Transcript: Why So Many of Trump’s Authoritarian Moves Have Failed |
Transcript: Why So Many of Trump’s Authoritarian Moves Have Failed
Historian Thomas Zimmer says Trump is still dangerous, but that his authoritarian project has been derailed on a number of fronts.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the March 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon, host of the New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Thomas Zimmer. He’s a historian, he grew up in Germany. He spent some time in the States a few years ago—we got to know each other—he’s back in Germany now. He’s a really great historian and has done a really great job writing about this period of American Trumpism and this question of democracy. But he asks it in a much smarter way, which is: We’re not always debating democracy as such, we’re really debating how much democracy, and for whom. That’s a phrase he’s used a lot, and I’ve borrowed it from him. Thomas, welcome.
Thomas Zimmer: Thank you so much for having me—and again, apologies for keeping people waiting.
Bacon: That’s all right. So what we’re going to do today is talk about the democracy-versus-authoritarianism question, but I want to talk through it historically, because you’re a historian. I want to go through this first year of Trump, look at some of the things that have happened, and think about them in this democracy context.
So much has happened—so much bad has happened, is what I would say—and I want to think through some of it. I want to start at the beginning and ask [about] DOGE and this general layoff of federal workers, the destruction of USAID. What did you think about that at the time, and ... I’m sure you thought it was bad at the time, but is there anything different about it now?
Zimmer: Yeah, DOGE, that started immediately. And the first two to three months after Trump took power is when I was generally speaking the most concerned, the most alarmed, the least optimistic about the fate of the republic. Three things stood out to me.
One is the speed and the scope of the DOGE destruction. It was so aggressive—a historically completely unprecedented level of self-sabotage. No country has ever done that to itself.
Bacon: No country has laid off its federal workforce in this way, you mean?
Zimmer: No country has ever just deliberately, for absolutely no external reason whatsoever, gone on this kind of rampage to completely destroy its own state capacity. Because that’s basically what’s happening—completely unprecedented destruction of state capacity. I think the consequences of that will be felt in the United States for decades. For decades, really.
The second thing that stood out to me: It was not just Elon Musk and the DOGE boys—it was also Stephen Miller, it was also Russell Vought. All of these different MAGA factions, basically a feeding frenzy from all the different corners of MAGA world, all unleashed at the same time. Go destroy the system. It was a complete unleashing of the destructive energies of MAGA, which I don’t think necessarily had any cohesiveness to it, but it added up to this vast destruction.
At the same time, we didn’t see any kind of systematic pushback—at least not from America’s civic institutions or America’s civic elites. There were protests from the ground up, but on the civic-institutional level, there was this pervasive tendency to acquiesce and align with the regime. That all happened within the first eight to 12 weeks or so.
So by the end of March, early April 2025, I was thinking: Wow, they seem to be actually succeeding with this strategy. They had this strategy going in: We’re going to go quick ... we’re going to overwhelm the system quickly. For those first two or three months, it looked like they would actually succeed.
But if you ask me today, I’m feeling less pessimistic. I think this initial strategy of overwhelming the system and overwhelming any resistance has largely failed. The societal resistance has hardened. We’ve seen a significant counter-mobilization from American society, and now, in terms of how close they got to actually consolidating authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they’re further away from that than now they were after those first 10 to 12 weeks.
Bacon: Let me follow up to ask: One thing that happened immediately was that Elon Musk was very involved in the government for about two months and then walked away. Was that because of the protests, or was it because he got bored? What’s your sense of how that happened?
Zimmer: I think what happened is that: If you look at the different factions of the MAGA coalition—Trump is basically a representative of this tech feudalism, these weird tech-feudalism that they want to install. And then you have the Christian nationalists, you have the America First nativists. If you really think through what kind of America they are envisioning, they’re not all envisioning the same thing. There’s actually quite significant tension between the different visions they’re pursuing.
Now, initially, in the first few weeks, it all worked out because it was all about what they always called a counter-revolution—they weirdly think there’s been a left-wing revolution and now they are the counter to that. So initially it was just about: Go destroy the system, do the counter-revolution, don’t even think about what comes after. So initially that worked.
But quite quickly they realized they were not all on the same page. What Russell Vought wants to do with the administrative state—which is not just destroy it, but also use it to impose a reactionary order on American society—that’s not what Elon Musk was doing, that’s not what DOGE was doing. So these tensions quite quickly got to the point where Elon got a little pushback from within the MAGA coalition.
And then he got all annoyed about it—all these people have incredibly thin skin. The least amount of pushback and they’re like, OK, I’m out. That probably didn’t have much to do with the protests. It had more to do with [the fact that] Elon had no idea what he was doing. He thought he was going to go in and do what he did when he took over Twitter—destroy everything, lash out, and declare victory. And that wore thin pretty quickly. Then you had someone like Russell Vought and Stephen Miller saying, Maybe this is not exactly what we want to do. So Musk quickly lost interest.
Bacon: I want to move to the second thing, which I’m going to call the great capitulation—which is that you saw these law firms, universities, the moment Trump threatened federal funding, they immediately close their DEI office or stop representing various liberal clients.
You saw this in law firms and universities particularly, but a lot of sectors of American life, corporations, were just bowing down very quickly. That was the most disheartening part early on, where it seemed not only was the Democratic Party not resisting, but the whole civil society was not, either. Talk about how you felt about that then, and where we are now.
Zimmer: Absolute disaster. That really was the thing that initially made me most pessimistic—really made me feel like they’re going to succeed with this authoritarian project. Because any assumption of democratic resilience in the United States—which a lot of very smart observers thought—was that there’s no question that the Trumpists want to install authoritarian rule, but they’re dealing with a system with relatively strong [civic institutions], at least on the level of civil society: a lot of institutions with a lot of resources at their disposal to push back against this kind of authoritarian project.
Universities with billions and billions of dollars. Rich law firms. The most powerful media companies in the world. A lot of observers, I think quite reasonably, assumed that Trumpists would struggle when up against these types of civic institutions—which a country like Hungary just didn’t have when Orbán came to power. The United States did have them, at least on paper. And so you thought they [would] struggle with this.
But then you realize: No, they’re not struggling with this. Because all of these elites who are in charge of these institutions showed this pervasive tendency to just acquiesce and align with the regime—for different reasons. Some because they felt the pressure was so high. Some because they fully bought into this idea that Trump really represented the “will of the people.”
Bacon: That’s an important one.
Zimmer: Right, absolutely. [It’s] the key assertion behind the MAGA assault. It’s all built on: We represent the will of the people, we can do whatever we want, because the will of the people is ultimately above the law, above the Constitution. A lot of these people in charge of these institutions bought into this whole thing. And then finally, I think there were also a lot of people—someone like Bezos at The Washington Post—who were quite glad that Trump got back to power, because they really thought all this “woke radicalism” of the Biden era had just gone too far, and you needed to push back against it.
All of this combined to produce this pervasive tendency to acquiesce. And that was so disheartening initially—because on paper you can have all these powerful institutions, but if the people in charge just don’t do anything to push back against authoritarianism, then you get authoritarianism.
Bacon: And now I feel like the capitulation has declined a bit. Do you agree that these institutions have gotten—not where I’d want them to be, but they’ve gotten back their muscle a little bit? How do you see that from where you are?
Zimmer: I agree. You see it with universities, for instance. Initially you had the complete surrender of Columbia. But not all universities have followed the Columbia model—Harvard has not. So Harvard was like: No, we’re not just going to surrender. They sued the administration, and everyone who sues succeeds in court against this administration.
Zimmer: It’s a very mixed bag, still. But that’s still better than what we had in the first eight to 10 weeks, where it wasn’t a mixed bag—it was just pervasive surrender. Now, on the university level, it’s a mixed bag. On the media institution level, it’s a mixed bag. What all of these institutions are starting to realize is that this whole “will of the people” thing just isn’t true. They’ve got enough data points now to realize that this whole lasting rightward realignment of American society just didn’t happen. It was a myth—it was never true. And so they are more reluctant now to go along with Trumpism than they were initially.
Bacon: But it’s not great that our civil institutions had to wait for the poll numbers. That’s what you’re hinting at—when Trump went from 49 to 42 in approval, they were like, OK. You want your institutions to be strong regardless of what the president’s poll numbers are. Even if he were in the seventies, you’d want them to resist authoritarianism. They might not do it—but this is not a good sign for our institutions.
Zimmer: It’s a disaster.... On the level of pushback from below, like the mobilization of people, the American people in the streets have been protesting right from the start. There was always this myth that there were no protests, but that was never true. There have been protests all over the country, much more sustained than during the first Trump administration. The people from below were like: No, we don’t want this. But the specific institutions—on the level of the people in charge of these civic institutions—just a disaster of a performance.
Bacon: So when I think about authoritarianism, I think about dictators, I think about military in the streets. And there was definitely a period where........