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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12328 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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On the sqs thread, @Capital_Room had an interesting query, about whether Trump is actually being authoritarian:

Is there anything to this: "The Coup We've Feared Has Already Happened"?

The coup we’ve been fearing has already happened. Utterly servile to Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to convene the House of Representatives for even pro forma business (and by extension Congress) indefinitely, thereby shielding Trump from all manner of inquiry and accountability, not least the Epstein files, and giving him de facto full dictatorial powers. The longer the shutdown continues, the more irrelevant Congress becomes. Next expect unilateral executive decrees on assuming full funding authority, essentially rendering Congress defunct. It may never reconvene. Suspension of the Constitution cannot be far behind. Dictatorship came to us while we slept.

Is this what it seems like to me — just more lefty pearl-clutching and crying wolf — or is there something to the arguments James Bruno and Tonoccus McClain are making?

Some of the commenters like @MadMonzer offer an interesting response:

That substack is a bad take on it - the best version of the theory I have seen is spread across multiple posts on lawfaremedia.org. But the underlying story is absolutely serious, and as far as I can see it is true. The three-bullet version of the story is

  1. Trump is trying to replace the Congress-driven budget process established by the Constitution with a White House-driven budget process.
  2. Johnson is helping him, and Senate Republicans are not trying to stop him
  3. So far he is succeeding

The slightly longer version is:

  • Trump has, on numerous occasions, refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Congressional Republicans have not complained. As well as using his partisan majorities in both houses of Congress to pass recissions under the Impoundment Control Act (which can't be filibustered), Trump has used a dubiously-legal pocket recission to cut spending without a Congressional vote. SCOTUS has helped this along by setting up procedural barriers to anyone suing over this.
  • Despite the Republican trifecta, Congress did not pass a budget in FY 2025, and does not appear to be trying to pass a budget in FY 2026. Notably, Johnson has shut the House down rather than trying to make progress on any of the outstanding appropriations bills.
  • Rather than moving a mini-CR to pay the troops (Enough Democrats have said they support this that it would pass both houses of Congress), Trump has paid the troops with a combination of private donations and funds illegally transferred from the military R&D budget. The White House ballroom is another example of using private donations to pay for what should be Congressionally-approved government spending.
  • On the revenue side, Trump has raised a helluvalot of revenue with dubiously-legal tariffs. He also did a deal with Nvidia and AMD where they pay what is in effect a 15% export tax in exchange for Trump waiving controls on advanced chip exports to China. Export taxes are unconstitutional. There has been no attempt to incorporate any of this revenue into a budget passed by Congress.
  • An obvious combination of this type of "deal" and funding specific programs with private donations is to set up a parallel budget where money is raised and spent outside the official Congressional budget process, all backed by more or less soft threats of government coercion. Trump hasn't done this yet, but it is a logical continuation of things he has done.
  • Trump has also claimed in social media posts that he can spend the tariff revenue without Congressional approval.

The claim that Trump and Johnson are trying to change the US budget process to one where (at least as regards discretionary spending - the only changes to entitlement spending have been done in regular order through the OBBBA) Congress does not meaningfully exercise the power of the purse seems to me to be straightforwardly true.

Overall I tend to agree that Trump's admin is acting in authoritarian ways, and even moreso than past administrations. However, it seems to me that the Congressional structure is so broken that, it kind of makes sense?

The way I see it, and the way Trump et al probably sees it, is that the Three Branches as they exist are extremely dysfunctional, and cannot do the actual job of governing the country pretty much at all. This has allowed NGOs and other non-state actors to come in and basically take over by deploying social and cultural capital in key areas, craftily created a sort of secret network of influence, etc.

The only way for us to get out of this morass, the theory goes, is to have a strong executive who basically burns this gridlock down. Though I don't know if Trump's team would want to restore a functioning American government after or just keep an extremely strong executive.

