Trump and the path to autocracy
We have witnessed, incredulous, the accelerated transformation of the United States into an autocracy: the deployment of the classic playbook of repression, censorship, and information control; the weakening of institutional checks and balances on the power emanating from the Oval Office; and a struggle to impose Donald Trump's will on the courts, universities, and public administration. All this, in the first eight months of his term.
A country like the United States, which had made the First Amendment the cornerstone of a conception of freedom of expression without nuances or limitations, and which allowed itself to accuse the European Union of being undemocratic for its regulation of social media, is now witnessing the unfolding of a hunt for moreno. The cancel culture dictated by the White House itself has even provoked some contradictions among Republican voices such as that of former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, or conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who have expressed their concern about the dangerous precedent of using the death of the ac'.
If there are two strategies that have accompanied Donald Trump's political career from the beginning, they have been disinformation and the use of the courts to wear down his opponent. Both now converge in his war against the media to silence criticism. In a short time, we have seen threats of multi-million dollar lawsuits in The New York Times, he Wall Street Journal, or the ABC and CBS television networks; political dismissals and the imposition of increasing self-censorship in comments following the assassination of Charlie Kirk; as well as the targeting of journalists and communicators by the president and members of an administration that has become a constant exercise in the art of flattery. Any relationship with Trump is doomed to feed his ego. It is in this context that the Ministry of Defense, now renamed the Ministry of War, has decided to prohibit journalists covering the Pentagon from publishing any news that has not been approved by the government, under threat of losing their accreditation if they do so.
In the exacerbated hyperpartisanship that Trump demands, criticism of the leader is an unacceptable challenge.
John MacArthur, president of Harpers Magazine, I wrote some time ago in The Guardian That Trump is not a narcissist but a "solipsist," that is, an individual for whom no reality exists other than his own self. He is the only point of reference. The important thing for Trump has always been to keep the spotlight on himself. But now, the constant appropriation of the media agenda through rhetorical and political hyperactivity is no longer enough. Now, he has also decided to forcefully impose the narrative of his presidency, amplified by the social media algorithm and the more than 2,000 content platforms, with an image very similar to that of traditional media, created around Trump with the aim of influencing AI search engines.
There is only one possible world, Trump's world, where reality and fiction mix in the service of perceptions. All presidential communication is directed at his faithful, and criticism is an unacceptable hindrance. Before the thousands of people who attended this weekend's public memorial in honor of Charlie Kirk, the President of the United States confessed that he "hates" his opponents.
Trump governs for his own people. And he does so with the connivance of those whom political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls the new "plutocracy." A technical-patriotic elite that coincides with a certain worldview: the breaking of norms.
This confluence of interests is accelerating the hoarding of economic and political power: the world's richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter to turn it into a cesspool of conspiracy theories and misinformation; the family of the second richest person in the world—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle—owns CBS, and the super-rich number three, Jeff Bezos, controls the Washington Post.
Controlling both digital and traditional opinion-making spaces has become the ultimate goal of the Trump administration and its allies. Trump's presidency is performative, but above all, vengeful, offering the perfect alibi to anti-democratic leaders around the world.