Everything Donald Trump has said and done in his second term as president was lifted from the Autocracy for Dummies handbook he should have committed to memory after trying and failing on January 6, 2021, to overthrow the government he had pledged to protect and serve.
This time around, putting his name and face to everything he fancies and diverting our attention from anything he touches as soon as it begins to smell or look bad are telltale signs that he is losing the fight to control the hearts and minds of a nation he would rather rule than help lead.
To be sure, in the five years he has spent in the White House, Donald Trump has come closer to bringing autocratic rule to the United States than any previous president. No doubt, he will keep at it until his term in office ends.
For however long that is and well past the time his second term ends, Donald Trump will remain Americans’ avatar for all things autocratic. But his successes won’t come close to those of other past and present autocrats.
True, the list of bright shiny objects catching his attention both internationally and domestically has been impressive. His branding of things already built, eligible for a teardown, or in desperate need of overhauling under his careful gaze has been exhausting and distracting. But tearing things apart wasn’t a downpayment on building something better and longer lasting. It was the only thing he was interested in and good at doing.
The reason why Donald Trump’s second presidency is already showing serious signs of fraying is that he has ignored the two most important lines aspiring autocrats can’t stop themselves from crossing.
They act as if they are at the center of a universe they can push around and shape to their liking; but the breadth and audacity of their ambitions and penchant for corruption exceed their ability to carry out their grandest designs.
It’s no less true for Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump today as it was in the past for the likes of
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler. In the case of Hitler, for instance, had he really been serious about building a thousand-year Reich, the late political scientist Sam Sharp observed, he wouldn’t have moved around so much in the first twelve.
Donald Trump’s attention-grabbing threats to “take over” Greenland, make Canada our 51st state, run Venezuela by proxy, bomb Iran into submission, or turn a post-apocalyptic Gaza into a tourist mecca are more scattered and fleeting than anything that Hitler had in mind to do. But the TACO-infused confusion spilling from Donald Trump’s brain makes his proposed do-overs look sillier and more delusional than they are dangerous.
Then there’s this.
Autocrats don’t fare well when the people they try to bully have had lots of practice and success at saying “no” to their would-be overlords.
Donald Trump has shown no familiarity or regard for this crucial piece of our history. Americans are, for better and worse, well-practiced in showing a cranky and sometimes violent face to leaders who push us harder than we like into places we don’t want to go.
The public anger on display in Minneapolis and elsewhere, limited as it may be, is a preamble to a history that’s already been written. We might dislike all the unrest, decry the loss of people’s lives and property, and scratch our heads at the modest changes our rebelliousness leaves behind. But it is the very evanescent quality of the hard and sometimes dangerous work undertaken by agitated Americans that keeps our unrest fresh and relevant.
Not long from now, the assault on our civic lives and constitutional norms occasioned by Trump’s anti-immigration campaign will be remembered for the same reason we should celebrate the insurrection and attempted coup d’état Trump provoked on January 6, 2021. They were dramatic and conspicuous failures.
We won’t have to defame the men and women who tried to take over the Capital or who want to throw out all our illegal immigrants to recognize that their actions were as historically unprecedented as they were incompetently executed.
The legacy of the everyday Americans protesting ICE arrests, incarcerations, deportations, and killings will be their restraint and programmatic modesty. The only thing they will have forced the rest of us to do is think about ideals we had come to take for granted but now, thanks to the trouble they’re making on the streets of American cities, we are practicing again.
The public fights over Trump’s anti-immigration policies are shocking. But they also make us reflect upon a long history of taking in people we weren’t expecting or thrilled to have here and letting them stay long enough to do better than expected for themselves and for the rest of us.
It would be good to keep all this in mind in the run up to our 250th birthday party. The irony that we would have President Trump to thank for reminding us about these important lessons is a pill I am ready and happy to swallow.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.