Authoritarian Blitz

In the weeks since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the president and his party have embarked on a concerted campaign to unmake the American government. He has signed sixty executive orders in an effort to, among other things, immediately freeze government spending, rescind birthright citizenship (a constitutional right), suspend the resettlement of humanitarian refugees, and prevent transgender people from legally transitioning by officially defining sex as an “immutable biological classification” at conception, whereby a zygote is male if it will one day produce the “small reproductive cell.” Meanwhile, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency—an organization with a broad remit to “maximize government efficiency” that is accountable only to Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world—have attempted to seize the Treasury Department’s purse, fired tens of thousands of federal employees, and gone a long way toward closing offices, like USAID, that technically cannot be shut down without Congress’s permission.

Many of these actions are liable to be unconstitutional. While a number of unions, government watchdog groups, and state attorney generals have filed lawsuits against the administration, the response from national Democrats has mostly consisted of press conferences and admonitions but little in the way of substantive action. Bewildered by the rapidity with which Washington seems to be accepting the concentration of power under the president and an unelected billionaire, I wrote to Joseph O’Neill—whom I last interviewed in November to help make sense of the failures of the Kamala Harris campaign—to ask what the Democrats could do better.

Daniel Drake: How would you characterize or qualify the work the Trump administration has been doing since his inauguration? Is there a useful historical analogy? To what extent is his approach—a flurry of executive orders, active antagonism toward employees of federal agencies—without precedent?

Joseph O’Neill: It’s been a shocking few weeks—an unprecedented spectacle of democratic implosion. Since World War II we’ve seen democracies fail in places like Nigeria, Myanmar, Hungary, Argentina. But these are not countries with a long history of prosperity and liberal stability. The relevant historical context is simply this: no mature democracy, anywhere, has given up the rule of law for a ruler—until now.  

The end of the rule of law does not mean that we automatically find ourselves in an authoritarian society. Yes, it’s true that intelligence agencies have begun to ask job applicants if January 6 was an “inside job,” Yes or No. It’s true that the Department of Justice is engaged in reprisals against FBI agents who worked on the January 6 cases. But federal law-enforcement institutions have not yet been transformed into active instruments of political oppression, many Americans still have legal, political, and judicial resources at the state level, and the 2026 midterm elections have not yet been undermined. There’s still room for effective oppositional action.

But let’s see things for what they are. The corruption at the Department of Justice is simply astonishing: if it’s prepared to drop charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams in return for his promise to do Trump’s political bidding, it is presumably ready to cook up charges against Trump’s political opponents. Then there’s the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A private political instrument of the oligarch Elon Musk, acting at once officially and illegally, DOGE seems intent on the lawless capture, corruption, and in some cases destruction of the United States’ independent (and expert) institutions of government, including USAID, the Office of Personnel Management, and, somewhat incredibly, the Department of the Treasury.

DOGE’s actions are the subject of multiple federal lawsuits and temporary restraining orders. The problem is that the judicial branch of government is under Republican attack too. Vice President Vance has claimed that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” and the efficacy of judicial action against the Trump administration ultimately depends on the willingness of the Department of Justice to prosecute administration officials for disobeying orders of the court. Already the administration has defied federal court orders to resume paying federal grants. The polite term for what we’re seeing is “constitutional crisis.” 

What is your sense of the things a strong or coherent opposition party could or should do to stymie the rush of authoritarian policies that the Trump administration has been issuing in the last two weeks? That is, how ought the Democrats be operating?

As I said, we’re in new territory—systemic democratic collapse. Things are coming at us fast. It’s hard to know which way to turn. It’s even harder because the collapse profoundly implicates the Democratic Party. But three things seem clear enough, even in the midst of chaos. 

First, it’s important to not get disoriented by the November election. In the presidential head-to-head, Brand Trump (as it was then constituted) proved stronger than Brand Harris; but nonetheless, in the downballot races, which many low-propensity presidential voters sat out, Democrats won tough statewide elections and reduced the GOP’s majority in the House to a mere five seats (since reduced to three, pending a special election in April, after two Republican representatives from Florida resigned to pursue positions in the Trump administration). In other words, Trump was a discrete electoral proposition. When he wasn’t on the ballot, Republicans struggled to beat Democrats. That hasn’t changed. In late January the Democratic grassroots earned their candidate an Iowa state senate victory in a district that Trump won by 21 points. The midterms are due to take place next year. They will also be decided by base turnout. Democrats have every reason to believe they will take control of the House.

Second, it’s important not to get distracted by the past. The Trump political agenda and the Trump brand are very different today from what they were in November. Everything is different—because we have entered an authoritarian environment. Which leads to the third point: it is essential that Democrats accept and act on this new reality. The (dubious) strategies hatched by their consultants in response to Trump’s win—“talk about egg prices,” “work with Republicans,” and so on—make even less sense than usual. New strategies, new faces, and a new level of adversarial exertion will be required.

