On Saturday two Apache helicopters flew over a “No Kings” protest in Tennessee before swinging by the nearby home of MAGA darling Kid Rock, where the musician saluted the pilots and appeared to receive a salute in return. The aircraft were on a training mission, according to the Washington Post, and had no orders to monitor or disrupt the protest. Despite that, “one of the helicopters flew by demonstrators six times,” at one point descending as low as 625 feet and briefly circling an area where people were gathered.
It sounds like the crew thought it’d be fun to scare anti-Trump American citizens by buzzing them, even if that meant deviating from their assigned task. Military officials naturally ordered a disciplinary review and suspended the pilots. And Hegseth just as naturally un-suspended them immediately, no questions asked.
“No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” he wrote on Twitter, approvingly retweeting a video posted by Kid Rock of his encounter with the Apaches. I doubt any writer anywhere has distilled the corrupt essence of the Trump administration so succinctly. If you’re a presidential ally, i.e. a “patriot,” not only will you not be punished for misconduct, you won’t even be asked to explain yourself. That’s how the Justice Department handled things in Minneapolis too, you may recall.
It’s not noteworthy that Hegseth, a longtime apologist for war crimes, would leap to absolve service members for behaving ruthlessly toward the president’s political enemies. Nor is it noteworthy that he would pass on an opportunity to demand accountability for misconduct in a minor incident, if only to keep up appearances that the Pentagon is still enforcing discipline in the ranks. To build a proper culture of impunity, extending that impunity to petty malfeasance is important: It entices the grunts to start small in abusing their power, making them comfortable with the concept.
What is noteworthy is the timing. The president’s approval has declined sharply over the last month and will continue to do so as the economic fallout of the Iran war accumulates. If ever there were a moment when you might think toadies like Hegseth would be more circumspect about parading their arrogance and corruption, a spell of intense public discontent is it.
They should be chastened by events, wary of antagonizing the public further. In reality, the president and his team are behaving more imperiously than ever.
Unchastened.
Trump signed an executive order Tuesday designed to limit voting by mail in America, no matter how our 50 state governments might feel about it. “Trump’s order directs the Homeland Security Department, in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to create an approved list of absentee voters,” Politico explained. “The U.S. Postal Service would be directed to only send mail-in ballots to voters on that list.”
There’s an extortion component, too, of course. Any state that refuses to comply will have its federal funding withheld, whether Congress approves of that or not.
Take this prediction for what it’s worth, as it’s coming from the worst lawyer on The Dispatch staff, but that order is headed down the judicial toilet. The Constitution grants the legislature, not the executive, the power to big-foot states’ voting protocols, and the Supreme Court demonstrated very recently in a dramatic way how serious it is about not letting the president usurp Congress’ Article I powers.
Trump doesn’t expect the order to be upheld, though, unless he’s even more deluded by the information bubble he’s in than I assumed. He signed it to signal that his plot to game the midterms in Republicans’ favor by hook or by crook will continue, undaunted, in increasingly aggressive ways. The fact that his job approval now stands at 35 percent in some polls did not and will not deter him from his dubious mission.
This morning, he became the first president in U.S. history (as far as anyone knows) to attend oral arguments before the Supreme Court as the justices at last took up his executive order ending citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born on American soil. That one’s also destined for the constitutional crapper, for much the same reason that his order on mail-in voting is. Even if the court finds that the 14th Amendment doesn’t guarantee birthright citizenship absolutely, it will assuredly hold that only Congress has the power to make the relevant rules. (It’s right there in Section 5.)
Maybe Trump knows that, maybe he doesn’t. Either way, it feels significant that he’d undertake to intimidate Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett into voting his way this time by staring them down in person. (You owe me, you can imagine him thinking, shooting daggers at both.) To be sure, it’s an idiotic tactic: Insofar as the president’s power play has any effect, it should make the justices less willing to rule in his favor to spare themselves lest they be accused that he successfully bullied them into doing so.
But I think his appearance has symbolic value. Venturing onto the court’s turf and confronting the justices personally might be his way of signaling that he’s preparing to confront them by infringing on their turf constitutionally if they rule against him. After the bitter disappointment of the tariff decision, Trump might treat an adverse decision in the birthright citizenship case as the moment to cross the Rubicon by ordering ICE to deport the children of illegal immigrants whether the Supreme Court likes it or not.
Even popular presidents didn’t dare risk a public backlash by defying court orders or rejecting the authority of Marbury v. Madison. Yet it seems plausible that a guy who’s at 35 percent might try it.
We’re not done. As I write this on Wednesday morning, Trump is promising to use his Oval Office address this evening about the Iran war to discuss his “disgust with NATO.” It sounds like the alliance is finally over: When asked yesterday if he’s reconsidering America’s participation in it, he replied, “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”
The president might be about to ask the country to support him in exiting a security pact that polls at 60 percent or better because member nations don’t want to participate in a war that, uh, Americans don’t want us participating in either. This too would be lawless, almost needless to say, as the NATO treaty isn’t a mere “suggestion” to the president. It’s a binding commitment that was codified in federal law when it was ratified by the Senate decades ago. Who’s going to give the order to defend Poland from Russia if he refuses, though? Sonia Sotomayor?
Then there are the monuments.
Never, surely, in American history has a leader been more consumed with glorifying himself than Trump is right now. The Trump ballroom, the Trump-Kennedy Center, the Trump international airport, Trump’s face on coins, Trump’s signature on the currency, and soon-ish a Trump presidential library-slash-hotel featuring a giant golden statue of the president that distinctly resembles sculptures of Kim Il Sung in North Korea.
And that list is not exhaustive.
All of it would be deeply, autocratically weird even for a president with massive popular support. For one who’s hemorrhaging approval, teetering on the brink of a full-blown energy crisis and stagflation, “weird” doesn’t begin to capture how disconnected it is from public opinion. From foreign policy to trade, the economy to immigration, Americans hate what he’s doing—yet the attitude of his administration in virtually every respect remains “Carry on, patriots.”
It’s Nero-esque, down to the quasi-gladitorial combat for the emperor’s amusement that will take place at his palace a few months from now. And maybe that’s no coincidence.
Self-correcting.
A president behaving more imperiously as he grows less popular is a confounding development in a democracy.
After all, democracy is meant to be self-correcting. A candidate makes promises, gets elected, then undertakes to govern. If his policies are bad, public opinion will sour and incentivize him to change course.
Sometimes presidents refuse to change course because they believe devoutly in a particular policy they’ve championed. Barack Obama promised health care reform as a candidate, for instance, and proposed a plan for it after taking office, only to discover that the public hated it. Polling at the time gave him a choice between abandoning the program and recovering or seeing it through and accepting the dire consequences. He chose door No. 2. Voters responded with an historic red wave in House races that fall.
What’s unusual about Trump isn’t that he’s sticking with an unpopular policy to which he’s deeply committed, like tariffs. What’s unusual is that he keeps making new and unexpected moves that he has every reason to think will deepen his unpopularity at a moment when he’s already unpopular.
The Iran war is the supreme example. Yes, he’s been rhetorically belligerent toward the Iranian regime for many years, but few believed that a guy running as the “peace candidate” in 2024 would start a war that’s now on the verge of involving ground troops and will compound a cost-of-living crisis that already has Americans at wit’s end. A popular president, like George W. Bush post-9/11, could reassure himself that he had political capital to spend in launching a questionable war of choice. Trump didn’t have the same capital—but spent it anyway.
Obama was sufficiently chastened by his party’s obliteration in 2010 that he felt obliged to negotiate the following year with the new House Republican majority on a grand bargain on entitlements. Trump will not be as compromise-minded if the House changes hands this fall, I suspect. “Now with the death of Iran, the greatest enemy America has is the Radical Left, Highly Incompetent, Democrat Party!,” he declared recently.
If we haven’t yet reached a point of democratic breakdown in which the country’s highest-ranking official stops caring about public opinion entirely, we seem to be approaching it. Why?
Democratic inefficiencies.
I think there are three reasons. One, of course, is that the president and his movement exist in an exquisitely curated information ecosystem designed to exclude discouraging feedback. Scroll through the replies to this tweet, showing a sharp shift toward Democrats in party ID over the past nine months, for an example of how MAGA true believers cope with data that contradicts their assumptions.
Like any market, democracy works best when it efficiently assimilates information, good and bad. Trumpist democracy is not efficient. The president won’t change course now that he’s conditioned himself and his supporters to treat every adverse data point as “fake news.”
Another inefficiency with Trumpist democracy is that the leader plainly does not give a rip about the long-term fate of his party and therefore lacks the usual motivation to avoid unpopular actions when he’s not on the ballot. We saw that in Georgia after the 2020 election, when Trump’s selfish paranoia about vote-rigging cost his party not one but two Senate seats. We’re seeing it again in Texas, where the president has held off on endorsing John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary despite the fact that he’d stand a better chance of holding the seat than uber-corrupt Trump crony Ken Paxton would.
Again, the Iran war is a prime example. In no sphere of reality does a conflict in the Middle East destined to disrupt oil markets make political sense nine months out from a midterm with affordability the most pressing issue in America. It’s a heavy anchor around Republican lawmakers’ necks. Yet as much as Trump might prefer to have them in control of Congress next year, his own desires will always take precedence over their political welfare. Look no further than the reason he gave to aides who warned him against attacking Iran: “I just want to do it,” the president reportedly said.
He just wanted to do it. In the same way that Europeans will have to deal with the economic consequences of the war Trump wanted to fight, Republican members of Congress will have to deal with the electoral consequences. The president doesn’t serve the party. The party serves him.
The greatest inefficiency of Trumpist democracy, though, is also the most obvious. Like all authoritarians, the president reveres democracy only to the extent it delivers the power he craves. He sees no special moral legitimacy in being supported by a popular majority, I suspect; if you told him that he could successfully gain or hold power only through anti-democratic means, no civic qualms would stop him.
In fact, we’ve seen that movie before, haven’t we?
By definition, a president who sees greater virtue in his right to rule than in the American people getting their way will not be chastened by negative feedback to his policies. The opposite, perhaps: If Trump is growing more imperious as his popularity declines, it may be that he’s begun to lean further into determined autocracy to shore up his position as he senses resistance mounting.
His new order restricting mail-in ballots and the pressure he’s putting on Senate Republicans to make voting more onerous are signs that he’s getting more aggressive about interfering with the midterms to prevent an impending blue wave. If those orders are struck down, another emergency order asserting presidential power to mandate voter ID and ban voting by mail is probably next. If (or when) that gets flushed, who knows?
But it’s a cinch that he’ll get more aggressive, not less.
The prospect of Trump conniving to try to suspend or cancel the midterms is realistic enough that a populist as diehard as Marjorie Taylor Greene now allows for the possibility. Last year, when Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House, the president said of Ukraine’s lack of recent elections: “During the war you can’t have elections? So let me just see—three and a half years from now, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. That’s good.”
Maybe he was joking. Or maybe he was doing something else.
The point of Pete Hegseth’s exhortation to “carry on, patriots,” and the reason so many federal bureaucrats now fear reporting misconduct, is that traditional norms of civic propriety are defunct. In which case, why would anyone assume that elections are an exception? An America where soldiers can intimidate civilians who hold political views they dislike, where Caesar’s face and name are on everything, and where nearly the entirety of federal policymaking is run out of the West Wing via illegal royal decrees is an America where the people in charge will feel no compunction about trying to retain power by any means necessary.
The less popular the president becomes, the more fervently he and his minions must “carry on.” Patriotism requires nothing less.
