Three Methods of Control
How an unpopular government will protect its power.
Donald Trump received less than half of the votes cast in the 2024 presidential election—49.9%. That was 1.5% more than Kamala Harris. Immediately upon taking office he greenlit a sweeping effort to decimate the operations of the federal agencies, at the same time he is testing the limits of autocratic control of the government and defiance of the courts. To a greater degree than any president in my lifetime, Trump’s actions are exceeding the slim mandate that he was given by voters.
Public opinion polls thus far show that Trump’s own popularity is hovering right around his percentage of votes in the election. Polls also show a significant majority of the public are concerned with Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts. Both of those numbers are going to get more negative. The impact of cuts already made to federal agencies have not yet rippled out far beyond those who are in direct contact with the federal workforce, but they will soon. And Musk and his team are only now getting to the cuts that are really going to piss Americans off once they are fully felt: Social Security, where a reported half of the work force is being fired, and Medicaid, a program serving more than 70 million people, which Republicans are proposing to slash to the bone. These attacks on the social safety net that Americans have taken for granted for generations, that tens of millions of Republicans and Democrats alike rely on to survive and have planned their lives around, are going to be very, very unpopular. There is a reason why these programs have long been considered politically sacrosanct. The Trump administration does not care.
This is not even including the planes that keep falling out of the sky as Mr. Ketamine cuts the FAA budget, or the people who are going to get food poisoning because all of the safety inspectors were fired, or the infectious disease outbreaks that will come because we’ve stopped trying to prevent them. All of these things will happen. They will not be popular either.
The basic point here is that, in pursuit of a right wing vision of full dictatorship and a callous destruction of the idea that the government can help people, Trump and his allies are going to see their popularity decline. How much the courts will rein in this project—or even try to—remains to be seen. The 2026 midterms will be the first real chance for voters to take out their anger on what is going to happen as a result of Trump’s policies. Republicans are aware that, by normal standards, what they are doing now would set them up to get whipped in the midterms. But a whipping in the midterms and the subsequent of ability of Democrats to grind the Republican legislative agenda to a halt is incompatible with autocracy, with dictatorship, with the imperial presidency that is being pursued by this administration. Given this obvious conflict between enacting unpopular policies, consolidating power in the White House, and winning elections, what will the Trump administration do to try to hang onto power?
There are three primary methods of control that I expect to see used to greater extremes than any of us have ever experienced between now and the midterms. None of these things are new. All are problems that have long plagued America. All are antidemocratic forces that have been exacerbated by systemic flaws in our electoral system and economy. All of them are worthy topics on their own. I ain’t unveiling any surprises here. But in an unpredictable time, it is worth focusing on the things that we can confidently predict, so that we can try to get ahead of them and counteract them. I cannot tell you what portion of every federal agency Elon Musk will succeed in destroying or what wild idea will come into Trump’s head next. I can tell you, though, that as this agenda unfolds, it will make many people upset because it directly harms them, and it will set up Republicans for midterm defeats, and it will lead to increasing calls to restrict Trump’s thus-far unchecked power—and that, in response, the right wing will reach for the following three dials, and turn them as far as they can, because they have few other choices:
Media as propaganda: America’s media landscape is utterly different than it was in past eras of social upheaval, like the 1960s. Back then, there were dominant mainstream media outlets that commanded wide interest from all segments of the public, and there was a thriving network of credible local news sources across the country. Neither of those things exist any more, except as pale shadows of what they were. Today we have polarized media bubbles enabled by the internet, and a thriving right wing ecosystem (and a less thriving left/ liberal ecosystem). What you can look for in the near future is the increasing right wing polarization of ostensibly mainstream outlets that are under oligarchic control—as you just saw from Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post; an increasing freezing-out and marginalization of credible mainstream outlets that are not under oligarchic control—as you just saw when the White House decided to snub the AP and seize control of which pool reporters get access; increasing use of direct political threats by the White House against major media companies that produce displeasing coverage—as you have already seen from Trump, who wields the FCC like a weapon; and an increasing thumb on the scale by social media companies under oligarchic control to raise the audience of right wing news and restrict the audience of credible news outlets—as you have seen at Musk’s Twitter, and will certainly be seeing more at Facebook as well. Widespread access to and belief in credible journalism is a direct threat to Trump’s project and they are going to attack it with more ferocity than America has ever seen.
