From “reason.com”
Trump’s second term lurches forward, powered by monarchical authoritarianism
A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.
Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.
Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he’s declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.
While he’s gone hog wild so far in 2026, the pattern of his core authoritarianism was already well demonstrated in 2025. Trump wielded state power to punish enemies and reward friends, sent the military into city streets under bogus pretenses and over the objections of local elected officials, authorized masked cops to enforce “papers, please” policies on U.S. citizens moving in public (the loosing of such largely undisciplined shock troops in American cities where they are not wanted has predictably resulted in the unconscionable murder of a citizen), ordered the serial murder of suspected drug smugglers, and disrupted the global economy by making Americans pay sharply increased taxes on imported goods, for starters.
He has concentrated what was supposed to be the competing branches of the federal government into the whims of one man, and erased distinctions between federal and state, public and private. America has never had a president who acted more like a monarch.
Not all of Trump’s actions and statements are mired in his core authoritarianism. This does not absolve him. Not everything negative reported about Trump’s actions, or the specifics or reasonable implications of something he said or did, ultimately bears out. This does not make him acceptable. Yes, previous administrations have also violated Americans’ and the world’s economic and political liberties and lives. This does not mean Trump deserves a pass. His specific, documented exertions of state power over the past year should be enough to declare him a dangerous foe of American liberty.
Trump vs. Everyone Who Might Thwart Him
The anti-Trump protesters of 2025, unlike the pink-hatted #Resistance of 2017, zeroed in smartly on the through line uniting most of his grievous flaws: He is a president who wants to be king.
Sworn to faithfully execute his office and defend the Constitution, Trump this term has instead used real and threatened use of government force to cow or crush countervailing forces to his whims, wherever they might be. He has actively purged the Justice Department and the Defense Department of people he deems insufficiently loyal, gutted the executive-branch watchdog system of inspectors general, and converted federal law enforcement into a weapon aimed at those who cross him.
If he thinks you’re on his side, you need not fear the law will ever contain or control you, as demonstrated by the mass pardon of January 6 rioters and protesters who were trying to illegitimately make him president, as well as his continual series of pardons of other corrupt political and business-world figures. If you are a judge who rules in a way that displeases him, however, his congressional lackeys will contemplate impeaching you, and his administration may defy your order when it comes to such matters as allowing lawyers access to immigrant detainees or deporting immigrants to South Sudan even if they have no connection with that war-ravaged country.
One of Trump’s first sustained second-term campaigns was to threaten and punish white-shoe law firms for having previously argued against him in court or merely represented clients he dislikes, via stripping them of security clearances, canceling government contracts, and successfully pressuring many into doing pro bono work for explicitly Republican-friendly causes.
America’s globally envied universities, another potential counterforce in domestic public opinion and activity, have also felt the president’s wrath. As summed up by Politico just two months into his second term: “Columbia University…appeared poised to submit to a list of Trump administration demands that threaten core tenets of the school’s mission in an attempt to release itself from a $400 million federal funding freeze. The University of California’s board moved…to cut diversity statements from recruitment requirements. Dartmouth College…announced it had hired the Republican National Committee’s former chief counsel—an outspoken critic of birthright citizenship—as the college’s top lawyer and leader of its immigration office. And dozens of universities last month rushed to scrub diversity, equity and inclusion policies from their websites and cancel related events.”
Libertarians and others worried about federal government overreach have always stressed that depending on state business or largess or programs left recipients vulnerable to pressure, intimidation, and control; pipers and tunes and all that. That observation was meant to be a warning, not a recommendation. No law firm or university has a right to taxpayer-financed contracts or support, but it’s still poisonous for the government of a republic to make such decisions based on who has pissed off the chief executive.
Trump vs. Free Speech
Trump’s pose as a free speech champion, capped off by a day-one executive order, was an obvious shuck, meaning at best that the ideas and expressions he and his fans favored would no longer face official pressure. The principle was never going to be applicable to his political foes.
