Müller writes that prioritizing loyalty over competence creates a ‘distinct vulnerability’
Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist, argues in a column published Aug. 3 that the methods characterizing Trump’s second-term governance carry risks that could weaken the administration rather than only strengthening it.
Müller writes that the debate provoked by each Trump power grab — “from a fraudulent speech about voter fraud to appeals to his supreme court to let him rig the midterms” — over whether the moves are signs of strength or desperation is “badly posed.” Much of what is distinctive about his second term, Müller argues, can serve to consolidate an autocratic regime and at the same time create particular vulnerabilities for it.
Drawing on a distinction the social scientists Serguei Guriev and Daniel Treisman have drawn between “fear dictatorships” and “spin dictatorships,” Müller writes that 21st-century aspiring autocrats try to fool domestic and international audiences into thinking that democracy and the rule of law still exist, rather than resorting to the mass violence of earlier eras. He cites the recently deposed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán as a master of the technique, spending years performing what he called “the peacock dance” to convince the European Commission and then-chancellor Angela Merkel that he was not creating a kleptocratic autocracy. Elaborate efforts to fake democracy, Müller adds, do not change the fact that violence is always kept in reserve — Vladimir Putin dropped the mask entirely in 2022.
Trump, Müller argues, differs from these patterns. Unlike Orbán, he was never constrained by international institutions or other powerful capitals, and his own approach — from his early days as a New York real estate investor onward — has always been to “simply do things that everyone can see are illegal,” creating facts on the ground, such as the demolition of the East Wing, and hoping the other side will settle out of court or live with a fait accompli. This method of illegality and hope for impunity, Müller writes, now characterizes almost the entire administration.
On what Müller describes as the “flooding the zone” strategy, he writes that the Trump administration has figured out that a scandal per year can spell political death, while 10 scandals a day elicit hardly a shrug, because no one appears able to keep up. The flooding is itself a means of generating power, but it also creates vulnerabilities: one never knows, he writes, whether a single scandal — even a relatively harmless one like the reflecting pool disaster, which Müller says combined “grift and incompetence” — might focus public attention and become a symbol for the corruption of the regime as a whole, the way that a child abuse scandal in Hungary, in which an Orbán ally pardoned a man convicted of covering up abuse, became the symbol of everything wrong with Orbán’s rule.
Every aspiring autocrat faces a trade-off between loyalty and competence, Müller writes, and “it is no secret where Trumpists have tended to be placed on the spectrum.” Total devotion to the leader — including the willingness to lie shamelessly, or at least engage in election denial, as a de facto loyalty oath sworn in public — can consolidate power. But it also creates a distinct vulnerability, he argues, because “sooner or later, the egregiously incompetent will produce terrible outcomes, plain for all to see.”
On the administration’s approach to violence, Müller writes that contrary to the tendency of today’s dictators to shy away from it, those around Trump have made a spectacle of cruelty. The glaring impunity apparently enjoyed by the men who killed Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero sends a signal that loyalists can count themselves above the law, he argues. Müller writes that the spectacle might please a portion of Trump’s political base, but that the ostentatious displays of cruelty have not been popular with the public at large, and making cruelty a priority creates images that can be turned against the administration.
On corruption, Müller argues that those around Trump are not really creating a coherent system of self-enrichment the way Orbán did with what came to be called his mafia state, where tricks with public procurement were disguised well enough for many years. Under Trump, Müller writes, “everyone just grabs whatever they can as quickly as they can.” That inability to build a system is ultimately a sign of weakness, he argues — the administration’s members themselves do not really seem to believe that their rule will last, and what Mike Johnson, in a revealing moment, called the Republicans’ “protection program,” the majority in Congress, might be gone this year. Self-confident creators of a kleptocracy, Müller adds, would have stayed silent on the point.