Trump 2.0, Year 1: A Libertarian Nightmare |
Donald Trump
Brian Doherty | 1.12.2026 4:04 PM
A decade into his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first, and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk, descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know.
Near the end of the first full year of his second administration, Donald Trump has demonstrated his core authoritarianism so completely and consistently that his personal character and comportment peculiarities lose significance.
Just in the past week, since his piratical and unconstitutional imperial conquest of Venezuela, he's declared that he, from his own personal ukase, is taking command of a dizzying range of economic and foreign policy matters, from his planned further imperial conquest of Greenland (accompanied by declarations from his satrap Steven Miller and himself that no external force or authority holds back his powers to conquer and wreak destruction on the world) to dictating how weapons contractors can compensate their executives or deal with their stocks, the interest rate credit card companies can charge, and whether certain companies can buy houses.
While he's gone hog wild so far in 2026, the pattern of his core authoritarianism was already well demonstrated in 2025. Trump wielded state power to punish enemies and reward friends, sent the military into city streets under bogus pretenses and over the objections of local elected officials, authorized masked cops to enforce "papers, please" policies on U.S. citizens moving in public (the loosing of such largely undisciplined shock troops in American cities where they are not wanted has predictably resulted in the unconscionable murder of a citizen), ordered the serial murder of suspected drug smugglers, and disrupted the global economy by making Americans pay sharply increased taxes on imported goods, for starters.
He has concentrated what was supposed to be the competing branches of the federal government into the whims of one man, and erased distinctions between federal and state, public and private. America has never had a president who acted more like a monarch.
Not all of Trump's actions and statements are mired in his core authoritarianism. This does not absolve him. Not everything negative reported about Trump's actions, or the specifics or reasonable implications of something he said or did, ultimately bears out. This does not make him acceptable. Yes, previous administrations have also violated Americans' and the world's economic and political liberties and lives. This does not mean Trump deserves a pass. His specific, documented exertions of state power over the past year should be enough to declare him a dangerous foe of American liberty.
The anti-Trump protesters of 2025, unlike the pink-hatted #Resistance of 2017, zeroed in smartly on the through line uniting most of his grievous flaws: He is a president who wants to be king.
Sworn to faithfully execute his office and defend the Constitution, Trump this term has instead used real and threatened use of government force to cow or crush countervailing forces to his whims, wherever they might be. He has actively purged the Justice Department and the Defense Department of people he deems insufficiently loyal, gutted the executive-branch watchdog system of inspectors general, and converted federal law enforcement into a weapon aimed at those who cross him.
If he thinks you're on his side, you need not fear the law will ever contain or control you, as demonstrated by the mass pardon of January 6 rioters and protesters who were trying to illegitimately make him president, as well as his continual series of pardons of other corrupt political and business-world figures. If you are a judge who rules in a way that displeases him, however, his congressional lackeys will contemplate impeaching you, and his administration may defy your order when it comes to such matters as allowing lawyers access to immigrant detainees or deporting immigrants to South Sudan even if they have no connection with that war-ravaged country.
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