This Is The Republican Party’s Death Spiral Into Authoritarianism
One thing no one would doubt— if Biden or Obama or Clinton or any Democrat had done even half of what Trump was done in trampling the prerogatives of Congress, the Republicans would be screaming bloody murder. They sure aren’t now. Noting their silent acquiescence to Trump’s power grabs, Aaron Blake likened Trump’s and Musk’s first 2 weeks in the White House to “a hostile takeover of government power with relatively little pushback. And those with the most power to change Trump’s course in the near term— congressional Republicans— have been especially meek, even as he’s trampled on their prerogatives and their past ideals. The party of limited government and federalism is tacitly green-lighting a more autocratic chief executive.”
This now a party that has convinced itself that “what Trump says, goes… [T]hey generally haven’t been willing to speak up and try to force his hand, even when Trump’s actions diluted their power and ran contrary to the principles they once espoused.” Bake listed 8 examples:
After many Republicans warned him against pardoning Jan. 6 defendants who assaulted police— and even suggested that it was unthinkable— their response to him actually doing it has been muted.
They pushed back some in his first term when Trump flouted the law in firing independent inspectors general; they’ve generally defended it now that Trump has done it on a much larger scale.
Many of them publicly cautioned him against firing special counsel Robert Mueller in his first term and against pursuing retribution for his recent indictments. Today, they’ve said virtually nothing about the targeting of Justice Department officials who participated investigating Trump.
They’ve largely given Trump a pass on the chaotic federal funding freeze last week, despite raising concerns privately and Congress having the power of the purse.
They’ve stood by as Trump sought to pause a TikTok ban (using unclear authority) that all but 15 House Republicans voted for and was supposed to start two weeks ago.
The former party of free trade has said very little as Trump has moved toward punitive tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China that could exacerbate inflation.
They’ve been reluctant to criticize Trump’s abortion rights-supporting pick for Health and Human Services secretary (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and a former Democrat with unorthodox views as director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard).
And most recently, they’ve said very little as an unelected official, Elon Musk, has sought control of key government data and systems and wrought havoc on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— after frequently pushing back on Trump’s attempts to cut foreign aid during his first term.
Part of the reason for the congressional GOP’s disappearing act is that lawmakers have seen what criticizing Trump has done to their colleagues, and they’ve lost the will to fight him, at least publicly. Trump is very good at turning the MAGA movement against perceived apostates.
But part if it is also that this is what their party seems to want, in large part. They are reflecting a base that, more and more, isn’t so much conservatism-first as Trump-first— and does want to invest huge authority in their authoritarian-curious leader.
A March AP-NORC poll showed 57 percent of Republicans wanted Trump to take action on things “without waiting for Congress and the courts.”
… [T]he GOP base has embraced a much more top-down, president-centric view of government power than Democrats have. Meanwhile, we’ve got a succession of congressional Republicans— despite being duly elected in their own right to the legislative branch— saying out loud that their job is basically to do whatever Trump wants, unquestioningly.
That doesn’t mean that’s what the GOP will ultimately do in every case. But the early returns suggest they’ll be exceedingly choosy about the battles they pick. And all the while, Trump will be emboldened to assert more and more power.
Yesterday, Charlie Warzel welcomed his readers to a look at Musk’s bureaucratic coup, reminding them that “Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he— a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress— is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.
As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and the Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management (one of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from high school last year). During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an ‘on-premise’ email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees— one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002 (there has not yet been a response to the complaint). Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system— used to disburse more than $5 trillion to Americans each year (a national security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon)— as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. (They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems, according to Reuters.)
Over the weekend, the Trump administration put two senior staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on administrative leave— staffers who, according to CNN, had tried to thwart Musk’s staff’s attempts to access sensitive and classified information. Musk posted on Twitter yesterday that “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” [USAID had helped free South Africa of the apartheid regime that Musk’s family admired] USAID staffers were barred from entering the unit’s headquarters today.
This is called “flooding the zone.” Taken in aggregate, these actions are overwhelming. But Musk’s political project with DOGE is actually quite straightforward: The world’s richest man appears to be indiscriminately dismantling the government with an eye toward consolidating power and punishing his political enemies.
… Musk and his Silicon Valley acolytes are acting on a long-held fantasy of approaching the federal government like a software company and running it like a venture-backed tech start-up during the days of zero-percent interest rates. Here’s the problem: The federal government is not a software company. “The stakes are wildly different,” a former senior Twitter executive told me recently. This person, who requested anonymity because they worked closely with Musk during his takeover and fear retribution, argued that Musk seems incapable of recognizing the limits of his own knowledge. When I asked them to describe Musk’s managerial strategy, they borrowed a term of art from SpaceX’s own rocket mishaps: “This is a rapid unscheduled disassembly of government services.”
