Donald Trump is following the dictator’s playbook as he uses his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society. Little of what Trump and his agents and allies are doing is a surprise. One only has to look at Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia (or Germany in the 1930s) as warnings and predictions for what the United States is quickly on the road to becoming. For Trump and his forces to succeed they will need compliant and obedient authoritarian subjects who either through surrender, agreement, self-interest, indifference, exhaustion or for some other reason(s) agree to the “legitimacy” of such a regime in America.
By the very nature of how power is concentrated around the Leader and their inner circle, autocracies and authoritarian regimes are almost always kleptocracies and plutocracies. Here, corrupt political power is a means to amass even more corrupt financial and economic power. The United States in the Age of Trump is closely following this model as well. The plutocrats and kleptocrats will also need compliant subjects who see themselves first as consumers and workers — most of whom will be stuck in a state of perpetual survival mode and economic precarity as they try to endure cannibal capitalism — and not primarily as citizens and responsible members of a humane society with any obligation or responsibility to other human beings beyond their immediate family and “community.”
