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Flying Bribery Palaces and the End of the Western Order -- EmptyWheel
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/05/24/flying-bribery-palaces-and-the-end-of-the-western-order/Marcy Wheeler
As always, the comments are a great sauce to the wonderful meal.
I am the rare person who thinks Trump’s authoritarian push has not, yet, gone as far as it might as quickly as I imagined.
I think that for two primary reasons. First, I expected far more violence than we’ve seen, both from jack-booted thugs and from Trump’s terrorists. While ICE has definitely done horrible things and wielded unnecessary violence, they have thus far limited their targets to people who are or look like they are migrants or those who’ve defended migrants’ due process. It doesn’t make what they’ve done right. It makes that violence an entrée.
That may change if Trump’s budget authorizing 20,000 more immigration cops–which should be viewed as a wholesale shift in the United States from law enforcement to policing–gets passed by the Senate. That may change as Trump and Stephen Miller continue to gin up violence targeting judges. That may change as Trump’s rubes begin to lose their livelihoods and need someone besides Trump to blame. But thus far, Trump has not wielded the kind of violence he has tested in the past.
The other thing I expected to happen more quickly was a solidification of an alliance with the great authoritarians of the world — the Middle Eastern autocrats who had been bribing Trump in plain sight throughout the Biden term, Russia, which had partnered with those same autocrats in Putin’s effort to destroy the United States, and eventually China. Such an alliance would leave Europe — already undermined by the Orbanist project — as the rump defender of once dominant Western ideals.
. . .
We should expect to see more instances where Trump takes sudden actions that empower authoritarianism. And as he proceeds, he will look for ways to start chipping away at democracy where it remains.
I think that for two primary reasons. First, I expected far more violence than we’ve seen, both from jack-booted thugs and from Trump’s terrorists. While ICE has definitely done horrible things and wielded unnecessary violence, they have thus far limited their targets to people who are or look like they are migrants or those who’ve defended migrants’ due process. It doesn’t make what they’ve done right. It makes that violence an entrée.
That may change if Trump’s budget authorizing 20,000 more immigration cops–which should be viewed as a wholesale shift in the United States from law enforcement to policing–gets passed by the Senate. That may change as Trump and Stephen Miller continue to gin up violence targeting judges. That may change as Trump’s rubes begin to lose their livelihoods and need someone besides Trump to blame. But thus far, Trump has not wielded the kind of violence he has tested in the past.
The other thing I expected to happen more quickly was a solidification of an alliance with the great authoritarians of the world — the Middle Eastern autocrats who had been bribing Trump in plain sight throughout the Biden term, Russia, which had partnered with those same autocrats in Putin’s effort to destroy the United States, and eventually China. Such an alliance would leave Europe — already undermined by the Orbanist project — as the rump defender of once dominant Western ideals.
. . .
We should expect to see more instances where Trump takes sudden actions that empower authoritarianism. And as he proceeds, he will look for ways to start chipping away at democracy where it remains.