Anyway, I can't say I fully agree with Trump's seeming plan to just destroy jurisprudence for the executive and do whatever he wants, but I admire the sheer boldness. OTOH, I'm also not convinced that the U.S. has more than a 2% chance of meaningfully falling into an authoritarian dictatorship under Trump, or even in the next 10-20 years. Hopefully I don't eat my words!

Trump is pulling a bunch of shenanigans, but they don't seem really different in kind from past shenanigans. The US hasn't passed a full budget since 1997. And that he's got Johnson on board means he's not actually leaving Congress out of it. The tariffs are going through the court system as normal. The Nvidia thing is an interesting reversal of "the power to tax is the power to destroy" (Trump can lawfully forbid the export), and is probably unconstitutional, but the trick is for someone to have standing. But all of this is pretty normal pushing of boundaries, combined with an especially dysfunctional Congress. It's not an overthrow of the system.

What is the bright line for you that would show an actual overthrow of the system?

Use of the federal security agencies to illegally gain partisan political advantage against the opposition seems like a fairly bright line.

If that happens, users on this board will immediately defend it as not illegal, not partisan, not an advantage, and not as bad as something that happened in the Hillary campaign.

Consider this a sad, sad prediction.

It has already happened, and other than the last item, they already did.

Now it appears that what Brennan told congressional investigators was false. The current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, who used to be one of the House investigators looking into the Russia matter, has declassified documents from Brennan’s time at the agency which show that, far from keeping the dossier at arm’s reach, Brennan actually forced CIA analysts to use it and overruled the analysts who wanted to leave the dossier out of the Intelligence Community Assessment.

Ratcliffe asked the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA) to review the tradecraft used in producing the assessment. First of all, the DA found what it called “multiple procedural anomalies” in the CIA’s preparation of the assessment. There was “a highly compressed production timeline,” too much “compartmentalization,” and “excessive involvement of agency heads,” which led to “departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing” of the assessment. Together, all of the “anomalies” “impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft,” the DA concluded.

There was no doubt the FBI wanted to include the dossier in the Intelligence Community Assessment; the CIA self-investigation found that “FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the assessment hinged on the dossier’s inclusion.” FBI officials “repeatedly pushed” to include the dossier in the assessment.

But career CIA analysts did not want to include the dossier. The CIA’s deputy director for analysis sent Brennan an email saying that including the dossier’s information in any form would threaten “the credibility of the entire document.” That was when Brennan made the decision to overrule his experts. From the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis:

Despite these objections, Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the dossier by the two mission center leaders — one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background — he appeared more swayed by the dossier’s general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottomline is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.” [Bolding mine.]

Director Ratcliffe has also declassified a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, which the CIA had kept under wraps, that outlined Brennan’s involvement in the dossier. The report, based on the committee’s interviews with CIA staff, said that “two senior CIA officers,” both with extensive Russia experience, “argued with [Brennan] that the dossier should not be included at all in the Intelligence Community Assessment, because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards, according to a senior officer present at the meeting. The same officer said that [Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s many flaws responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’”

...For what it's worth, I think your prediction is probably accurate in the sense that you intend it. Buy as I asked last week,

If you wish to argue by appealing to a general principle, what is the proper way to rebut such an argument if one disagrees that the principle is generally held?

Several of the effort-posts I don't have time to write any more are simple surveys of old discussions with links to the evidence answering the questions since. I have a pretty strong impression of how this has gone on balance, but it'd be better to have hard data to make the case.

Several of the effort-posts I don't have time to write any more are simple surveys of old discussions with links to the evidence answering the questions since. I have a pretty strong impression of how this has gone on balance, but it'd be better to have hard data to make the case.

A 'revisiting old questions' series would be an interesting contribution to the Motte, as long as it was done with an eye to parts of previous arguments that were wrong as well as right. It is often worthwhile to re-test old arguments, and if it can't be done without denials or dismissals that too is worth drawing attention to.

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