It's high time commentators stopped trying to shoehorn the American polity into a paradigm that doesn't fit. Donald Trump's brand of government is as new and unique as it is volatile and disturbing. Sometimes, history neither repeats nor rhymes. Sometimes, a whole new species bursts onto the scene.
What we're seeing today with Trump isn't dictatorship. Dictators control their countries. They don't rely on the opposition party to pass budgets; they dictate where money is spent. They don't get bludgeoned every hour in the press; they dominate the media. And they don't have their key initiatives stymied in the courts; they control the judiciary.
Nor is this Nazism. Nazis don't make Nazi salutes at rallies and then try (with mixed success) to downsize the government. Nazis make Nazi salutes at rallies and then go kill a bunch of innocent people. Nazis, moreover, don't just slap tariffs on their neighbors. Nazis invade their neighbors.
This isn't fascism, either. Fascists enforce a coherent vision of government through a murderous, totalitarian regime. They don't flail around pursuing incoherent and contradictory policies that get blocked as frequently as they get implemented.
Sure, there are similarities between Trump’s presidency and these historical forms of government. Trump's rhetoric, for example, is often lifted from the lips of history's worst tyrants. His abuses of executive power, moreover, often resemble certain dictatorial techniques. But, overall, these political pegs don't fit into the American hole. Having similarities with something is different from being the same thing. Both the mouse and the elephant have four legs and a tail.
No, what we have in America today is different. It's new. It’s unprecedented. What we have in America today is Trumpism.
There are four defining elements of Trumpism. First, Donald Trump is the sitting president and dominates the Republican Party. His cabinet includes people with varied pedigrees and ideologies who share one common trait: slavish loyalty to Trump. The same Trump-first, person-over-party ethos pervades Republicans in both houses of Congress.
Second, several essential pillars of American democracy no longer function. For example, Trump's executive branch doesn't respect legal precedents or traditions in its daily workings. Trump ignores rules regarding government ethics, such as avoiding conflicts of interest. An impulsive and profiteering businessman, he naturally gravitates toward, instead of away from, these conflicts. He also ignores other long-held norms and legal requirements governing executive action. Under Article 2, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, the president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Yet Trump and Elon Musk have brazenly confiscated valid federal funding to serve their political goals and settle personal scores.
Third, other essential pillars of American democracy do continue to function. As Trump's recent deal with Democratic senator Chuck Schumer illustrated, a majority of Congress is still required to pass a budget. The judiciary still operates independently from and consistently rules against the president. State and local governments still control vast portions of America's legal and political systems. A diverse and free press still vociferously criticizes the president every minute of every day.
So we find ourselves today charting new territory as a nation. Some parts of our democracy still work, some don't, and some of our fears have been realized. We are not under the yoke of a fascist dictator. We are, rather, neck-deep in the dysfunctional scramble of a constitutionally illiterate and shameless bully.
Which brings us to the fourth and final element of Trumpism: unpredictability reigns. Will Trump start systematically violating court orders? Will he and Musk illicitly unwind foundational programs like Social Security? Will Republicans keep both chambers of Congress in 2026? Will Trump try to stay in office after the next presidential election?
These are big open questions. And we shouldn't understate the predicament we’re in. But we also shouldn't confuse where things stand or make them worse than they are. This isn't dictatorship, nazism, fascism, or any other familiar political paradigm. This is something different. This is something new. This is something as odd, as unique, and as troubling as the man who gives it its name. This is Trumpism.
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.