Alex Brandon/AP Photo
President Donald Trump pumps his fist before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, March 7, 2025, in Washington.
As autocrats go, Donald Trump is in a class by himself. Every other autocrat in living memory used brutal techniques to destroy his opposition, but also built a strong state for the sake of military power or economic development. Trump, by contrast, seems determined to destroy government per se, even those parts of it that made America great.
Though he is particularly focused on destroying liberal habitats such as universities and blue states and cities, Trump wants to annihilate the state in general. This is not because he is a principled libertarian. On the contrary, to the extent that he wants the state to survive at all, he wants to bend it to his personal will, civil liberties be damned.
Unfortunately for the U.S. economy, science thrives on free inquiry. Researchers who work at places like the National Institutes of Health, or in the numerous labs that it funds, tend to be unsympathetic to crackpot theories. That makes them liberals, in Trump’s view, hence enemies of the state.
But if anything made America great during the long era of American economic ascendance, it was extensive funding of applied science. Trump may view, say, Johns Hopkins as a hotbed of liberals. Trump’s budget cuts have forced Hopkins to lay off some 2,000 researchers. But it’s not possible to starve Hopkins and kindred research universities without destroying the seedbed of American leadership in science.
Even though it’s perverse, you can sort of understand Trump’s vindictiveness directed at great research universities, as denizens of liberals. What’s even more bewildering is his willingness to destroy the economy generally via a combination of tariffs that make no economic sense and drastic cuts in public spending generally, which will have reverberating effects on the private economy.
Even more appalling is the eagerness with which Trump’s toadies are excusing his crashing of the economy. As the stock market was collapsing, Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy told Fox News’s Larry Kudlow, “Our economy has been on a sugar high for a long time. It’s been distorted by excess government spending.”
Sorry, but the economy that Trump inherited was mainly built on significant private-sector growth, stimulated by smart public investments. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeated the canard. The economy, he said, needs “a detox period.”
Apparently, “detox” is the latest euphemism for an enginnered recession. But Trump’s policies pour on more toxicity. Wholesale closure of government agecies will only sink the economy further; likewise, impulsive tariffs.
We are still in a phase of responses to insane policies where nobody in Trump’s own party is willing to point out that the king has no clothes. The one thing Trump has succeeded at is intimidation.
In Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, the Polish poet observed how, under communism, potential dissenters self-censored by anticipating and internalizing the regime’s party line. There was no need to shackle their bodies; their minds had been taken captive.
This psychology now intimidates nearly all Republicans. Trump differs from other dictators in the sheer randomness of his destruction. The only unifying element is vindictiveness.
Trump’s bizarre obsession with taking control of every aspect of Washington’s Kennedy Center makes sense only when understood in the context of Trump’s petty narcissistic need for retribution. During his first term, several Kennedy Center honorees boycotted the White House reception. No slight is too petty for Trump to strike back by burning down the house.
The recent Brazilian film I’m Still Here, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature, tells the true story of how the Brazilian military dictatorship arrested, hid, and eventually murdered a onetime Labor Party deputy named Rubens Paiva, and the impact on his family. Paiva was one of tens of thousands who were disappeared.
But while the dictatorship, which lasted for 21 years from 1964 to 1985, was ruthless at destroying any hint of opposition, it also built up Brazil’s economy, relying heavily on currency reform and state-led enterprises. One of the reasons the dictatorship lasted so long is that the regime was associated with prosperity.
Not so with Trump. At some point, Trump’s catastrophic economic policies should produce some opposition from within his own party. His own base will suffer, and Republican senators and representatives have to face the voters.
Unless, of course, they don’t.
