But Trump has done just that, with the gigantic cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and with all of Elon Musk’s Nazi teenagers crawling around in government agencies firing people by the thousands, ripping the wiring out of the walls, and uploading your Social Security information to an unsecured cloud server.
But Trump has done just that, with the gigantic cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and with all of Elon Musk’s Nazi teenagers crawling around in government agencies firing people by the thousands, ripping the wiring out of the walls, and uploading your Social Security information to an unsecured cloud server.
Historians have been pointing out for a while now that Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship is wildly at odds with how it has been done in almost every other instance. As a rule, aspiring dictators do not mess with the health care system, or food aid, or rip out great chunks of their state capacity. You want the population bored, apathetic, and quiescent—not losing income, if not starving outright. Food riots are a common spark for dictatorships being toppled, from the French Revolution to Tunisia in 2010.

You also don’t want to obliterate the state bureaucracy, because you’ll need it to consolidate your rule. Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung involved bringing the bureaucracy under his direct control, not tearing it to shreds.

But Trump has done just that, with the gigantic cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and with all of Elon Musk’s Nazi teenagers crawling around in government agencies firing people by the thousands, ripping the wiring out of the walls, and uploading your Social Security information to an unsecured cloud server.
Historians have been pointing out for a while now that Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship is wildly at odds with how it has been done in almost every other instance. As a rule, aspiring dictators do not mess with the health care system, or food aid, or rip out great chunks of their state capacity. You want the population bored, apathetic, and quiescent—not losing income, if not starving outright. Food riots are a common spark for dictatorships being toppled, from the French Revolution to Tunisia in 2010. You also don’t want to obliterate the state bureaucracy, because you’ll need it to consolidate your rule. Hitler’s process of Gleichschaltung involved bringing the bureaucracy under his direct control, not tearing it to shreds. But Trump has done just that, with the gigantic cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and with all of Elon Musk’s Nazi teenagers crawling around in government agencies firing people by the thousands, ripping the wiring out of the walls, and uploading your Social Security information to an unsecured cloud server.