On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration was using secretive “administrative subpoenas” to access the phone, e-mail, and social-media communications of US citizens who had criticized the government’s anti-immigrant positions. The content of and rationale for the subpoenas aren’t revealed to the targets. Instead, people are being sent vague legal notices from Google and other tech companies saying that the government has sought access to their accounts—making it all but impossible for them to challenge their validity. 

It is the sort of Kafkaesque twilight zone that would have been all too familiar to Eastern Europeans in the decades they spent under the Soviet heel.

For Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director at the ACLU Foundation’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the use of these subpoenas speaks to the increasingly extra-constitutional—or even anti-constitutional—nature of Trump’s second term. “The right to criticize the government and to speak out about government abuses is the core of what is protected by the First Amendment. Government agents abusing these administrative subpoenas to target people for exercising their First Amendment rights is not only outrageous—it’s unconstitutional,” he argues. “Congress has given DHS the power to issue administrative subpoenas in specific kinds of customs and immigration enforcement investigations. But here, the government is violating the law by issuing these subpoenas—which don’t involve approval by a judge—to investigate people for their lawful, protected speech. That’s illegal, and it is a betrayal of our bedrock guarantee that the government can’t punish people because it disagrees with their speech.”

He’s right. Increasingly, on one issue after the next, Trump 2.0 is dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law and reaching toward a Big Brother Is Watching You vision of governance.

Over and over again, the government is making it clear that it regards the First Amendment as an inconvenience to be skirted wherever possible. Witness the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, targeted for writing articles on workers fired during the DOGE purges.

Or recall that, last week, Trump ordered Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to head to Fulton County, Georgia, to personally oversee an FBI raid on the election offices there, in search of nonexistent evidence of “fraud” in the 2020 presidential vote. There’s nothing in Gabbard’s job description that gives her a legitimate reason to be chaperoning the G-men. But she wasn’t there do her job; she was there to make a phone call to Trump, and to then hand the phone over to the agents on the scene so that the “president” could give them what sources later termed a “pep talk” about how great their ridiculous stunt was. That’s not law enforcement; that’s simply an exercise of brute power.

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The lawlessness is everywhere you look. Trump has begun to escalate his demands for political prosecutions of those he claims were involved in a massive web of fraud to deny him electoral victory in 2020. Stand by for the indictments that Pam Bondi’s rubber-stamp DOJ will now surely try to procure in Fulton County. The “president” has also made increasingly inflammatory calls to “nationalize” and “take over” the election system in the run-up to the midterms, notwithstanding the fact that the Constitution prohibits such actions. And his Svengali, the odious Steve Bannon, this week called for ICE agents and military personnel to swarm polling stations on Election Day.

As Trump’s polling numbers sag and the public turns against all of his signature policies, he has increasingly retreated into a fantasy world in which he remains a strongman leader relentlessly stamping his will on hundreds of millions of Americans. No matter that, in reality, that public is increasingly blowing raspberries his way.

Witness: Having renamed the Kennedy Center as the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” Trump was faced with massive boycotts by performers and audiences alike. The Washington National Opera decided to move house; Philip Glass announced that he wouldn’t perform. Rhiannon Giddens and Renee Fleming pulled out of planned concerts. The cast of Hamilton said thanks but no, thanks. The Kennedy Center Honors show had the lowest TV ratings in its decades-long history. And in-person audience numbers plummeted by nearly half.

What was Trump’s petulant, weak-man-trying-to-look-like-a-strong-man response? He announced that he would be shuttering the center for two years for a major renovation.

Like other authoritarians of yore, Trump is fixated on monuments. He tore down half of the White House to build an aircraft-hangar-sized ballroom. He is ripping up the Kennedy Center to create a new, marble-speckled behemoth. In recent weeks, he has fixated on building a 250-foot-high triumphal arch, to be titled “Independence Arch,” on land lying between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. It would dwarf most of the monuments in the nation’s capital. Obsessed with size, he has told journalists that he wants it to be the biggest arch in the world, to recognize that the United States is “the biggest, most powerful nation.” (Fact-check: The US is neither the geographically largest, nor most populous, nation on earth, and, if current Trumpian trajectories continue, and if the country goes on alienating allies at speed, will likely forfeit its claim to being the most powerful nation on earth in the near future).

The proposal for a giant arch is not the only monument to the Trump era doing the rounds. A particularly oily group of crypto investors, peddling a $PATRIOT currency, has realized that the road to the “president’s” heart lies paved, or more accurately gilded, with gold. And so they have commissioned a 15-foot-tall gilded statue of Trump—rising to 22 feet tall when on its pedestal—to be exhibited at the Trump golf club in Miami, where the next G20 summit —yes, the one that Trump petulantly banned the South African leadership from attending, allegedly because they were committing a genocide against white Afrikaners—will be convened. (One can’t help but wonder if all of that glittering gold originated in South African mines.)

Fascist monumental art and architecture tends to run toward the tasteless. It’s entirely likely that the leaders of the G20 countries (at least those allowed into lockdown-America) will fall over themselves fawning at the quality of the golden idol—after all, that’s what authoritarians expect and demand of their guests. In private, however, I would bet my bottom crypto-dollar that they will be guffawing—at the sheer tackiness and tawdriness of it all, at the venality of a man so easily tempted by shiny objects, at the vastly inflated ego of a host who greets his guests with a golden image of himself, and perhaps above all at the sound that that statue will make when it eventually comes crashing to the ground.