When it comes to governing style, Atlantic assistant editor Marc Novicoff says President Donald Trump loosely qualifies as a certain kind of “dictator,” and it isn’t even the best version.
“President Trump prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants … to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him,” said Novicoff. So, the title fits, but what do you call this particular dictator’s brand of government?
Novicoff pondered whether Trump's style is authoritarian, kleptocratic, totalitarian or fascist. He wrote that while Trump seemingly wants to be a despot, he’s “not terribly successful at despotism."
“Sometimes he gets his way, but sometimes he does not," Novicoff wrote. "The White House on occasion seeks Congress’s approval and is periodically thwarted. Courts block his administration’s moves weekly, even if the small fraction of cases that make it to the Supreme Court mostly go Trump’s way. His enemies continue to walk free, despite his efforts. He is historically unpopular and his term ends in three years."
Using the process of elimination, Novicoff posited Americans are not living under totalitarianism. Power in America, he pointed out, is still decentralized, with local governments operating mostly independently and business and institutional leaders maintaining power over their individual domains.
And while fascists seek increased militarization, the abandonment of democratic freedoms, violence in service of internal purity and expansion abroad, Novicoff said that doesn’t mean “fascism has taken hold,” as revealed by Trump’s thwarted Jan. 6 coup attempt.
This brings up the possibility of kleptocracy, or rule by thieves.
“Few Americans are doing better in the Trump economy than Trump himself,” said Novicoff, pointing out that Trump doesn’t bother to hide enriching himself.
“The top purchasers of Trump’s crypto meme coin were invited to dinner with the president. The Securities and Exchange Commission halted its case against one of the biggest investors in Trump’s crypto schemes," Novicoff wrote. "The top donors to Trump’s new White House ballroom include the recipients of major government contracts such as Palantir and Lockheed Martin. The government of Qatar gave the White House a $400 million jet."
But a post-Soviet Russia scholar told Novicoff that here are only a few countries “where the government primarily exists to steal from the populace,” and where the oligarchs “face very few constraints from doing so.”
Novicoff argued that kakistocracy— "rule by the worst" — is probably the most apt description for “our current form of government.”
“Prosecutors don’t know how to prosecute. The health secretary believes vaccines cause autism. The FBI director uses government resources to hang out with his country-singer girlfriend, 18 years his junior,” said Novicoff. “The president’s national-security brain trust accidentally texted their war plans and a bunch of emoji to my boss.”
There’s always a trade-off between getting people who are unmorally loyal and people who are competent, but Trump is “unbothered by that trade-off,” said Novicoff. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has a talented central banker setting monetary policy while Trump is criminally prosecuting his own central banker to replace him with someone more likely to follow orders, dump interest rates and sink the economy.