In 2025, the president launched factually absurd lawsuits against, among others, The New York Times, CBS, and The Wall Street Journal for reporting things about him he didn’t like; an inversion of the particularly American hostility toward charges of seditious libel that predates even the Revolution. Having the threatened whip-hand of government behind him, in the form of merger approvals or license renewals, has convinced some big media businesses to pay him off rather than deal with the hassles of winning in court but facing further retribution.
Trump has suggested at least 15 times that broadcasters he disfavors have their licenses revoked, described critical coverage of the administration as “really illegal,” and repeatedly characterized news organizations as the “enemy of the people.” His Federal Communications Commission Chair, Brendon Carr, threatened and jawboned ABC into temporarily canceling late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over opinions expressed about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, kicked reporters out of the Pentagon unless they signed an oath to not seek unauthorized information, sicced the oath-signing propagandists to harass refuseniks, and retaliated against his own servicemen and women for posting what he deemed were inappropriate responses to Kirk’s murder.
When six Democratic lawmakers in November pointed out in a public video that members of the armed forces are not required to carry out unlawful orders (which was the main initial organizing principle behind the eventually Trump-supporting Oath Keepers), the president accused them of treason, and both the FBI and the Defense Department announced intentions to investigate them for their clearly lawful statement.
Trump’s Muscle
We have alas grown accustomed to American presidents launching lethal and potentially regime-changing force against foreign countries against whom Congress has not, per its constitutional prerogative, declared war. Trump regularly dispenses with the very notion that the legislative branch requires consultation, while also waving off both the international laws of war and traditional (and legal) domestic restraints on deploying the military internally.
Trump’s flexing of his newly rechristened Department of War as some kind of plaything is perhaps the most dangerous of his monarchical urges, combining history’s most powerful arsenal with a wholehearted rejection of legal or customary restraints.
Trump used the military as a machine to murder people on boats in his also-newly-renamed Gulf of America, merely because he asserts they are criminals, treating an accused role in the movement of illegal drugs as worthy of summary execution. Beyond the blatant criminality—we were not and even after conquering the country are not legally at war with Venezuela, nor is selling drugs anywhere (let alone transshipping them in international water between points unknown) reasonably construed as an act of non-state terror—it’s also an absurdly indulgent mismatch of ends and means, expending tens of billions in equipment against a couple dozen small boats.
Trump has also declared the military “locked and loaded and ready to go” should the mullahs in Iran open fire on demonstrators there. America’s appetite for toppling foreign governments appears to remain undimmed; and Trump is temperamentally attuned to just doing whatever he wants regardless of constitutional restraints, and his laughable reputation as an antiwar America Firster in foreign policy.
The president has also waived away legal and customary restraints over the past year in federalizing the National Guard (as well as using some actual Marines) to be a literal invading army against U.S. cities run by the opposing political party, using risible excuses about out-of-control crime and insurrection against his immigration enforcement authority. The Pentagon has instructed National Guard units to create “quick reaction forces” for such strictly domestic law enforcement. A series of court decisions impelled the president to scale back his deployments, though he vowed, “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again.”
A September National Security Presidential Memorandum on “domestic terrorism and organized political violence” illustrated what happens when an unrestrained federal government starts hunting around for what Trump has described as the “enemy within”: free political expression will be the first casualty. The memo, issued in the wake of the Kirk assassination, instructed federal law enforcement to be on the lookout for various domestic baddies, including those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity…[and] extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
Tyrannical government behavior tends to inspire violent reaction, which then occasions the imposition of still more tyranny. Some of Trump’s invasions of U.S. cities were purportedly inspired by protests against the most damaging and cruel policy initiative of his second term, the campaign to deport millions of immigrants who haven’t met government paperwork requirements.
In their immigration raids, Trump and henchmen such as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller behave with intentional and gleeful cruelty, sending masked bully boys throughout the land to snatch people from their workplaces and government appointments, then ship them to overseas (and domestic) torture chambers. Bereft, separated families are often left without any means to learn what has become of their loved ones. The administration routinely lies about its actions, about who is being detained and why. Meanwhile, federal officials and departments regularly churn out vicious cartoon memes mocking those whose lives they are ripping apart.
