The Autocratic Engine
The President has a brutally efficient method of consolidating power. We won’t stop it until we take back the White House.
Yesterday, I received a Democratic fundraising email telling me that President Trump was “HUMILIATED” because Democrats could win back the Senate and “SLAM THE BRAKES” on his agenda—if I would “express donate” $24.
Apparently, these emails work, and I’m sure this one will raise some money. But, telling voters that winning the Senate will SLAM THE BRAKES on anything is dishonest.
Take a look at the ongoing government shutdown, which has now gone on so long that it’s no longer on the front page. The news still covers it like past shutdowns—who will the public blame? Who will blink first? But that’s a mistake, because this President is playing a different game. For Trump, the shutdown is more opportunity than crisis, and he’s already used it to end programs, fire federal employees, and exact political retribution.
But the largest prize for the administration will be using the shutdown as a pretense to subvert Congress’s authority to set a budget, weakening one of the last constraints on presidential power. Legally, the President needs a budget from Congress to run the government, but why can’t an outlaw administration go ahead without one? The Treasury Department is in charge of distributing funds and it reports to the President, as do the agencies that generate revenue like the IRS. He has consolidated authority over them and has gone out of his way to show that he doesn’t believe that authority has any limits. If he’s willing to unilaterally impose tariffs, shut down agencies, or start military campaigns without congressional approval, to say nothing of deploying troops domestically and building a paramilitary force, why would he wait for Congress’s approval to spend public money?
Sure enough, the administration is exploring that option, starting by using the revenue from his tariffs—a tax on the American people that is as foolish as it is illegal—to fund programs that should legally be shut down. Tariffs have already given him leverage on foreign nations and American companies, and could soon be a slush fund to pay for his priorities. For an administration this creative, it will be a short leap from there to simply operating without a budget.
There is a method to this madness. Trump is prying freedom and democracy out of Americans’ hands, and he’s doing it deliberately rather than trying to yank it away all at once. As outrageous as his actions have been, there is always a pretense: an emergency declared, a novel reading of the law. Even if it’s flimsy and transparent, it allows people who want to ignore or justify an authoritarian takeover to explain it away. From there, he can build to broader abuses. Today, it’s an immigrant who gets unlawfully deported to a prison in another nation, but the President hints that the same could happen to citizens. Today, it’s a few American cities seeing troop deployments in the name of reducing crime, but more cities are already on the list. In business, this is called “land and expand”: start with a small sale to get in the door and use the relationship to build to a much larger deal. The President is using the same approach to destroy the constitutional order. He’s already landed, and he’s still got nearly forty months left in this term to expand.
In an earlier post, I talked about autocratic ingenuity—the way the President creatively uses the authority he has as leverage to take the authority he doesn’t. Consolidation of power, leverage, and expansion compound one another in an autocratic engine that increases the President’s authority and sidelines Congress, the courts, states, and everyone else who wants to push back. He consolidated authority in the party, then used that to stock the administration and Congress with loyalists. He used that loyalty to impose unlawful tariffs, which provide further leverage as well as funds. He is now planning to use those funds to pay for programs despite a shutdown, further weakening Congress and consolidating authority. That’s just one thread; the President is running the engine across multiple fronts at once. It is brilliant in its brutal simplicity and range.
That is why it’s dishonest to say that winning the House or the Senate is going to end this. We should fight tooth-and-nail for every seat, but Trump is subverting and ignoring Congress even when he has Republican majorities in both houses. That will only intensify if Democrats win a majority. Democratic efforts to push back slow him down in the near term, but also serve as pretexts that fuel the autocratic engine.
Every post I write here, every conversation I have with voters on the street, and every answer I’ve given in a public forum comes back to the same point: we have to win back the White House in 2028, or we will have not three more years of this but (at least) seven. Today, we are not on track to winning. We can’t wait for a charismatic presidential candidate to save us, and we can’t cross our fingers and hope the country finally decides enough is enough. It’s up to us to build a party that wins. That’s what I’m fighting for, and it’s the only way we’re going to SLAM THE BRAKES.
