In a pair of recent posts, I reviewed the MAGA communication strategy successfully wielded by the Trump administration. Another aspect of the White House messaging strategy is to silence critics and quash their views. While cancel culture has been associated with the Left, MAGA has taken it up with a vengance. Furthermore, the Trump administration has openly employed state power to snuff out dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

David French, a political conservative and evangelical Christian, who hasn’t changed his mind about free speech or religious liberty since the rise of Trump, continues to embrace constitutional principles. From today’s New York Times:

One of the most frustrating elements of our post-election national conversation was the insistence in some quarters that the election represented a repudiation of censorship and cancel culture. It did not.
Instead, nearly half the American people voted against the party that was actively moving away from extremism — including the far-left censorship regime that has long afflicted America’s elite campuses — and instead voted for the party that didn’t just weaponize government against dissenting voices (through book bans, various anti-“woke” bills and prohibitions against drag shows), it also created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation against its political enemies.
The MAGA movement relentlessly attacked election workers, school board members and anyone else who defied its will to power or dissented from MAGA’s version of American history. Trumpian political correctness is becoming so absurd that The Associated Press reported on Thursday that at the Pentagon “tens of thousands of photos and online posts” have been “marked for deletion,” including a photo of Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, presumably because its name included the word “gay.”
I spent much of my legal career combating censorship and defending free speech and religious liberty. I defended people from across the political spectrum, but I was also very familiar with censorship from the left. I filed lawsuit after lawsuit against universities that, among other things, imposed speech codes, discriminated against Christian student groups and retaliated against conservative professors.
When I filed those cases, I believed the American right had a basic commitment to individual freedom. Today, it does not. It is far more committed to fighting the left now than it was to defending liberty then. As the right rejected libertarianism, it turned against the First Amendment.
And now Trump’s administration and his MAGA movement are the most dangerous and powerful censors in the United States.
When an administration blatantly attacks the First Amendment, it attacks our national identity. The First Amendment is core to the idea of the United States of America. 

Earlier this week, French highlighted an article in the Washington Post on the Trump administration’s “zeroing out” foreign aid, which devastated many Christian ministries. French observed: “If the Biden administration had done this, it would be deemed proof of the Democrats’ hostility to religion. But Trump is doing it, so his Christian allies turn against Christian ministries and gut their ability to serve the poorest of the poor.”

If the Biden administration had done this, it would be deemed proof of the Democrats' hostility to religion. But Trump is doing it, so his Christian allies turn against Christian ministries and gut their ability to serve the poorest of the poor. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec…

— David French (@davidfrenchjag.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T20:45:24.421Z

Two days ago I posted about the White House’s remarkably successful amplification of Bannon’s flood the zone strategy. Today Luke Winkie references that strategy in Slate and quotes Jesse Watters (from last month) describing how the thing works. Acyn has the video:

Watters: We are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign from the left…It's like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it.. and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T22:29:18.325Z

Transcript:

…
Dana, we are waging a 21^st century information warfare campaign against the Left. And they are using tactics from the 1990s.
They are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies. They’re screaming into the ether on MSNBC.
This is what you call top-down command and control. You get your talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and then it disappears.
What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare.
Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.
It’s free money, and we’re actually talking about expressing information.
They are suppressing information.

That sums things up crisply and clearly, though it works only because — contrary to Watters — FNC, Musk, and other actors on the right suppress the truth — that’s key to making the strategy so successful. The big, beautiful bubble offers such reassuring certitude that folks inside it aren’t tempted to burst out into a wider, more disparate, less black and white world. MAGA media is alluring because it has so many channels, themes weaved together, and modes of engagement — it’s great entertainment — but it persuades because it ruthlessly suppresses views of truth and doubt and humility that clash with the party line.

Winkie describes sealing himself off from the mainstream media and immersing himself in MAGA via X: “I created a brand new Twitter—well, X—feed that followed, exclusively, White House agencies and their associated MAGA partisans. For the next 24 hours, it would be my only source of news.”

