"So this is how liberty dies… " Making sense of Trump's first three weeks

Where I categorise 76 Trump administration actions from the last 3 weeks and show how they align with the authoritarian playbook

** updated 15 Feb to include 76 actions **

So much happening all the time

In 2018 Steve Bannon famously said the way to beat the media was “to flood the zone with shit”, on the (correct) assumption that it was impossible both for media organisations to cover everything in the detail it deserved and for the public to keep up with what reporting there was. The Trump administration has been doing exactly this since the 20th January inauguration. As one article described the barrage of announcements:

“The point isn't to persuade anyone of anything, it's simply to ensure that critics don't mobilize around a coherent narrative and that no one has control over the flow of information.”

Well, I’ve been fishing in the ‘flood of shit’ and this post is my attempt to assemble the patchwork of policies into a coherent tapestry. In assembling it, I realised I’d already forgotten some of the early actions that were only (!) three weeks ago. Even while writing this substack, I had to keep adding new policy actions every few hours. So take a breath and let’s look at the whole.

The overall tapestry looks dark

Below is a Venn diagram of the actions spread across five broad domains that correspond to features of proto-authoritarian states:

• Undermining Democratic Institutions & Rule of Law; Dismantling federal government

• Dismantling Social Protections & Rights; Enrichment & Corruption

• Suppressing Dissent & Controlling Information

• Attacking Science, Environment, Health, Arts & Education

• Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilization

Because there have been so many actions, you may need to zoom in to read everything on the diagram. A high resolution PDF version of the diagram is available here.

For readibility, I’ve also categorised the actions into a table (below), assigning each action to its dominant domain (essentially, losing the nuance of the intersections on the Venn diagram). An online link to the table is here (click on tab “Categorised table of actions”).

It’s obviously impossible to go into each action and its consequences here, but I’ve made a Googlesheet with each action and a link to a corresponding news story if you want to read about any of these (click on tab “Actions with links”).

The Trump administration is closely following the authoritarian playbook

The 2018 book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt argues that modern Democracies do not need violence to fail - instead their demise can be entirely legal, through manipulating institutions, silencing opposition and undermining electoral integrity. Meanwhile, Timothy Snyder draws particularly on the regimes of Putin and Orban in his 2018 book The Road To Unfreedom. Across the two books some distinct steps to erode democracies emerge:

• Undermine independent institutions (courts, media, electoral commissions)

• Weaken the opposition using legal or bureaucratic means (including sham investigations and lawsuits)

• Dismantle social protections (weaken welfare and public services, foster resentment towards vulnerable groups)

• Retreating from international institutions, agreements and alliances.

• Weaponising nationalism (framing “out” groups as the enemy; rewriting history; calling dissent ‘unpatriotic’)

• Undermining science and objective knowledge

• Alter laws to stay in power (including gerrymandering, changing voter laws)

• Undermine free elections (limit voting rights, spread misinformation, deny election results).

Together these steps form a deliberate authoritarian playbook where each step enables another. Most of the actions taken by Trump over the last three weeks map directly onto those steps.

Anne Applebaum in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy warns that democracies become incredibly fragile once their elites abandon democratic norms in pursuit of ideology, power or personal gain. We are now seeing exactly this in the US.

Trump never liked democratic norms but did (sometimes) pay lip service to them in his first term. In his second term, he is revelling in burning them down. The Republican Party looked for a few weeks as if it might uphold norms after the January 6th Insurrection but they are now Trump’s party. The few who tried to resist (e.g. Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger) were exiled. The rest have either embraced the chaos or chosen complicity. The Republican House and Senate seem to have forgotten that they are co-equal branch of the state. As a consequence, Trump has easily appointed a cabinet in his image, is free to attack the international order, and has given fellow iconoclast Elon Musk free rein to destroy the federal government.

Seeing the actions of the last three weeks as a whole, with signs of escalation in the coming weeks, it surely cannot be denied that the US is progressing rapidly along the path to an authoritarian regime, most at ease dealing with other autocracies.

We need to recognise this for what it is

For so long the US has been the core UK and European ally, the backbone of NATO, the largest contributor to the WHO, and the loudest voice in proudly proclaiming its democracy. It seems unbelievable to state baldly that the US is a threat to the global economy, to global health and to global stability. But it is, and the sooner this is acknowledged the better.

In particular, our political leaders seem paralysed, unable to talk about the US in the same language they use for traditionally inimical countries and hoping that the bully’s eye passes them over. Some international bodies and scientific societies are standing against Trump’s policies, but too many are quietly acquiescing. Our mainstream media discusses clear lawbreaking in euphemisms and clings to its “both sides” framing, when only one side is on the playing field and it’s destroying the pitch. Some media outlets, particularly in the US (e.g. Fox; influential radio and podcast hosts), are enthusiastic cheerleaders. Big tech is no better: Google (including YouTube) and Facebook (including Instagram) are falling into line, with the latter recently significantly weakening its ability to counter misinformation. Plus of course X is an enormously powerful pulpit for the stream of disinformation, conspiracy theories, threats and bravado that Musk pumps out almost continuously on behalf of Trump. These are communication channels any authoritarian would kill for.

In Adam Kucharski’s recent excellent substack, he discussed a type of normalcy bias:

“where the status quo has already collapsed, but people still act as if it remains intact. Because individuals haven’t fully processed this shift, they default to inaction, clinging to the belief that things will return to ‘normal’ instead of recognising that a fundamental change has already occurred.”.

It’s also something I wrote about with Kit Yates and Duncan Robertson for the BMJ last year: that before you can act on a crisis you have to recognise you are in one. In ‘normal’ times, any one of almost all of the actions would have been scandalous but now we have almost 80 and in just three weeks. The actions are more than a flood of shit - they tell a story. Look up.

What Next?

Tracking these authoritarian moves in real time is overwhelming, but crucial for recognizing patterns. If people find it useful, I’ll keep my live table of actions updated in a Google Sheet—feel free to suggest additions or improvements or to offer to help! Again, a high resolution PDF of the Venn Diagram is available too.

There’s also much more to unpack: beyond documenting what’s happening, we need to think about what these actions mean in practice, where they lead, and what can be done to resist them. If there’s interest, I could write further posts exploring some of these aspects. Let me know.