Most everyone other than apologists and professional contrarians would agree at this point that President Donald Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his whims are policy and his will is law.
But the execution has been haphazard. Trump tried to overwhelm the public with a campaign of shock and awe. His executive orders targeted a broad swath of civil society, forcing states, localities, colleges, universities and law firms into a defensive crouch. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency — run, until recently, by Elon Musk, his billionaire ally — ransacked the federal government, fired thousands of civil servants, obliterated critical state capacity and destroyed entire agencies: including the U.S. Agency for International Development, a move that may kill countless thousands of people worldwide.
The president’s most recent effort is an immigration crackdown in Democratic-led cities. In Los Angeles, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been conducting roundups of anyone who might lack legal status, Trump deployed National Guard troops and Marines, citing riots and violence from protesters. He has threatened to do the same in Chicago and New York.
Interestingly, the two states with the next largest populations of immigrants in the country illegally after California are Texas and Florida. But under the operating philosophy of the administration — a version of “For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law” — both states have received something of an exception from the White House deportation program on account of their Republican governors.
Both the crackdown by ICE and the calling up of the military to suppress protests were supposed to rally the public to the administration, in opposition to alleged crime and disorder. The president’s military parade — meant to mimic the ornate processions seen in Russia, North Korea and other dictatorships — was similarly meant to be a show of Trump’s popularity: a demonstration of the almost-spiritual connection he is supposed to have with the American people.
Except it’s the opposite. Far from galvanizing the public to his side, Trump’s ambitious effort to impose his will on the country has only generated discontent and backlash.
We see it in the polling, where majorities of Americans say they disapprove of the Trump administration and where the president is underwater on virtually every issue of note, including immigration. We also see it on the ground. On Saturday, an estimated 5 million Americans took part in a national protest against the president’s monarchical pretensions, in one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the nation’s history.
In his influential 1922 book, “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann observed that political leaders hold their greatest sway over the public when the issue or interest in question is abstract to most people’s experience. “The incidence of policy determines the relation between leader and following,” Lippmann wrote. “If those whom he needs in his plan are remote from the place where the action takes place, if the results are hidden or postponed, if the individual obligations are indirect or not yet due, above all if assent is an exercise of some pleasurable emotion, the leader is likely to have a free hand.”
This was why, Lippmann explained by example, Prohibition was popular “among teetotalers” or why “governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs.” All but the most exceptional leaders, he concluded, “prefer policies in which the costs are as far as possible indirect.”
Here we see Trump’s fundamental problem. He and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies — the fallout from their effort to mold the country to fit their nativist and mercantilist obsessions — are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles or even a few million immigrants in the country illegally, out of the more than 340 million people in the United States? But the reality is that to harden the border and more tightly police immigration — to remove as many people in the country illegally as possible — is to necessarily subject American citizens to the scrutiny and violence of the state. External control requires internal suppression.
Both Trump and Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies, may have imagined that their crackdown would isolate a relatively small group of people and be met with indifference by most Americans, giving Trump and Miller free rein to do as they pleased. In actuality, there is no way to execute an immigration crackdown in a way that spares ordinary citizens — that shields their families and keeps their communities intact. And so with each ICE arrest comes a new story: an immigrant parent torn from his citizen child; a business owner whose arrest threatens the livelihoods of his employees; lawmakers detained for the apparent offense of asking questions of ICE agents.
The result is a growing number of Americans who have turned against the White House out of anger and outrage over what they see as overreach. It is reminiscent of the transformation of those Americans who experienced, firsthand, the practical consequences of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad abolitionists,” antislavery philanthropist Amos Adams Lawrence remarked after what was likely his first confrontation with the reality of the slave system — the arrest and return of Anthony Burns to bondage.
Even an autocratic president needs public opinion on his side, if only to stave off the opposition of his political opponents. You can imagine (or, well, you could imagine, if you worked at it) a more strategic Trump who understood the risk to his political project. This Trump might pivot away from his immigration crackdown to more favorable ground. He might recede to the background to work on consolidation: securing his wins while preparing for the next offensive. He might even rein in Miller and make a show of disciplining one of his most aggressive deputies to signal moderation.
Other than some slight waffling on ICE activity at farms and hotels, the actually existing Trump has done the opposite. His response to the failure of last weekend — and the overall unpopularity of his project — has been to push the throttle even further. More threats, more arrests, more crackdowns in more cities, or as he wrote a few days ago on his Truth Social platform, “The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.”
There is every reason to think that this doubling-down will drive the public even further from the administration, and there is every reason to think that the White House will then triple-down in response. Some of this is no doubt explained by both the stubborn arrogance of Trump and the blinkered monomania of Miller. But some of it, I think, is explained by their genuine belief that their anti-immigrant rampage is the right thing to do. They believe in it. And no amount of protest will push them to reconsider.
The only thing the White House seems to want, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, is for the American people to cease to call the crackdown wrong and join them in calling it right.
I do not think they’ll get their wish.