He observes: “It has never been easier for an American voter to elide mainstream airwaves and yet still think they know exactly what is going on.” And being sealed in a bubble encourages an unwavering perspective, unchallenged by whispers of doubt or dissent.

The MAGA worldview is “completely purged of a single contrasting viewpoint.” MAGA “is a place where the president is always right, and nothing is going wrong.”

When the nation is split more or less in half, with each side imbibing cues about what’s happening that the other side rejects (or blocks out altogether), this makes communication across the divide difficult. It renders the give and take of politics within democratic institutions virtually impossible.

We don’t hear or see the same dispatches. The stories we rely on to make sense of things are diametrically opposed. Our impressions, convictions, judgments hardly overlap. Small-d democrats and the Democratic Party have failed to communicate convincingly to half the nation.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

This must change or our slide into authoritarian rule will continue apace.

Brief notes (among a glut of dispiriting stories) from today’s news:

▪ I’ve mentioned loyalty questions for job seekers wishing to join the Trump team. It’s no surprise that this corrupt pattern continues. From Bloomberg:

Would you be willing to serve as a spokesperson for mass deportations? Which of Trump’s executive orders is your favorite? Job candidates at federal agencies are being questioned on their loyalty to President Trump https://t.co/7zA03gJSjx

— Bloomberg Politics (@bpolitics) March 6, 2025

▪ UC Berkley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky makes several sound points in his NYT op-ed this morning. ▫The Trump administration has ignored a number of court orders. ▫The courts have no means to compel court orders; that’s up to the executive branch. ▫VP JD Vance, Special Government Employee Elon Musk, Senator Mike Lee and others have suggested either ignoring court orders or impeaching judges whose decisions displease Trump. These acts would be unprecedented. ▫Chemerinsky also affirms (as others have) that the story of President Andrew Jackson declaring, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” is likely apocryphal.

Alas, though, I agree that the dean has started off on the wrong foot as a Johns Hopkins professor notes. Chemerinsky’s piece begins:

It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American constitutional democracy now rests on a single question: Will President Trump and his administration defy court orders?

Filipe Campante replies: “The future of US democracy does not rest solely on whether Trump will defy court orders. It’s perfectly possible to destroy democracy without doing that, as long as you have a friendly court.”

As a dedicated critic of the Roberts Court, I couldn’t agree more. Democracy is under siege and the Republican majority on the high court is an integral part of the assault and has been for more than a decade.

▪ From Wired, the most recent report of sky-high protection money that Trump is pocketing: “People Are Paying Millions to Dine With Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago: Business leaders are paying as much as $5 million to meet one-on-one with the president at his Florida compound, sources tell WIRED, while others are paying $1 million apiece to dine with him in a group setting.”

▪ Finally, at a time when Trump and MAGA are attacking independent media in multiple ways; going after universities and corporations committed to diversity; firing civil servants for their failure to embrace MAGA doctrine; threatening to withhold federal aid to Democratic governors and mayors; penalizing law firms whose clients displease Trump; and, amidst intimations of retaliation for noncompliance, soliciting payouts from wealthy individuals and businesses, many folks who normally speak up about things they care about have “muzzled themselves” (if they haven’t flipped to Trump’s side) when confronted with the threat of retribution by the President of the United States. Elizabeth Brumiller writes in the New York Times:

More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.

This goes beyond Timothy Snyder’s warnings about anticipatory compliance — obeying in advance. Folks are obeying in real time. Snyder’s warning suggested that in the beginning, the tyrant didn’t posses actual power to carry out his threats, but by obeying in advance we were granting him that power. In this case, Trump has demonstrated the power to exact retribution. We’ve seen this in action and folks don’t want to come under the lash.

Observing the stampede from all quarters to fall into line has been breathtaking. Steven Levitsky (co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die) observed in the NYT report :

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.

Nothing could be clearer in Trump’s America.

Steve Bannon’s, “Flood the zone with shit,” described a highly effective media strategy. In response to this flood, the media would be intent on doing fact-checking (for instance) — and thus playing follow-the-leader as MAGA set the agenda, while the colossal deluge of lies and disinformation would overwhelm, tying news gatherers in knots.

