throughout the executive branch is moving ahead. The power ministries—defense, law enforcement—are falling one by one.

As historian Robert Kagan explained on the Bulwark on Sunday podcast, we’re on a path towards autocracy, and it does us no good to continue to pretend it can’t happen here.

And as Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond told the New Yorker, one lesson of history is that once an autocratic takeover begins, the forces of autocracy can grow stronger very quickly.

So I conclude: It’s going to get worse before it gets better, assuming it does get better. And time is of the essence if we are to reverse course. As Diamond explains, “The earlier the intervention, the earlier the mobilization, the earlier the forthright exercise of countervailing power, the better the prospect of saving democracy.”

But we aren’t yet seeing that forthright exercise of countervailing power. The alarm bells have been going off. But an awful lot of people—including our political, business, and civic leaders—have been choosing not to hear them.

Could things be beginning to change?

Perhaps.

There is some evidence—from national polls to local town halls, from reports not just from blue states but from red states—of a public reaction against the Trump-Musk rampage through our government. But a gradual reaction may not be enough.

If the autocracy is allowed to settle in, increased public unhappiness may not matter much. Trump and Musk haven’t gone to all this trouble to control the military and law enforcement agencies in order to hand over power should they happen to become less popular and seem to be on course to lose an election. If Trump and Musk can continue down the path they’re on, they’ll use their control and intimidation of our institutions to put a weighty thumb on the scale in 2026 and certainly in 2028. There’ll be elections. But will they be free and fair? Is that something to which Trump and Musk are deeply committed?

So there is an urgency to the needed resistance. And that means there’s an urgency to change the current behavior of Congress.

It’s true that the Republican party in Congress has been servile beyond belief. But we don’t need, at first, a massive rebellion against Trump. We need only a handful of congressional Republicans—only four in the Senate, two¹ in the House!—to break with Trump on some key issues. For all the momentum Trump has, a few Republicans in the Senate and the House could bring much of it to a screeching halt.

Trump would presumably still try to carry out as much of his autocratic project from the White House. But it would be a lot more difficult without Congress nodding along.

What could provoke a revolt of at least a few Republicans? There are several possible issues, including Musk’s attempt to destroy popular government programs. But what about the attempted betrayal of Ukraine? Half of the Republicans on the Hill voted for aid to Ukraine less than a year ago. Are all of them going to sit quietly and vote for continuing resolutions and appropriations bills that will do nothing to prevent a free Ukraine from disappearing into Putin’s bloody clutches?

The bad news, as we’ve certainly seen, is that liberal democracies are not as robust as one might have hoped. But the good news is that the course of autocracy does not always run smoothly. Wannabe autocrats—and long-established ones like Vladimir Putin—make mistakes. New leaders emerge in free countries to help rally the forces of liberty and democracy.

And so declines can be reversed. The United States seemed to be in deep trouble, both at home and abroad, in the mid-1970s. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. History doesn’t move in a straight line.

I was on a panel at the Principles First conference here in D.C. over the weekend with Garry Kasparov and Tom Nichols. At the end of the session, after all of us had expressed great alarm about the current moment, I commented that while it might seem dark now, as John McCain liked to say, it’s always darkest before . . . it turns pitch black. An upbeat ending to the panel!

The fact is that things needn’t turn black. But if we don’t act, they could.

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Going Through the MAGA Motions

by Andrew Egger

Last Friday afternoon, I took the trek to the Gaylord National Resort just outside D.C. to dip my toe into this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. The annual event is billed as a star-studded extravaganza where right-wing infotainment goobers can hear from all their heroes: Elon Musk, Kari Lake, Steve Bannon, Benny Johnson, Mike Lindell, JD Vance, Donald Trump.

But with three full days of nonstop programming, there’s a lot of time to fill. So much of the main-stage fare ends up more like the panel I found myself watching, led by an anchor for Dr. Phil’s new media company interviewing the former CEO of the Hallmark Channel and ‘90s TV actor Dean Cain about how “the era of woke movies is over.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the bored-sounding female voiceover intoned, “this is Inclusion Delusion: Hollywood Survivors.”

Most of the content at CPAC is like this: broad, thuddingly predictable, consisting mostly of punchlines everyone in the room has heard a thousand times before. A little while later, CPAC poohbah Matt Schlapp himself took the stage alongside convicted and pardoned January 6er Brandon Straka. Straka praised Schlapp for having stayed in his corner even “when the national conversation surrounding January 6th was very negative.” How can something so morally repugnant be so boring? Out of the main hall I went.

Outside, things were less scripted. In the booths on “Media Row,” I chatted with former Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Brittany Kaiser—now an advocate for open-source AI—and some former Robert F. Kennedy Jr. staffers who now run a group called MAHA Action, pushing for legislation to get processed foods out of children’s lunches. The crowd is dotted with guys in “Dump Lindsey” hats; these turn out to correspond to a South Carolina businessman, Mark Lynch, who is there to gin up interest in his insurgent primary campaign against Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The wackiest sights can be seen downstairs at the CPAC Central exhibitor hall, where various conservative lifestyle brands hawk their wares. Bizarrely star-spangled service brands like cell provider Patriot Mobile and payment processor Revere Payments have exhibits alongside tiny right-wing publishing companies and odd brands like Vibra Tec, which sells a vibrating plate you stand on to (they promise!) gain all sorts of health benefits.