The Democrats’ most urgent political goals must be to stop the Republican Party’s ongoing authoritarian takeover, vigorously organize for victory in next year’s midterm elections, and preserve and strengthen the party’s most formidable electoral weapon—its battle-hardened grassroots. These goals can only be achieved if Democratic leaders show the moral clarity and political courage of a normal party of opposition. They must, in short, act with proportionate determination and imagination. Look at what just happened in Canada. In response to Trump’s proposed tariffs, Canadian politicians have put regular political business on hold, come up with the Team Canada concept, and conspicuously united to threaten counter-tariffs in defense of their country. In the hockey metaphor of one Canadian politician, they have shown that they’re ready to jump the boards. 

By comparison, Democrats have disgraced themselves. They’ve looked terrified and defeated and confused. They’ve hidden behind consultant-devised talking points about grocery prices. They’ve cast votes to confirm Trump’s extremist cabinet nominees (for example, the oil executive Chris Wright as energy secretary, the notorious right-wing hack Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the unprincipled Marco Rubio as secretary of state). They’ve proposed obviously futile legislation such as the Stop the Steal Act to counter DOGE. We’re talking about full-time, professional politicians with support staff and expense accounts and good lawyers. They have solicited and accepted pro bono labor and vast campaign contributions from millions of concerned citizens. They must start to fight back with whatever power they have.

Republicans control the House and Senate. In principle, they don’t need Democratic votes to pass government funding bills or raise the debt ceiling. In practice, they are too extreme and chaotic to muster a House majority. Speaker Mike Johnson—who voted to overturn Biden’s election—will need Democratic votes to keep the government running. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will have no choice—he must make it clear that Democrats will bail out the Republicans if, and only if, Johnson can guarantee that Trump will cease and desist from unlawfully destroying the US government. This is not a big ask. Precisely how Johnson can credibly give such a guarantee is a matter for Johnson. He’s the speaker, after all. If he fails, most Americans will hold the extremist GOP responsible for the resulting fallout—but only if Democrats are ready and able to fight the public relations battle. 

It really isn’t a difficult argument: Republicans have all the power. Their most basic job is to keep the government open for business. But they can’t. They’re too crazy and too corrupt and too incompetent. Americans who live in red districts should call their representatives and tell them to stop talking about invading Canada and start doing their jobs.

What do you think is motivating the Democrats’ feckless response? I see plenty of commentators who believe that the proof is in the pudding, that the weakness of their opposition is by design, and they function as a bulwark against the left rather than a check on the right. While this kind of “ratchet effect” theory has some explanatory power (and appeal), it doesn’t usefully describe the work of politics. It is doubtful, for example, that Democratic leaders are outright colluding with Trump’s administration in order to defang the left, but it is otherwise hard to account for why they aren’t shouting from the rooftops about the president cutting food stamps, and instead we have Senator Schumer worrying about defunding the police and the party scheduling an emergency response meeting a full day after the spending freeze went into effect. 

Unfortunately, your typical Democratic official—whether it’s Biden or Schumer or Jeffries or House Oversight Committee ranking member Gerry Connolly or the recently elected DNC chair Ken Martin—didn’t get into politics to defeat the Republican Party, to zealously advance the interests of ordinary people, or to protect democracy. They didn’t rise within the party ranks because of their talent for public service. In a functioning democracy, that wouldn’t matter as much. Nobody really cares if a politician’s inner life is absorbed in personal ambition. But at this moment of national and planetary emergency, pathological careerism is unacceptable. People should either step up or, if they don’t fancy the fray, follow the example of Senator Gary Peters, who recently announced, like a normal person in his late sixties, that he’ll retire in 2026. 

The sorry truth is that without enormous pressure from the party base, a significant number of senators and representatives won’t have it in them to oppose Trump. We, the concerned citizens, will have to force them to do their duty. We’ll also have to march, sooner rather than later. But that’s a separate topic. For now, these are our guys. We go with what we’ve got. And let’s not forget: Republicans can’t govern, they’re unpopular, and they’re led by the most idiotic president in living memory. They are beatable. 

You’ve said that “brand is king” and that an effective party needs “a charismatic leader (Obama, Sanders, Trump) who appeals to low-info types.” Are there any people—either in or out of the Democratic party—who you think fit that description and might prove effective at leading an opposition to Trump?

I must have been referring to the 2028 presidential election. We’ll certainly need a charismatic leader with mass appeal for that. In the meantime, it would be very useful to have a visible Leader of the Opposition. If exhausted and demoralized American liberals are not to tune out, they need somebody to tune in to. My own view is that Democrats should hold a daily press briefing at the DNC as a counterpoint to the White House briefings. Ideally, their spokespeople would be charismatic working-class nonpoliticians capable of speaking accurately and normally about the disastrous wrongdoings of the Trump administration. Such people—potential media stars—do exist outside in the real world, outside D.C. Democrats must find them, perhaps with auditions televised in the form of a reality TV show. I’m suggesting this unironically. Trump cannot be the only show in town.

As for the broader political leadership—well, Schumer and Jeffries obviously can’t be the faces of the opposition. America’s got talent, but they haven’t. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is strongly charismatic and substantive, but she has been the target of countless Republican attacks, and this limits her transpartisan appeal. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has shown promising signs of being an effective media presence, but has not claimed the national spotlight. In the final analysis, I’d want Bernie Sanders to take on this hypothetical newly created two-year position of Opposition Leader. Bernie’s ancient, but he’s still got it. And he enjoys credibility and popularity across every demographic. There’s nobody else, yet.