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An Autocracy of DuncesHow stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy
If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment. But how did this happen? It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic. It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines , Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made. Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer
My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting. While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something. The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth. Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year. It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:
Source: KFF The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse? Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t aware of the issue. Who would tell them? As far as I can tell there are no competent health analysts working either for Trump or for Republicans in Congress. So let me return to my opening point: America is no longer a fully functioning democracy. In the good old days of Richard Nixon, the Republican Party had the conscience and backbone to standup to Nixon’s attempt at autocracy. William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, recused himself from US vs Nixon because of his close prior association with Watergate conspirators? Can you imagine Scalia or Thomas having any such sense of fairness and duty? But like all authoritarian regimes, America’s autocracy is being run by malevolent incompetents. And while our hallowed institutions are utterly failing to rise to the occasion, the sheer incompetence of these hacks is generating pushback that may yet save us. While it is likely that the top ranks of the US military skew right politically, all of us – liberals included – should applaud their stony reception of Hegseth and Trump. Likewise, while business leaders are also likely to skew right politically, we all should applaud their pushback over tariffs, the appointment of E.J. Antoni, and the attempt to fire Lisa Cook. And let’s give special thanks to the many Disney subscribers who canceled after the abortive attempt to fire Jimmy Kimmel. Many innocent people — above all, federal employees — will be hurt by the government shutdown. But Democrats needed to take a stand, to show that they will try to hold Republicans accountable for their assault on the welfare of Americans, and Republican incompetence gave them good ground for doing so. In a perverse way, we can be grateful that Trump and his minions are so incompetent, because that is forcing the dormant parts of our country to push back. Let’s just hope that the pushback is strong enough and fast enough to save us all. MUSICAL CODA  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
A Holistic Plan for an Authoritarian Military
Trump and Hegseth unveil a plan to make the military an authoritarian institution and adapt the notion of the battlefield and the enemy for domestic use.
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Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will take place on Sunday, Oct. 5, 8-9pmET. Paying subscribers will receive a link at 5pmET that day to register for the Zoom call.
Our guest for the second half of the hour will be Miles Taylor. He is a national security expert, bestselling author of the anonymously authored book A Warning and the book Blowback, a former Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security, and Head of Advanced Technology and Security Strategy at Google.
If you can’t attend, a video of my conversation with Miles will be available at lucid.substack.com. You can join these weekly sessions by upgrading to paid or signing up as a paying subscriber here:
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I had to take a beat after the extremely disturbing speeches by President Donald Trump and Secretary of War to hundreds of American commanders assembled at the Quantico Marine Corps base on September 30. I followed the livestream and media summaries that day, and as I started to understand the magnitude of the changes that were being outlined, I realized with a sinking feeling why hundreds of leaders had been summoned from all over the world on short notice.
The Trump administration was presenting a holistic plan to shift the culture and conduct of the United States military to accommodate the lawless character of this nascent regime. Not only is this a plan to make the military an authoritarian institution on and off the battlefield, but to adapt the very notion of the battlefield, and the enemy, for domestic use.
Many commentators rightly focused on the security risks and financial costs of bringing so many leaders together physically rather than utilize the Department of War’s secure and private communications channels. Trump’s rambling remarks, and Hegseth’s comments about “gender delusions” and how “tiring” it was to see “fat troops,” made it easy to underplay the event as a “lecture on fitness and grooming standards” that aired “familiar partisan complaints,” to quote two New York Times headlines.
I write about authoritarian spectacles, and know that Trump never misses a chance to star in one, but I have also have learned that we should never underestimate authoritarians. And in fact, this was a momentous occasion staged for four distinct audiences: foreign powers, the United States military, United States civilian authorities, and the American people.
The assembly of military luminaries and the livestream were necessary because all of these audiences needed to see in real time the commander in chief letting those luminaries know that he considers them to be expendable and also see them being given their new mission statement: to fulfill the commander in chief’s desires to use the American military against American civilians who stand up for democratic freedoms.
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Trump was clear on this point. “America is under invasion. We’re under invasion from within,” he declared, adding that the civilian enemy is, for him, “no different than a foreign enemy” other than their lack of uniforms. And so, the leaders who had come to Quantico were told that they would be cleaning up the “dangerous cities” governed by “radical left Democrats,” and “straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.”
Trump talked about “liberating” American towns and cities from immigrant invasions during his electoral campaign, and always held out the possibility of using the military for this purpose. But since January, as he has begun to implement the authoritarian playbook of repressing the political opposition, he has focused on Democrat-run territories, treating them rhetorically as though they were foreign territories. In June, Los Angeles became the test case, complete with deployment of a Marines battalion that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rhetoric about regime change from Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
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In light of these events, in June I forecast a domestic “forever war” that would bring counter-insurgency methods honed in the “Global War on Terrorism” home.
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And in August I theorized a more general “War on America”:
To allow our enemies to expand and prosper in the world, the Trump administration is in addition seeking to use the military and state security and intelligence forces to target the domestic population and intimidate political opponents.
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The purpose of the Quantico gathering was to officialize this –thus the direct communication to hundreds of top commanders—and to push the authoritarian agenda forward in ways that recall the dark days of military dictatorships.
The Quantico announcement that Democrat-run “inner cities” would be “training grounds” for the military builds on traditions of racialized policing in America, but also echoes Cold War junta practices in Latin America of sending inexperienced soldiers to do sweeps of very poor neighborhoods.
And the most chilling revelation has gotten little media attention: Trump has signed an executive order “to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances” by “the enemy from within.” He appears to be describing a kind of shock troops corps to be used against civilians in America, for example against those who protest. This “quick reaction force” would be separate from ICE and the National Guard, it seems, because the president told the military commanders that it will be “a big thing for the people in this room.” Every dictatorship has advanced special forces-style units to deal with “crowd control” in the autocratic manner.
When militaries transition to autocracy, there is always resistance within the ranks to using force against compatriots. But Hegseth and Trump hope to create a new kind of soldier over time. From allowing physical violence during training, to ending “politically correct rules of engagement,” they are setting the stage for the institution of the military to undergo the same processes of moral collapse and moral deregulation as are now unfolding in the civilian sphere.
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Hegseth has been advocating such shifts in military culture for years, as important reporting by Mathieu Aikins for the New York Times documents. Now he is in a position to make policy. “We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy…We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.”
What if that enemy is the American people who stand up for their rights? Dramatic times lie ahead for the United States military. The stage is set for a showdown between the administration and those principled commanders who sat stoically in Quantico and listened to ideas that could destroy the morale and integrity of the institution they have served for years.
Note: All quotes from Hegseth in this essay are taken from this Department of War transcript. All quotes from Trump are from this Roll Call transcript.
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