Those targeted are not generally “worst of the worst” illegal immigrant criminals; halfway through the year only around 7 percent of those detained had been previously convicted of any violent crime. And some aren’t even non-citizens; as ProPublica reported in October, “Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched….About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.”
These are the fruits of a man who considers the lives of millions of people as toys for him to break in pursuit of a dangerously unattainable vision of nationalistic purity, which obsesses him both at home and abroad. (His Department of Homeland Security publicly announces its dream to somehow eliminate 100 million people, the majority of whom would need to be citizens to hit that number, whose ancestry is seen as “third world.”)
The Global Economy as Plaything
The president’s tariffs, and the wild, careless way he has implemented and un-implemented them, may have come with less direct physical violence than his immigration policies, but they nonetheless highlight the miseries of being subject to a single sovereign’s erratic whim. Anyone who purchases an item from abroad, whether for consumption purposes or to combine with domestic materials for the manufacture of a good, is subject to having the means and methods of one’s life and livelihood made more expensive, complex, frustrating, and maddening, just because one powerful man is particularly dumb and willful.
With his whipsawing and complicated tariff maneuverings, using power baldly usurped from Congress, Trump is not only disrupting Americans’ ability to manage and plan their own lives, he’s making it onerously difficult to even fully know what the law demands on any given day.
As trade analyst Scott Lincicome noted in The Dispatch in December, the money costs of obeying the law, much less paying the tariffs, are absurd: “Federal Reserve economists in July of this year estimated that U.S. manufacturers would alone pay between $39 and $71 billion each year to comply with just content and reporting requirements in four Trump tariff actions.” (The tariffs also magnify monarchical opportunities for graft; when the wealth of nations and businesses depend on one man’s extraconstitutional impulses, that one man can expect payoffs and supplication from those nations and businesses, as Switzerland seeing its tariff rates plummet after giving Trump expensive gifts.)
Such is the president’s personalization of the entire economy that he has unabashedly directed the federal government to take equity stakes in various private corporations, while continuing to drum up business for the Trump family empire even during presidential visits abroad.
The Monarch vs. Democracy
In October, as a second round of “No Kings” protests filled American streets, the president of the United States on social media shared an Artificial Intelligence video showing him wearing a crown, flying a “King Trump” branded fighter jet, and bombing demonstrators on Times Square with a giant payload full of shit. Sometimes the symbolism can be a bit on the nose.
Trump and his less vertebrate GOP allies are trying to arrange it so that any potential source of insufficient compliance, let alone outright defiance, is threatened in advance and/or punished after. He tried, and failed, to bully Indiana Republicans into voting for a redistricting map he deemed more nationally favorable. He successfully pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to delay by months the swearing in of a new Democratic member of Congress, simply because that might change the results of a vote he cared about. His Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into his own appointed Federal Reserve chair for resisting Trump’s interest-rate-slashing whims.
Unlike actual kings, Trump will likely leave office at the end of his term. (Although he also habitually asserts a power over state-created election practices that could lay the groundwork to challenges to democratic attempts to oust his party.) But the president’s authoritarian tendencies have unfortunately found and expanded a substantial fanbase in America. Which means that the threat Trumpism poses to American liberty will not likely go away when he does.
The people who have thrilled to the 45th president’s frenetic exertions and nonstop insult comedy will not soon rediscover the values of aspirational virtue, of venerating the Constitution, respecting limits on federal power, acknowledging the fatal conceit of would-be central planners, eschewing war, avoiding cruelty, treating human beings as if they had rights, privileging rule of law over rule of man. These very concepts now strike his MAGA movement as risible, foolish, outmoded, hopelessly naive, a sign that one doesn’t know what time it is.
Which is why it’s more necessary than ever, despite what a banal and overdone truism it has become, to say, however repetitively, that Donald Trump is, at least until he no longer holds office, a menace to the liberty and peace of America and the world.