In this morning’s Washington Post, Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison report on a media strategy much more comprehensive than Bannon could have hoped for a mere 6 1/2 years ago. This strategy, which has been successfully implemented by the White House, is designed not simply to overwhelm the mainstream media (and other critics), but to displace independent viewpoints.

When Selena Gomez posted an Instagram video that humanized children threatened by Trump’s promise of mass deportations, the digital wizards at the White House responded:

Bannon appreciates the achievement by the White House: “Rapid-response communications are normally defensive. They’re all offense, all the time.”

Democratic bewilderment

No wonder the Democrats, still adhering to 20th century methods of communicating and clinging to legacy news gathering organizations, are feeling bewildered by what’s happening.

Big money, really big money, is always on the side of lower taxes and deregulation. For a while in post-World War II America working- and middle-class folks in the United States were doing well. Incomes were healthy for working families, and the top income tax rates were high. Under Democratic public policies, people and their kids shared the wealth. But by the Reagan era, the times they were a-changin’.

The billionaires staged a comeback, step by patient step. From Leonard Leo’s capture of the courts, the Supreme Court became a corrupt, partisan tool of the Republican Party. The Roberts Court scaled back voting rights and fair representation to the advantage of the Republican Party: Citizens United v. FEC, Shelby County v. Holder, Rucho v. Common Cause. (The court also abandoned the Constitution to rule, in case after case, Democratic public policies as illegitimate.)

Rupert Murdock’s launch of Fox News Channel (still the leader of the conservative media universe almost 30 years later), served to erode mainstream media outfits and conventional journalistic standards. (FNC wasn’t the only factor at work.) This made a fortune for Murdock, but it took patience and deep pockets to pull off. Billionaires determined to break free from political restraints have proved to be persistent. It has taken decades — and careful planning and gobs of money (much of it dark money) — to get where we are.

And now, when the Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires are at the height of their power, the influence of social media continues to grow, while mainstream journalism retrenches. Combined with other Trump initiatives — catering to Republican-aligned media, suing corporate media, banning news agencies that won’t toe the Republican Party line, pushing aside the White House press corps, not to mention demeaning independent reporting that seeks to tell the truth — we have every reason to think that there’s lots more in store for us.

I’m tempted to say that I wish there were a savvy multi-billionaire ready and willing to take on the guys running the show now, so we could have a level playing field. Efforts to bolster a multiracial democracy, where the interests of working-class and middle-class folks count for as much as the interests of the billionaires, are faltering. Hoping for a rogue billionaire to serve as a counterweight to Musk and his fellows is undoubtedly unrealistic. And what a monumental task that would be.

Garry Kasparov, who witnessed the Putinization of Russia, waves a warning flag (as he did in 2017) about Donald Trump, who in his second go-round in the White House is actively siding with Vladimir Putin, as Russia faces ongoing military losses and a wobbly economy.

Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch.
Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased.
Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away.

While Trump’s unleashing of Musk and DOGE to rip apart the infrastructure of government may not appear to fit the authoritarian model, Kasparov has seen this before:

Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control.

The world’s richest man (at least “richest private citizen”) is unelected, unaccountable, and — though he is damaging the capacity of the federal government to do its jobs — he still has his hand out. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the NIH, EPA, CFPB, VA, FAA, and other programs and agencies may fail, but Musk is still near the front of the line to reap immense profits because of his connections to the Trump regime. Other billionaires aren’t far behind.

If we continue moving in this direction, this won’t turn out well for the rest of us.

Donald Trump is a narcissist, uninterested in anything and everything that does not, in his view, redound to his personal advantage or disadvantage. Insofar as other people offer him praise and admiration (expressed, best of all, by making financial payoffs), he looks on them favorably. If someone denies him such recognition, it provokes his anger. Trump is utterly indifferent to anyone who falls into neither camp.

The president has enabled Elon Musk’s rampage through federal departments and agencies because Trump is impressed by the world’s richest man and, as the New York Times reported “[f]lattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him.” The president hasn’t given any thought to how the binge has affected civil servants, anyone who signed contracts that DOGE has reneged on, or folks who were to receive the goods and services that will not now arrive. Many Trump 2024 voters will be harmed by the destruction DOGE has brought. Trump, it is safe to say, hasn’t felt a pang of empathy (or pity or concern in any measure) for any of the people in harm’s way.