Holding court at a large installation in the middle of the room was Jack Posobiec, the pizzagate conspiracy theorist turned right-wing influencer turned apparent confidant of our new defense secretary. He was hawking a poster called the Trump Map: “I designed these maps,” he told us. “It’s got Greenland, you’ve got the Panama Canal, you’ve got Gitmo on there, you’ve got it all.”

Across the hall, a remarkable international breakout session was underway. Billed as “CPAC Korea,” a panel of speakers was telling a small, receptive audience that former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol—ousted and indicted after attempting a martial coup on the legislature just months ago—is actually a Trump-like figure who was forced out for trying to clean up fraud. Election denialism, it seems, is now a major American political export.

For me, the most interesting moment came when I happened to catch Schlapp interact with an attendee while out in the crowd. “Sorry that your wife has to defend you,” the attendee told Schlapp with a laugh. Schlapp chuckled and walked on.

A few weeks ago, Schlapp was accused of sexually assaulting a man at a Virginia bar. He was allegedly drunk and grabbed the man’s genitals when the man approached him to say he was making people uncomfortable and should leave. It wasn’t the first such accusation: Back in 2023, a young male staffer who had served on Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign accused Schlapp of “aggressively fondling” his genitals while the two were alone in a car. (Schlapp has denied the charges. The staffer later dropped the suit after an apparent cash settlement.)

For a weekend of conga-dancing over Trump’s win and their political reascendancy, there was something worn-out and tired about the whole affair. Maybe it’s that CPAC just doesn’t really fit the conservative id anymore. It’s MAGA through and through, but it’s not full-fat: You can wallow in the movement a lot better at Charlie Kirk’s AmericaFest conference, or—if you prefer a darker flavor—hang out with the white nationalists at the America First Political Action Conference.

But it’s hard to imagine Schlapp pulling the plug on CPAC anytime soon. After all, the sponsors pay so well. And all those politicians and voters paint a strong visual picture: Whatever the latest accusation against Trump, the MAGA movement and, of course, Schlapp himself, Real Patriotic Americans reject it.

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Quick Hits

WITH A BOSS LIKE THIS: It wasn’t just much of Washington D.C. that was shocked by Dan Bongino’s appointment as deputy director of the FBI. The agents themselves were, too. That’s because, according to a memo sent out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association, newly-confirmed director Kash Patel had made a commitment to them that the deputy post would go to “an on-board, active Special Agent as has been the case for 117 years.” The memo, which was released just hours before the Bongino announcement and obtained by The Bulwark, suggests that Patel entirely misled the group representing FBI agents during their meeting—or that circumstances dramatically changed. Either way, not a great start for a bureau that is already under siege.

The memo recounts that Natalie Bara, President of the FBI Agents Association, along with Vice President Jen Morrow, met with then-nominee Patel back in January. Two “main concerns” were brought up. The first was that the deputy direct slot be given to an active special agent “for many compelling reasons, including operational expertise and experience, as well as the trust of our Special Agent population.” The second was that any “Agents facing allegations of misconduct should be given due process as it relates to those allegations.”

“On both points,” the memo reads, “Director Patel agreed.”

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A HURT DOGE WILL HOLLER: With no statutory authority for its pillaging of the federal government, Elon Musk’s DOGE has moved at will through agency after agency via a simple strategy: Proclaiming “Daddy MAGA said we can do what we want.”

This has worked so far because Trump has seen no reason to yank Musk’s leash. But what happens when DOGE starts stepping on the toes of others in the president’s inner circle?

We may find out. Over the weekend, Musk ordered a mass email be sent to the entire federal workforce, requesting each employee reply with a list of five bullet points of what they’d accomplished in the previous week. “Failure to respond,” Musk proclaimed grandiloquently, “will be taken as a resignation.”

But the email, which contained no mention of resignation for non-responders, was met with some substantial resistance. Not every cabinet secretary was pleased by the idea of their workforces being compelled to justify their ongoing employment to Musk’s youths (or whatever AI they actually planned to feed the data into). Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told her staff not to reply. So did FBI Director Kash Patel. Similar messages went out at the Defense Department, the State Department, and—sources tell The Bulwark—the Department of Energy. RFK Jr.’s HHS told its employees to reply. Then it reversed course and said to “pause” on doing so. (The guy runs a tight ship.)

Musk and DOGE have consistently polled below Trump himself in recent weeks, but the president has only doubled down on his commitment to his rich buddy’s mission. “ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB, BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE,” he wrote shortly before Elon sent his email.

Still, somebody’s got to blink here. Are we going to see Musk try to fire big chunks of, say, the FBI, because Patel asked his employees not to play ball? Is Musk going to back down? Or—which is perhaps most likely—are we going to see Musk trying to continue harrowing the government according to the rules of palace intrigue: only coming down on agencies whose Trump-appointed heads don’t have sufficient MAGA cred to push back?

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Cheap Shots

1. This number will eventually grow to three after Republicans fill the two safe-seat vacancies left by former Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz.