My weekend was disrupted by Donald Trump’s efforts to impose one-man rule in America. Specifically, his executive order declaring a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas—something for which he doesn’t have legal authority, but which Congress and courts might be too supine to stop—posed immediate problems for people we know; some of whom were currently outside the country, at risk of not being allowed to re-enter under the vaguely-worded directive. Never doubt that autocratic rule can affect you and people you’re close to.
Dictator from Day One: How Donald Trump Is Overthrowing the Constitution and How to Fight Back, by Robert Tracinski, is a concise, incisive analysis of the key problem posed by the second Trump administration. As Tracinski summarizes: “It is a swift and concentrated attempt at regime change. A ‘regime,’ as political scientists use the term, is not just a particular group of people who are in charge, but the overarching structure of a government and the rules by which it operates. How are decisions made and implemented? How are leaders selected? Does the balance of power lie with a king or with a legislature, or is it spread across multiple institutions that have the power to check each other?”
Rejoinders that such change “was called an election” are fatuous, as not merely changes in policies or personnel are at issue, but rather the powers of legislators, courts and voters. Also unfounded are assumptions that government by presidential decree will only be used against people one despises. “The ideological agitators for authoritarianism never end up getting the ideal system they claimed they were fighting for—and are lucky to avoid getting chucked into concentration camps themselves,” Tracinski writes. “Instead, having worked to install an authoritarian leader, they get whatever that leader chooses to impose, and all institutions—very much including religious ones—are subordinated to his arbitrary power.”
Tracinski, a libertarian writer, provides a feature called “Executive Watch,” tracking presidential abuses of power, for The UnPopulist, a publication for which I’ve also written. In Dictator from Day One, Tracinski focuses on “five main prongs in Trump’s campaign to create a dictatorship in the United States.” These are: undermining Congress’ power of the purse; creating an apparatus to seize and imprison people without due process; defying courts and scheming to curtail their power; seeking arbitrary powers to tax and regulate; and asserting control over independent institutions such as universities and the press.
That isn’t a comprehensive list, as one could add, say, misuse of the military, both as a tool of domestic law enforcement and in overseas actions without congressional approval. The protean nature of Trump’s assault on institutions makes it difficult to keep tabs. Tracinski points out how DOGE did little to curtail spending or boost efficiency, but served a purpose of undermining Congress’ “power of the purse”; however, the administration’s efforts along those lines have lately taken on other guises, such as seeking to use “pocket rescissions.” Tracinski rightly contends that old assumptions about left and right, such as presuming Republicans in favor of free markets, have become obsolete; tariffs and other Trump measures (including fees on H-1B visas) are designed to give the president personal control over the economy, with the power to reward and punish companies and individuals.
Meanwhile, Trump seeks control over elections, having issued executive orders on mail-in voting and voter ID. “As actual laws, these executive orders are a fraud,” Tracinski writes. “The president has absolutely no power to set voting rules; the Constitution explicitly gives that role to the states and to Congress. So what is the point of issuing orders he knows the states won’t follow?” The motive, Tracinski notes, is to repeat Trump’s 2020 strategy of denying unfavorable outcomes, starting in 2026. “It allows him to claim that any election that didn’t follow his rules is invalid, that the midterm election is stolen, and to overturn the results. We can predict he will attempt this, because he has already tried it once.”
How to resist such a broad assault on a free society? Tracinski argues for Democrats to wear the administration down by blocking as much of its agenda as possible, including by shutting down the government anytime they can. He pushes for administration opponents to work with each other despite disagreements, and for an overall willingness to fight, including to lose fights rather than declaring many of them not worth fighting.
“An opposition that has the habit of focusing on only one narrow, concrete thing at a time is kept permanently off-balance,” he writes. “You can see this in the rhetoric about how each new outrage is ‘just a distraction.’ Starting a war with Venezuela is a distraction from sending troops to occupy our cities, which is a distraction from Trump’s attempt to bury the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which is a distraction from bad jobs numbers, which is a distraction from the price of eggs—and so on in an infinite loop.”
Tracinski makes a cogent point: “When things start to go badly wrong in an authoritarian system—and they will go wrong—there is always the same underlying cause.” Rather than viewing issues in isolation, emphasize that they add up to “a picture of a dangerously unchecked leader, a mad king whose erratic and paranoid rule is spiraling out of control.” He adds: “That is the one issue we should focus on, hammer away at, define in the public mind, and refuse to be distracted from: the intolerable danger of one-man rule.”