Bluesky

Afew months ago, when my editors asked me to try my hand at a new “Authoritarian Watch” column in the new year, part of me worried that some weeks I would struggle to find material. After all, surely even the Trump administration would slow down; surely, not all their actions would be authoritarian.

Turns out I needn’t have worried.

Take Venezuela, or, more accurately, take Venezuela’s leader and spirit him away to a jail in Brooklyn and then take Venezuela’s oil and sell it on the open market. Who will determine how the profit is divvied up? “Me,” Trumps said, in a rare moment of honesty.

Or take Greenland, or more accurately, well… “take Greenland.” Because, as Trump so piquantly puts it, “Ownership is very important.” He went on to tell his New York Times interviewers that “that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” This is a 21st-century version of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes’s hubristic claim, “I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” (Well, Elon Musk is set on colonizing space and realizing Rhodes’s dream.)

Meanwhile, Trump is increasingly set on creating his own Lebensraum here on planet Earth. While Hitler sought living space for his German Volk, Trump seeks to secure resource space: access to unlimited oil via Venezuela, access to rare earth minerals via Greenland, and access to pliant markets across Latin America and the Caribbean. All of this is backed by a pledge to vastly increase US military spending (last week he posted on social media that he needed a 50 percent increase in military spending over the next year)—thus putting the entire economy and country on a permanent war footing. And he may indeed need the military after declaring that the entire Western Hemisphere now exists solely to pleasure and enrich the United States. He calls this grotesque philosophy by the anodyne name of the “Donroe Doctrine.”

“In foreign policy, he has discovered he can do whatever the hell he wants,” Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, said of Trump’s new doctrine. “There are no constraints. This should be terrifying for anyone who believes in the international order.”

In the blink of a sleepy Trump eye, the world has regressed from a purportedly postcolonial era to a most avowedly colonial one. And, as the US presents itself to the world in full colonial finery, Stephen Miller, Trump’s ghoulish immigration enforcer and now foreign policy guru, has said that Europe’s great powers were wrong to have ditched their empires and even more wrong to then have allowed those brown and Black ex-colonials to migrate to the First World and “reverse colonize” them.

One can almost see Miller, in khakis and a pith helmet, guarded by Pete Hegseth and his vandal hordes, slashing his way through the jungle while quoting Rudyard Kipling—or, since 21st-century American colonialists seem somewhat less poetically inclined than the old British empire builders, belting out some skinhead anthem as he subdues the natives.

Miller’s white nationalism is infecting every aspect of the US government. Recently, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission posted a video requesting that white males who had suffered job discrimination contact the government to see if they could file a claim for racial or sexual discrimination. Because, of course, if one looks at the vast history of discrimination in the United States, it is white males who have been treated most unfairly. That now seems to be the Trump administration’s official view. After all, Trump recently noted that the outcome of the civil rights movement was that “white people were very badly treated” and that the country embraced “reverse discrimination.”

After ICE agents murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem spouted a slew of lies about Good from a podium emblazoned with the logo “One of ours, all of yours.” In other words, “Dare to fuck with us as we implement our government-sponsored pogrom against Somalis and other non-white residents in Minneapolis, and we will come after all of you.”

Stories have emerged in recent weeks that in DHS’s $100 million effort to enlist 10,000 additional ICE agents, recruiters are targeting gun shows, UFC Fight Nights, and other far-right hangouts; and in these efforts, they’re using what critics have labeled a neo-Nazi song, “We’ll have our home again.” The department has also published Uncle Sam recruitment posters emblazoned with the words: “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.”

It’s hard to look at all of this and not think of the fascist paramilitaries and nativist propaganda machines led by men such as Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, and Pinochet. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, take Joe Rogan’s. The podcaster, whose support for Trump was instrumental in his 2024 election win, is now describing ICE as a “Gestapo” agency.

Reports out of Minneapolis have detailed ICE agents’ repeatedly invoking the killing of Good, essentially warning protesters that what befell Good will befall them if they continue to oppose the government’s pogroms. That’s not law enforcement; that’s terrorism with a federal uniform. And, to make this threat a reality, Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy heavily armed military personnel to Minneapolis.

In 2025, the administration all but ended the country’s refugee resettlement program, letting in only right-wing white Afrikaners from South Africa. In 2026, Trump has upped the ante still further, announcing this week a ban on immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries. Look at the list, which encompasses roughly a third of the countries on earth, and almost all them are predominantly non-white, majority non-Christian, or, in the case of countries like Colombia and Brazil, led by presidents who have had the temerity to challenge Trump.

In normal times, such an extraordinary—and illegal—action as upending US immigration policy without any input from Congress would dominate the news; this week, so deep has the country sunk into Christian white nationalist mire and so acclimatized have we become to Trump ruling by fiat rather than by legislation, it merited barely a mention.

So, too, the FBI being sicced on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson got buried under the avalanche of other examples of authoritarianism. Agents raided her home this week to search for files she had compiled while reporting stories on fired federal workers. And while the stunning news that the Federal Reserve chair was facing a clearly politically motivated investigation into spending decisions surrounding the renovation of the Reserve’s DC headquarters did create ripples, by midweek it, too, had largely been lost amid the other authoritarian clutter.

“I said in February I thought we were in a constitutional crisis,” outgoing New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, whose term concludes on January 20, told me this week. From the president on down, he explained, members of the administration are repeatedly “thumbing their noses at the rule of law.”

Platkin—who says that in private many Republican state attorneys general agree with his criticisms but are too scared to go public with their concerns—explained that he remained hopeful that lower courts would continue to push back against Trump’s excesses and that ultimately an aroused public would evict these lawbreakers from the halls of power. “This is not who we are as a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept a scenario where federal law enforcement officers operating for a rogue agency with no training can kill US citizens with impunity.”

Platkin is scathing in his observations about Trump cabinet members who are enabling the slide to full authoritarian governance. “They’re acting like laws don’t apply to them, and that’s just not true. Trump’s shown us how fragile our system is. And unless people see there’s a cost to doing this, it will happen again.”