Bully Donny and the Magats. That’s our government now. Musk, for all the talk of him being the real president, remains, for now at least, just a Magat. Sadly, a very rich and effective one. A super-Magat, if you will. I won’t attempt to list all of the laws they’re breaking and how because it’s too much to keep up with, but their goals are clear: They are destroying the United States Government from the inside out, using illegal, quasi-legal, and legal means to remove all possible opposition to anything they might want to do so they will be free to do whatever they want.
Timothy Snyder says of course it’s a coup. Alex Norris, in a really great pice at Lithub, says it’s a self-coup, or autogolpe, and whether it succeeds only time will tell.
I don’t need to wait. It seems clear that right now the coup is succeeding and it so far it doesn’t look like anything is going to stop it. Yes, the courts are hitting the brakes here and there, but the damage is still being done. So how far will it go and what will be left in the end?
Writing in Foreign Affairs (behind soft paywall), Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argue (link via TPM) that what will be left after all of this destruction will be something called “competitive authoritarianism”:
U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.
The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.
But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori’s Peru, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.
The whole thing is certainly worth your time. It’s a plausible argument, though it hinges almost entirely on whether it turns out to be true that Bully Donny “will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country’s professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform.” Right now, something like competitive authoritarianism is looking like a best case scenario. At least it promises “competitive” elections in 2028 where the Magats could lose and, maybe, people who care at least a little bit about the country and its citizens could try to stop and begin the long, decades-long, job of repairing the damage. It seems almost too much to hope for, but hope we must.