Empathy is not Trump’s thing, which is why a portion of Trump’s ranting at Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy is revealing. When asked by a reporter what if Russia breaks a ceasefire, Trump responded:

Well what if they—what if anything! What if a bomb drops on your head right now? Okay? What if they broke it? I don’t know. They broke it with Biden because Biden, they didn’t respect him, they didn’t respect Obama. They respect me.
Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia—Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal? That was a phony—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it and we didn’t end up in a war. He went through it, he was accused of all that stuff—he had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bedroom. It was disgusting. And then they said, ‘Oh, oh, the laptop from hell was made by Russia.’ The 51 agents, the whole thing was a scam, and he had to put up with that. He was being accused of all that stuff. All I can say is this: He might’ve broken deals with Obama, and Bush, and he might’ve broken them with Biden. He did, maybe, maybe he didn’t—I don’t know what happened. But he didn’t break them with me. He wants to make a deal. I don’t know if he can make a deal.

Trump has revealed empathic feelings toward Vladimir Putin, who Trump believes had to suffer accusations from the likes of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Adam Schiff. Trump is aggrieved on Putin’s behalf. President Trump feels President Putin’s pain — or what he is convinced is the pain Putin must feel (since Trump feels it so acutely).

Of course, in Trump’s mind the accusations against Putin — “Russia, Russia, Russia” — are identical (and equally unfair) to the accusations against Trump. The man with overweening narcissism identifies with the Russian strongman. What he, Trump, feels, he projects onto Putin.

OneLook defines empathy as “Identification with or understanding of the thoughts, feelings, or emotional state of another person.” Trump, in this moment of anger at his own victimhood and at Zelenskyy’s disrespect of him, is displaying something very like empathy for another human being.

Trump is capable of this experience because he identifies with Putin. In Trump’s mind, he and Putin are both strongmen, coequals, fearless leaders of powerful countries. So, of course, since Trump-the-victim has been wounded by the accusations against him and Putin, then in the president’s mind Putin must feel the same way.

That’s not to say that Putin actually feels the same way as Trump. Since Trump’s projection into Putin’s mind and emotions is almost certainly wrong, perhaps empathy doesn’t apply. Perhaps pity is more accurate.

Still, this is a rare and remarkable expression of feelings for another person from our nation’s president. Unfortunately, this expression exposes Trump’s vainglorious obsession with himself and his own grievances.

Today’s New York Times features a report (“How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy”) on DOGE, providing detail (going back a year and a half) on the destructive effort and clarifying a bunch of stuff for which we already had ample evidence.

In a September 2023 dinner in the Silicon Valley, “Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge.”

The destruction, at the hands of a bunch of computer geeks, is going full throttle.

The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.

When Brad Smith, another billionaire and someone who had worked with Jared Kushner and Amy Gleason (later named acting head of DOGE), advised him on government policy, Musk resisted:

Mr. Musk expressed impatience with Mr. Smith’s caution that the team would need a phalanx of lawyers to help with executive orders and regulations. Mr. Musk wanted to tear down the government to the studs, and saw Mr. Smith’s approach as incremental.

It has been clear from the beginning that government efficiency had nothing to do with the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency. The point was, and continues to be, destruction: to tear down the government to the studs. And Musk’s crusade has been fabulously successful thus far.

His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.

Nothing and no one has slowed things down. Trump could, but he’s all-in. So the destruction continues apace. The damage has been so indiscriminate that many people — including Trump 2024 voters — will be hurt. There will be political blowback.

By that time, though, the damage could be immense.

The President of the United States repeated that phrase several times, as Trump and Vance — like a tag team in the ring with a single opponent — took turns berating the Ukrainian president. Trump, who clearly has the power to turn the tables on Ukraine, has sided with Putin. The United States and Russia are now partners. With the emphatic, “You don’t have the cards!” Trump is rubbing it in, underscoring that Ukraine is powerless to change the course that the president has set for the U.S.

