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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8719 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.

Yeah, you make a strong point. I suppose ultimately the 2016 campaign with the FBI covering for Hillary, and then subsequent FBI involvement in the 2020 election and the Covid "misinformation" thing is evidence of utter corruption in our political process.

Nuts that it's all relatively out in the open, and yet half the country seems to not be aware or not care about it. Sigh.

I suppose ultimately the 2016 campaign with the FBI covering for Hillary,

Don't forget illegally spying on her opponents' campaign office. For completely unknowable reasons, including what happened to any intel thus obtained.

For completely unknowable reasons, including what happened to any intel thus obtained.

Wasn't the intelligence put into the PDB and distributed to the Clinton campaign?

I don't think there has ever been any public statement about the results or even purpose of the investigation. It's been acknowledged the FBI lied in order to obtain the warrant to surveil Page, but nothing else.

Of course, this is all going by memory. A cursory search results in lots and lots of whitewashed "fact checks" about how Trump was totally lying about the FBI spying on him; none mention Page. I found a few links purporting to lead to articles on the FISA court's condemnation of the FBI over the Page warrant, but they are all dead.

I found a few links purporting to lead to articles on the FISA court's condemnation of the FBI over the Page warrant, but they are all dead.

Speaking as someone who followed that whole episode closely enough that I once knew the details of why footnote 389 in the IG report meant that the FBI had been lying about when they opened their various investigations against their various targets, my memory of this says that the FISA court, being involved in signing on to an obviously false FISA warrant, played the IG report straight and sent it back to DoJ. The upshot of that was that Brandon Von Grack was removed as a prosecutor from the Flynn case, a new DoJ attorney was appointed, and what do you know, suddenly pretty much every single piece of evidence that Flynn's defense alleged existed and had been seeking, and that the DoJ denied existing, was produced and the DoJ was motioning to dismiss the case. The judge denied the motion, defense sought a writ of mandamus, appeals initially granted the writ but then convened a full panel, which allowed the judge to continue the trial, etc. etc.

Oh, and Kevin Clinesmith, the guy who falsified the CIA's answer that Page was an asset, was fined $100 for his crime.

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