I remember well, because it was just a few months ago, when political commentators ridiculed Kamala Harris for placing so much emphasis on preserving democracy in the face of Trump when it was simply obvious that the main problem facing Americans was inflation.
Meaning, it was more important for the Harris campaign to talk about the price of eggs than the price of freedom.
Now it is clear that Harris was correct and the pundits were wrong. For Trump is acting more like an authoritarian and wanna-be dictator than was expected by Trump critics like me -- and I expected things to be really bad if Trump won, just not as bad as they're turning out to be.
Here's a sampling of what Trump has been up to, dismantling democracy-wise, in the roughly three months since he took office.
-- Firing many thousands of federal workers in illegal ways that make a mockery of civil service rules.
-- Dismantling government agencies established by Congress.
-- Instructing the Justice Department without any evidence of wrongdoing to investigate people critical of Trump.
-- Extorting free legal work for his administration from large law firms whose attorneys represented causes Trump didn't like.
-- Demanding Harvard and other universities agree to government control of the institutions if they want to keep billions in federal grants that fund important research.
-- Imposing massive widespread tariffs that threaten the world's economy without authority to do this.
-- Disappearing immigrants with a right to be in this country to a prison in El Salvador without the due process required by law.
That last item is especially concerning, because Trump is ignoring an order by the Supreme Court to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García from the El Salvador prison because administration officials acknowledged that he was mistakenly deported to the notoriously dangerous prison.
Any other president would have taken steps to remove Garcia from the prison, bring him back to the United States, and have his case reviewed by courts. But Trump is refusing to comply with the unanimous Supreme Court order, which sets the stage for a constitutional crisis.
Timothy Snyder is an expert on authoritarianism who has written books on this subject, including On Tyranny, which I enjoyed a lot. Today he published a substack essay, "State Terror: A Brief Guide for Americans." It is, well, terrifying for those of us who don't want to lose our hard-won democracy.
Here's an excerpt.
Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.
So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice. Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language.
Today in Berlin stands an important museum called "Topography of Terror"; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called "terrorists." Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a "terrorist" without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime.
The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition its victims are the "criminals" and the "terrorists." The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters "want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children."
The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order. Our rule of law begins with notions such as the people and their rights. If politicians shift the framework to "criminals" and "terrorism," then they are shifting the purpose of the state.
In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.
Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by "legal" what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.
It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law.
What aspiring tyrants present as "strength," the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us.
In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness.
The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump's advisors claim that what he is doing is popular.
The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal "mandate" from the people has the same problem. Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who "hate our country" or who are "stupid."
The second escape from law is the state of exception. In principle, the Soviet Union was governed by law. Before its greatest exercises of terror, however, the Soviet authorities declared for themselves states of exception. This meant that, on the territory of the Soviet Union itself, it was "legal" (in Bondi's and in Trump's sense) to abduct people and send them to concentration camps: authorities claimed that there was some sort of threat, and so protections could be withdrawn and procedures set aside.
People could be abducted in black vans and executed or sent to a camp, "legally," in the sense that the law had been set aside. The notion of the state of exception, important to Soviet practice, was at the center of Nazi theory. As the leading Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt argued, the sovereign is the person who can make an exception. If we are living in normal times, then we think we should be governed by law. But if politicians can use words to make us think that these are exceptional times, then we might accept their lawlessness.
A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one's own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.
This exploitation of purported stateless zones was the main line of the history of the Holocaust. Under Hitler, the Germans did have concentration camps on their own territory, and they did reduce Jews to second-class citizenship, and they did live under a permanent state of exception. But, in the main, the mass murder of German Jews was achieved by their abduction and forced rendition to sites beyond prewar German territory where, German authorities claimed, there was no law.
A probing of this statelessness approach was on display yesterday, as Trump and his advisors claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States whom US authorities abducted by mistake and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, was now beyond the reach of American law. This is state terror: the state is presented as "strong" in its oppression of a person, but as weak in its ability to respect or enforce law.
The idea that the United States can send you to places from which it cannot bring you back is the theoretical basis for a doctrine of statelessness. Call it the Rubio Doctrine: in the words of the secretary of state, "the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court." But what that implies is that people forcibly transported beyond the boundaries of the United States can be incarcerated or killed for no reason. That would be "foreign policy."
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