The president stepped in, after JD Vance chastised Zelenskyy for “trying to fight it out in the American media when you’re wrong.” And Trump got this right: “I think it’s good for the American people to see what’s going on.” Yes, and for the world. Here’s how the U.K reacted:

NEW: The first front pages of Saturday’s newspapers in the UK.“Ukraine Hero Ambushed”“Trump stuns world with vile rant at Zelensky”“A spectacle to horrify the world”Trump is obliterating the global reputation of the US.

— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) 2025-02-28T22:23:31.404Z

Other European allies will respond the same way. As will longtime American allies across the globe.

Most Americans can be expected to respond as our allies will. Except, now that the change is clear, soon enough folks in the Republican Party will switch to Putin’s side as well. Republicans, no matter what came before or what principles they once embraced, inevitably play the parts that Trump assigns. The U.S. is on Putin’s side now.

March 7, 2025 postscript:

A conservative French news magazine brightening up the Paris news stands … hard to overstate the damage Trump is doing to his and USA’s reputation among allies (sic)

— Alastair Campbell (@alastaircampbell2.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T16:22:55.917Z

President Trump, a prodigious liar during his first term, has upped his game in his second. In a brief review, Peter Baker observes that Trump has created “a whole alternative reality to lay the groundwork for radical change as he moves aggressively to reshape America and the world.”

Baker quotes a couple of historians on the subject:

“We have seen repeatedly how President Trump creates his own reality to legitimate his actions and simultaneously discredit warnings about his decisions.” — Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University; editor of The Presidency of Donald J. Trump)

“Trump is a highly skilled narrator and propagandist. Actually he is one of the most skilled propagandists in history.” — Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University; author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present)

Baker offers a half dozen recent examples (all familiar) of Trump’s fraudulent narratives, which serve to justify something Trump is doing or wishes to do. And Baker cites former Trump aides who have seen up close Trump’s modus operandi.

Mr. Trump’s aides have long recognized his penchant for prevarication and either adjusted or eventually broke with him. John F. Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, has said that Mr. Trump would tell his press aides to publicly repeat something that he had just made up. When Mr. Kelly would object, saying, “but that’s not true,” Mr. Trump would say, “but it sounds good.”
Stephanie Grisham, who served as a White House press secretary in the first term, once recalled that Mr. Trump would tell aides that “as long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.” And that trickled down to the staff. “Casual dishonesty filtered through the White House as though it were in the air-conditioning system,” she wrote in her memoir.

Every Trump associate, no matter how high or how low, breathes the same air. Whether one is a White House aide, an agency manager or staffer, a cabinet secretary or member of Congress — you must accept the deceit.

You may be required to affirm it. Current and former officials seeking intelligence or law enforcement positions in the Trump administration have been questioned about two events — the 2020 election and the January 6 riot — featured among Trump’s favorite narratives:

two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

Only loyalists, ready to affirm the lies, can expect to get hired.

Republicans must play the parts that Trump assigns. And every part is drenched in lies.

The United States, at the direction of Donald Trump, has switched sides in the war Russia launched against Ukraine. Trump is partnering with Vladimir Putin. The president has attacked our European allies (and others: north and south of our border and across the globe) and NATO, the alliance that has kept the peace for three-quarters of a century.

Embrace of AfD

And the Trump administration has done a bear hug with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has diminished the significance of Hitler and the Nazi era, thereby prompting a rejection from every other German political party.

Elon Musk — among Trump’s closest allies — has urged Germans to “move beyond” guilt and told more than 4,000 rallying AfD supporters, “I think you really are the best hope for Germany.” Then JD Vance scolded American allies in a speech in Munich for not listening to voters “with an alternative viewpoint,” followed up by meeting with the leader of AfD, and afterward doubled down in a speech to CPAC.

Peter Wehner, addressing the MAGA embrace of AfD writes:

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.
And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

Yes, before you know it (no matter what came before, no matter what principles the Republican Party espoused previously), virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. The men and women of this party inevitably follow their leader.