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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Signs point to Donald Trump soon invoking the Insurrection Act (paywalled, but you can get around it with Reader View):

The clock is ticking down on a crucial but little-noticed part of President Donald Trump’s first round of executive orders — the one tasking the secretaries of the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to submit a joint report, within 90 days, recommending “whether to invoke the Insurrection Act.”

Many of us are now holding our collective breath, knowing that the report and what it contains could put us on the slippery slope toward unchecked presidential power under a man with an affinity for ironfisted dictators.

Adding to the suspense was the recent “Friday Night Massacre” at the Pentagon — the firing of the nation’s top uniformed officer and removing other perceived guardrails (i.e., the top uniformed lawyers at the Army, Navy and Air Force) standing between the president and his long-stated intention to declare martial law upon returning to power.

And here's the linked EO they're referencing:

(a) Within 30 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the President, through the Homeland Security Advisor, a report outlining all actions taken to fulfill the requirements and objectives of this proclamation; and

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall submit a joint report to the President about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 essentially allows the President to declare martial law by deploying the military to "suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion".

I still don't think that Trump is going to make a serious attempt at establishing permanent one-party rule. What would be the play, exactly? Declare permanent martial law and then cancel elections in four years? I don't think there's much appetite for that, either with him or with the members of his inner circle. But then again, I also never predicted that he would cut off military aid to Ukraine either, so my predictions have already been wrong once!

It seems like we've had a slight uptick in leftist (or at least anti-Trump) posters lately so I'd be particularly interested in hearing their thoughts.

I still don't think that Trump is going to make a serious attempt at establishing permanent one-party rule. What would be the play, exactly?

  1. Centralise power in the President through impoundment authority, unitary executive doctrine, subordinating Senate-confirmed Cabinet members to informally-appointed advisers like Elon Musk etc. This is being done, and appears to be succeeding. The Constitutional limit is the counterveiling power of Congress and the Courts. The inbuilt rural bias in the Senate means that Trump could be as popular as Jeffrey Epstein and the Democrats would still struggle to get to 60 seats - with reasonable effort by the administration by 2026 we will be in a world where the only tool a Democratic Congress with say 300 Reps and 59 senators has to oppose the President is to shut down the government. It looks like Trump is already floating a trial balloon about ignoring SCOTUS on the USAID impoundment case.
  2. Establish politically reliable, centralised tools of violent repression. Purge the officer corps and FBI leadership. Invoke the Insurrection Act on some spurious pretext so that troops can be deployed to Blue cities. The point isn't to go full brownshirt before 2028 - it is to establish escalation dominance to ensure that the next step goes smoothly.
  3. End competitive elections for the Presidency. There are at least two really obvious ways to do this: the constitutional one is for sufficiently many purple states with Republican state legislatures who are voter-immune due to gerrymandering to switch to legislative appointment of presidential electors. The strongman one is for the outgoing VP to ignore the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act (saying it is unconstitutional), to count the electoral votes himself, and to disqualify enough electoral votes based on bad-faith allegations of fraud to declare the losing candidate the winner. This part of the playbook was written down by Eastman, Trump tried to run it in 2020, and a willingness to run it in 2028 was a requirement for Vance to be considered for the VP slot.
  4. Use the normal populist-authoritarian playbook to consolidate power (Orban and Erdogan are the best modern examples) - use process-is-the-punishment lawsuits to drive uncucked media out of business, withhold funding from State and local governments who don't play ball, establish an regulatory anarcho-tyranny for medium and large businesses such that a company which pays Danegeld to the Party doesn't need permission to do things and a company that doesn't can't get it, selectively prosecute regime opponents for three-felonies-a-day bullshit, selectively refuse to prosecute regime allies for political violence such that opponents are not physically safe, in general try to make conspicuous sycophancy a pre-requisite for career advancement in as many domains as possible.

We can argue whether Trump was joking when he said he wanted to be a dictator, override the constitution, arrest insufficiently loyal Republican congressmen etc. but he did say it. You say "What would be the play?" but the plays have been very publicly called. The points above are all things Trump has said he will do, is doing (or tried to do last time in the case of 3), and has retained the support of the GOP in the country while doing. The case that democracy is safe basically comes down to "Trump would never say a Democratic election victory is fraudulent unless it really was fraudulent." (which is obviously false given his record) and "The guardrails that held in 2020 will still hold after Trump has had spent four years deliberately undermining them." (which is rather optimistic, unless there is a Dem landslide in the 2026 midterms or Trump manages to lose GOP support through some piece of shocking incompetence).

I agree with you that Trump is probably not going to pull the above playbook off by himself, but Musk is clearly extraordinarily competent, and appears to be on board with it. Giving betting odds on how likely all this is to actually happen is hard, because under the most likely scenario there won't be a "mask off" moment that the bet can settle against unless the Democratic candidate wins the 2028 election by more than the margin of Bush v Gore style shenanigans and Vance overturns it anyway.

Globally, presidential autogolpes are the usual failure mode of presidential democracy. From an international perspective, the surprising thing is that it hasn't happened in the US already. (There were close shaves under Lincoln and FDR).

If only. But on a more serious note, it’s been a few weeks. The legitimacy of Orban, Putin and Erdogan rested on real, huge economic growth and improvement in the prosperity of the average American. Trump can’t offer that and couldn’t achieve it even if he wanted to, and his current policies only make it even less likely. The sensibilities of the vast majority of the domestic elite still run contrary to him. He has no substantive personal ideological program.

As I have long said, the only real test is immigration. Trump will be a dictator when he can deport 15 million illegal migrants, by any means necessary, and get away with it. Until then, he is merely playing in a sandbox carefully maintained by those who have constrained the realm of political possibility.

I think the chance of Trump and Musk making a serious attempt to do something like this is about 60% (being deliberately vague about the meaning of serious attempt) and if they my wild-ass guess outcome prediction is:

  • 40% Truss/Sunak level incompetence means that the administration loses the support it needs to do something like this
  • 30% Success
  • 20% Failure because institutions are more robust than I thought.
  • 10% Failure because Musk and Trump fall out with each other and Musk blows Trump up Cummings v Johnson style

As I have long said, the only real test is immigration.

Unfortunately, the test that matters is the 2028 election, and by the time you get there it is too late. Think about Trump's first term - whichever side wins and gets to write the history, the main thing that gets written about will be the disputed 2020 election. (The pandemic response will be glossed over because the events that happened, in particular the Trump administration being much more Covidian than the MAGA base wanted it to be, don't fit into either side's preferred narrative).

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