Voter suppression: The Republican Party to a large degree already owes its political power to antidemocratic flaws in our electoral system: Unrestricted money in politics, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. As we approach the midterms, you can expect to see voter suppression, particularly in red states, ramp up tremendously. They will restrict access to voting locations, they will (further) purge voter rolls, they will use official and unofficial groups of “supervisors” to intimidate people at the polls, they create fantastical tales of Illegals trying to vote and use it as an excuse to challenge vast swaths of mostly-Democratic voters. They will cast the existence of get-out-the-vote efforts as corruption, and outlaw them. They will cast the existence of voting in the black community as DEI, and target it. There will be little relief available from the courts. The more unpopular an autocrat gets, the more crooked elections must become. Expect all of this and more.
Military control: The full takeover of US security agencies—the FBI, the CIA, the military, and others—by Trump loyalists is more or less complete now. They are just mopping up the last disgruntled insiders at this point. If you still believe that traditional norms against using the military domestically or launching FBI investigations for purely political reasons will be respected going forward, please abandon those beliefs at once. The FBI’s primary business now will be attacking Trump’s domestic enemies. It will be more crude and more overt than what happened under J. Edgar Hoover. On top of that, I will bet a dollar that the US military will be called out against protesters in this country before the end of the year. Trump wanted to use the Army to bust the heads of BLM protesters in 2020, and was only stopped by the career civil servants. Now the career civil servants have been shown the door and the military is under the control of a Fox News host. There will be no restrictions. We are going to begin to see the administration’s political enemies charged with crimes and put in jail, and movements in the streets met with harsh, violent force by riot police and, if necessary, soldiers. This form of control works as a disincentive to resistance, a warning. The FBI will arrest some people, one protest will get suppressed in a bloody fashion, and the idea is that those things scare so many people that resistance subsequently declines. How far down the road we go with this form of control depends on the extent to which the political resistance decides to react to it by pulling back, or pushing forward.
Again: All of these things exist in some form already, and all have been used to suppress dissent before. What distinguishes this point in history is, I think, the severity with which we are going to see all three of these things unleashed. All of these things have, in the past, been used somewhat covertly, because politicians understood that they were perceived as shameful. That shame is going away now. These methods are coming out to play in the sunshine.
Discussing this does not mean it will be easy to fight it. There is significant value, though, in thinking ahead and recognizing that this is coming. One of my greatest fears is that the institutions that are supposed to protect American democracy—the press, organized labor, lawyers, progressive nonprofits—will continue to act as if we are living in normal times, and continue to express shock (shock I tell you!) when old tactics fail in the face of a newly lawless and dictatorial set of opponents. Every week we spend saying “Surely they will not violate the norm against [X],” and then seeing that norm violated, and then putting out a statement to the shrinking press corps decrying this violation, is a week wasted. That is us being led around by the other side. The first step to crafting a plan to deal with what we are up against is to acknowledge what we are up against.
I hope I’m wrong! But I don’t think so.
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Related reading: Dark Times Are Coming; It’s Not Looking Great; Gangster Party; Revolution Town.
Next Saturday, March 8, at 8 pm, I’ll be appearing at the “Night at the Library” in Brooklyn with Alissa Quart. We’ll both be talking about how to build a working class media in the age of billionaire control. A relevant topic! If you want to read up in advance, you can buy my book about the labor movement, “The Hammer,” right here, and you can find links to Alissa’s many great books right here. In addition to being an excellent writer, she also runs the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a vital funder of working class-centric journalism, which I encourage you all to support.
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I worry about a fear spiral where people are (reasonably!) worried about violent suppression of protests and thus don’t turn out to marches and rallies when in fact the larger the protest, arguably the safer it is.
I screwed up. As part of todays boycott I wasn’t going to use a credit card, but I donated to you via cc and I blew it. But I won’t regret it because it’s important work you’re doing. And, I’ll make up for my transgression in some other way.