The theory that the government is in efficient is not altogether incorrect. I recently spoke with Robert Gordon, formerly the deputy assistant to the president for economic mobility in the Biden administration, to get a sense of how intricate government agencies are and what it would take to reform them. Gordon, who has spent time in the Office of Management and Budget and as the assistant secretary responsible for grants policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, was quick to note that we desperately need to simplify processes within the federal government to allow workers to execute more quickly and develop more agile technology, such as the Direct File product that the IRS recently made to allow Americans to file taxes for free. “No doubt the government could do more here,” he told me. “But it requires incredibly specific approaches, implemented in a thoughtful way. It requires paying enormous attention to detail, not blowing shit up.” Musk and DOGE have instead operated with a “vast carelessness,” Gordon wrote in a Substack post last week. “This government cannot trouble itself to plan for the biggest things, the funds that thousands of organizations use to serve millions of people,” he wrote. “It has swept up civil servants in a vortex of confusion and fear.” Musk wrote today on Twitter that the Treasury team that built Direct File no longer exists. “That group has been deleted,” he said.
Among Gordon’s biggest concerns is that DOGE’s slapdash cuts will remove key links in the bureaucratic chain that make the government function. Even simple-sounding procedures— allocating government funds in a crisis like, say, a pandemic— require coordination among teams of civil servants across multiple government offices. “All of this is done by back-office types,” Gordon told me. “There are so many people in that process, and it matters enormously how good they are.” That this system is inefficient is frustrating, Gordon said, but he worries that the chaos caused by Musk’s efforts will halt any possibility of reform. “If you want to make this system better, you need to create space for civil servants who know what they’re doing to do that work,” he told me. “What’s very likely to happen now because of this pressure is that the most competent people on that chain are at super-high risk of saying, I gave it my best shot; I don’t need this and quit, because they can get better jobs. That’s what I see happening.”
Of course, the so-called tech right does not agree. As the political scientist Henry Farrell wrote this past weekend, “The fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy, you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.” But this reasoning is not usually compatible with the reality of managing complex organizations. As the former Twitter exec told me, after Musk took over the platform, his people enthusiastically championed ideas that seasoned employees with knowledge of the company had already researched and rejected: “It wasn’t that we hadn’t thought about new ways, say, to do verification or handle bots, but we rejected them on the basis of research and data. There was a huge contrast between the methodical approach and Musk’s rapid-fire whims.”
When Musk barged into Twitter in 2022 as its new CEO, his strategy was “decision making by vibes,” according to the former exec I spoke with. Those vibes were often dictated by the sycophants in Musk’s orbit. The executive described Musk as surprisingly receptive to ideas when presented with facts and data, but said that few in his inner circle questioned or spoke frankly with him: “And so, in the absence of rational decision making, we got the vibes-based, yes-man approach.”
The former executive did point to a meaningful difference between Twitter and DOGE, however: The government is big and complex. This may be an asset during an assault. “Even if you try to take a flamethrower to the government, the destruction won’t be quick. There’ll be legal challenges and congressional fights, and in the months and weeks, it’ll be individuals who keep essential services running,” they said. The government workers who know what they’re doing may still be able to make positive incremental change from within.
It’s a rousing, hopeful notion. But I fear that the focus on the particulars of this unqualified assault on our government is like looking at Twitter’s bottom line, in that it obscures Musk’s real ambitions. What are DOGE’s metrics for success? If Twitter is our guide, health, functionality, and sustainability are incidental and able to be sacrificed. The end game for Musk seems to be just as it was with Twitter: seize a polarized, inefficient institution; fuse his identity with it; and then use it to punish his enemies and reward his friends. DOGE is a moon-shot program to turn the government into Musk’s personal political weapon.
This isn’t just about bureaucratic mismanagement or even corruption— this is a not-so-slow-moving coup, the deliberate dismantling of democratic governance under the guise of “efficiency.” Trump, Musk, Vought and their minions— each in their own way— are executing an unprecedented seizure of power: one through the force of political will, one through ideological fanaticism and the other through sheer technological, financial and physical dominance.
The Republican Party, long reduced to a cult of personality, has abandoned even the pretense of constitutional conservatism. They no longer check power; they enable it. They no longer serve as a coequal branch of government; led by MAGA Mike, they grovel before a man who openly promises to rule with an iron fist. The few dissenters who remain are silenced, purged, or made irrelevant.
And so, the question that remains is not whether Trump will push the limits of his power— he already is. It’s whether anyone in a position of power will resist. History warns us that authoritarianism does not arrive with fanfare; it creeps in through the cracks of cowardice and complicity. The cracks are now gaping. The next phase of this experiment, should it continue unchallenged, will not be governance. It will be rule.
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