At a moment when political lines are crossed every week, every day, even every hour, this week still felt different. In the blink of an eye, the looming threat of living under a mercurial and unaccountable tyrant began to feel real.
In just one week, the administration urged Americans to spy on one another, purged prosecutors who resisted politicized charges, threatened broadcasters, targeted immigrants through punitive visa delays, tightened Pentagon press rules, and even continued extrajudicial killings at sea. Any one of these might be defended in isolation; taken together they mark the consolidation of power in service of one man.
I realize that a long list of the President’s overreaching can be unwieldy, but it is important to sit with the immensity of what is happening. So, at the risk of trying your patience, here is a hastily prepared list of quasi-dictatorial actions from the past week.
- The Vice President pleaded with Americans to inform on their co-workers and friends who did not evince the proper reaction to the terrible assassination of Charlie Kirk.
- President Trump forced out U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert of the Eastern District of Virginia after he refused to bring charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James, replacing him with loyalist Lindsey Halligan. At the same time, according to the New York Times, Trump is also targeting Maryland’s U.S. attorney, Kelly O. Hayes, who has resisted prosecuting Senator Adam Schiff and former National Security Advisor John Bolton. Both career prosecutors cited insufficient evidence — underscoring that the Department of Justice is now being bent into the personal law firm of a resentment-fueled president.
- The head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened ABC’s license unless it pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live, after Kimmel wrongly suggested Charlie Kirk’s assassin was MAGA-aligned. Days later, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the Justice Department would begin targeting “hate speech.” Together, these moves show the administration wielding federal power to police expression and intimidate critics — an authoritarian cancel culture cloaked in state authority.
- The President also asked the Supreme Court to allow him to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on charges — unproven and highly questionable — that she may have listed two different properties as her primary residence in order to get a better mortgage rate
- Trump also sued The New York Times for $15 billion, claiming its coverage damaged his reputation — a suit quickly tossed by a federal judge. At the same time, the Pentagon issued new rules requiring reporters to seek approval even for unclassified stories. Both efforts share a single aim: silencing independent journalism and tightening control of the press.
- The Defense Department has also continued to blow up boats that it claims carry Venezuelan drug dealers in open waters, allegedly extrajudicial killings in violation of international law. While the U.S. Navy has never signed on as a party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, it has been U.S. practice to act in accordance with it.
- Immigration policy has also been weaponized. Under “Operation Midway Blitz,” ICE detained over 550 people in Chicago, including at least two U.S. citizens, while the administration simultaneously announced a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa renewals and began deliberately slow-walking approvals. The message is unmistakable: deportations by delay and bureaucracy, without the spectacle of mass roundups.
Any one of these acts might be justifiable on their own. The blowing up of Venezuelan drug dealers, while illegal, is an attempt to deal with a real problem that our government has failed to address for years. The use of the National Guard to reduce crime in cities is a result of decades of failure by many urban mayors to accomplish their primary task of keeping their people safe. And our cultural institutions–from TV networks to colleges and universities–do have a problem. They are overwhelmingly liberal and progressive and lack ideological diversity. The networks have blended entertainment with political orthodoxy and the universities have too often imagined themselves to be teaching unapologetically progressive interpretations of history, economics, and even biology. One can imagine that it is justified to apply external pressure on these institutions in order to help them address the powerful internal ideological pressures that trap them.
Even Ross Douthat, who has strained to see an “arguable civic purpose” in Trump’s culture war, admits the obvious: Trump’s aim is not reform but submission. His goal is not to strengthen institutions but to have them kneel. What the President clearly wants — and what he is achieving — is to have these institutions bend a knee and demonstrate their fealty to him personally.
Trump, Douthat admits, is the “king.” He has not yet figured out how to avoid the two-term limit on the presidency, but he is more powerful than ever. The country, which for years had to obey the often tyrannical dictates of a progressive ideology, is now experiencing what it feels like when wokeness is enforced by an elected dictator wielding the full force and power of the government of the United States of America.
As much as President Trump would be king and dictator, we do still live in a constitutional government and under the rule of law. Trump is not king — not yet. Congress — weak as it is — still exists. Twenty-three states are led by Democratic governors with their own police, guards, and bureaucracies. Even Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox has resisted Trump’s propaganda. And in fourteen months, there is an election. Trump may act the part of a dictator, but he is not beyond the people’s reach.
But the crisis we face goes deeper than Trump. We know what we reject — tyranny, racism, meaninglessness. What we lack is clarity about what we affirm. That absence is the true mark of our time: nihilism.
The rise of nihilism — what Friedrich Nietzsche called the death of God — means that there are no highest values. With no truth held in common, no principle worth dying for, every conviction becomes relative. As Samuel Moyn argues in The Last Utopia, the grand narratives that once gave politics meaning — communism, capitalism, democracy — have lost their force. Only human rights remain, but reduced to bare survival.
What is terrifying about nihilism is its silence. We can still name what we resist — totalitarianism, fascism, racism, sexism — but when we ask what we are fighting for, we hear silence. Hannah Arendt, in Between Past and Future, called it “the ominous silence that still answers us whenever we dare to ask, not, ‘What are we fighting against’ but ‘What are we fighting for?’”
Revolutions happen when the breakdown of a current system becomes so palpable that political and social institutions lose their legitimacy. This creates a revolutionary situation in which power is lying in the streets, ready to be picked up and wielded by those who can articulate values and ideals worth fighting for. And yet, such a revolutionary situation will only become a revolution when revolutionaries can articulate a new common sense, a vision of a shared world that would emerge on the ruins of the old. Absent such a vision of what holds people together, revolutions collapse into chaos rather than founding a new era of freedom.
Trumpism, I have argued, is revolutionary in its own way: a revolution of destruction without creation, seeking to dismantle liberal democracy without offering any vision of what should replace it. It aims to destroy what it sees as a corrupt and unjust political system. But it has no positive idea of what will replace the liberal democratic world it aims to dismantle.
In The Human Condition, Arendt writes that the task of politics is to find that which gathers us together in a meaningful world while also respecting our plurality. Religion once offered such shared meaning. Today, in its absence, politics itself must bear that burden: to “discover in the secular realm an independent, immanent meaning which even God could not alter.” Politics, for Arendt, is not only about administering government or managing resources. It is the ongoing work of building a common world — made of words, deeds, institutions, and stories — that can both unite us and honor our differences.
Arendt believed that such rebirth is always possible, though never guaranteed. It requires speech that is courageous, honest, and open–speech that resists the temptation of ideological certainty and refuses the comforts of dogma. From that courage, from the willingness to appear before one another as distinct individuals and to listen without foreclosing, a new common world can begin to emerge.
Out of today’s turmoil, Arendt suggested, “there will finally arise some new code of conduct.” That is the wager of politics: not merely to resist what we are against, but to discover together what we are for.
