You Know Who's Up To No Good? Donald J. Trump, That's Who— And EJ Dionne & Chris Murphy Are Onto Him

Señor Trumpanzyy is reviving a deeply authoritarian plan to gut the nonpartisan federal civil service and replace it with a corps of political loyalists. Under the rebranded “Schedule F” policy, tens of thousands of career civil servants— people hired for their expertise and commitment to public service, not partisan allegiance— would be stripped of longstanding job protections and made “at-will” employees, fireable at the president’s discretion. This isn’t about performance or misconduct; it’s about raw political control. It’s a textbook move from the authoritarian playbook. Historically, regimes from Mussolini’s to Erdoğan’s have purged professional bureaucracies to consolidate power, replacing neutral administrators with ideologues willing to serve the leader, not the people. The U.S. civil service was deliberately designed to insulate government from exactly this kind of political purging— because when every government employee fears the ruler more than the law, democracy is already on life support.”

Trump’s obsession with a mythical “deep state” is nothing more than a pretext for dismantling any remaining guardrails on his power. His goal isn’t efficiency— it’s obedience. Turning the federal workforce into an instrument of personal loyalty isn’t just dangerous; it’s tyrannical. If implemented, this plan would accelerate the transformation of the U.S. government into a personalist regime, where loyalty to Trump trumps loyalty to the Constitution. Alex Isenstadt wrote that Many of the Trump allies who pushed for Schedule F now have key roles in the administration, including Stephen Miller and Russ Vought. The “set back government health, education and research efforts, and threatened access to crucial programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid [and] Trump's plans to implement the rule has drawn aggressive pushback from labor groups. The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed a lawsuit against the administration in February, alleging that it overstepped its authority in reversing Biden's regulation protecting civil servants. ‘Schedule F is a shameless attempt to politicize the federal workforce by replacing thousands of dedicated, qualified civil servants with political cronies,’ AFSCME President Lee Saunders said then.”

Like the tariff agenda, this is all about Trump’s thirst for one-man rule. EJ Dionne wrote that “the tariffs have made clear how all of Trump’s policies fit together: Every step he takes is aimed at concentrating the power of government in his own hands as he seeks to intimidate opponents and move aggressively to eliminate alternative sources of public influence in the legal system, the universities, and the media. The most conspicuous moment of truth has been for Trump’s supporters in big business and other advocates of a loosely regulated free market. They thought they could get what they wanted out of Trump, mainly lower taxes and less regulation, without having to worry about his very explicit campaign promises to impose tariffs, let alone to do so in a madcap way that now threatens their own wealth. They couldn’t imagine that Trump would happily wreak such havoc in the national and global economies or demolish the entire post–World War II economic system.”

Dionne looked at why they missed this. “The fact that Trump lies regularly and has few fixed principles has, perversely perhaps, been a source of his political strength. Those who rally to him fool themselves into thinking they can have Trump à la carte. They assume he really means his pledges to policies they like and that he’s lying to the masses when he promises policies they don’t like. All the old nonsense about taking Trump ‘seriously but not literally’ was a way for his apologists to assume he couldn’t really mean the more outlandish things he said… The big thing the CEOs missed, pre-Liberation Day, is that Trump is not a capitalist in the strict sense of the term. He’s a kleptocrat. Webster’s defines kleptocracy as ‘a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.’ That’s a rather good definition of the Trump regime.”

His rationales for his tariffs change regularly. At some moments they’re about returning manufacturing to the United States, at others they’re just a bargaining tool. But one justification is constant: They are designed to force business leaders and other nations alike to deal with Trump. And he wants to humiliate them in the process, as his most revealing comment on this mess made clear.

“These countries are calling us up kissing my ass,” Trump told a Republican gathering last week. “They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal, I’ll do anything, sir.’”

Not only does Trump’s approach to tariffs shake the confidence of the world in the stability of the United States; it also opens up limitless opportunities for grift. This or that industry will have to come to Trump for exceptions to his ever-changeable tariff schedules.

…[A]ll these abuses are about the same issue implicated in his tariff overreach: the danger to our country created by a president who has always told us how much he admires and aspires to one-man rule. It’s a shame that few in the GOP raised their voices when Trump came for law-abiding fathers, legal immigrants, or dedicated civil servants. Only when he came for big market investors and 401(k)s did the perils of Trump’s power grab begin to arouse cross-party opposition.

But better late than never. Resistance to Trump is rising— most recently in the backlash against the lawless and contemptible treatment of Abrego Garcia and Harvard University’s defiance of Trump’s freedom-crushing takeover attempt.

Now his tariff adventures have shaken Trump’s own electorate and begun to crack GOP solidarity. Will Republicans finally contain him before he bankrupts us all? If it takes a threat to our bank accounts to save our constitutional rights, so be it.

One resistance leader is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy who penned an OpEd for the Financial Times this week, Trump Tariff Policy Has Nothing To Do With Trade with a perspective very much like Dionne’s, noting that there’s “a simple reason that Trump’s short-lived tariffs make little economic sense: they are not designed as economic policy but as a means to compel loyalty to the president… [T]hese chaotically designed blanket global tariffs are not accomplishing anything other than threatening to send prices skyrocketing and destabilising the global economy. This makes sense because Trump’s goal seems to be to impose economic chaos, requiring the leads of industry to come running to him to plead for relief… [H]e does not mind if his policies cause a recession, so long as they do not lead to a depression. He must not remember the nearly 9 million jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008 and the 10 million Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure. But these tariffs were never really about helping working people, bringing jobs back to the US or fixing our broken global trading system. The 90-day pause is proof of that.”

Murphy urged his readers to “understand Trump’s actions as the use of executive power to bully into complicity the institutions that would otherwise stop a slide towards autocracy, then it is easy to see how tariffs fit into the plan. Some may not want to believe it, but Trump appears to be undertaking a systematic campaign to destroy any institution that might stand in his way. He has already attacked three key pillars of American democracy. He has threatened to cut off federal funding to universities, the centres of both academic research and youth protest; he is attacking top law firms by cutting them off from government contracts and stripping their lawyers of security clearances; and he is trying to silence journalists by denying them access to government facilities unless they use language preapproved by the White House. Now he is using tariffs to force companies and industries to come to the White House to beg for relief. Each company or industry will presumably be forced to make concessions in exchange for this relief. During the pause, we can expect to see one chief executive after another make the case for their company to be exempted from the tariffs. Maybe the concession is financial in nature, but more likely it is political. Most of these deals will be secret to the public. Once Trump has most law firms, universities, news organisations and private companies under his thumb, it will become almost impossible for any form of opposition to gain traction. His weaponised Department of Justice can arrest protesters and there will be fewer lawyers to defend them. University research and academic discussion of ideas that run counter to the Trump ideology will be threatened. Private companies will not object as the rule of law collapses. This is not some innovative new strategy— it is the global playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever. Switching tariffs on and off, and granting exemptions for your political allies, is not about trade policy. It is about bringing American industry to heel. Public outrage will be much more likely to stop Trump’s attempt to destroy democracy in its tracks if everyone can see plainly the plan he is trying to hide.”

This is part of the architecture of the new autocracy. It’s how democracies crumble: not with tanks in the streets, but with bureaucracies hollowed out, laws bent to serve one man, and institutions repurposed to punish dissent and reward allegiance. The warning signs couldn’t be clearer. Stripping civil service protections is not a bureaucratic tweak— it’s a coup in slow motion.