Donald Trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.
Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty.
Neither Trump nor Bukele bothered to make this absurd conceit appear plausible. Even as Trump and his officials claim that only El Salvador has the power to free wrongfully imprisoned American residents, the United States is paying El Salvador to hold the prisoners. (Naturally, Congress never appropriated such funds; Trump has already seized large swaths of Congress’s constitutionally mandated spending power for himself.) Bukele told reporters, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Trump, not even attempting to maintain the pretense that the two countries were somehow at an impasse, told his counterpart, “You are helping us out, and we appreciate it.”
The play was signaled early on, after a judge ordered Bukele to return prisoners seized without due process. In response, Bukele posted on X, “Oopsie… too late 😂.” Trump can snatch prisoners and hand them to Bukele before the courts can act, and Bukele can ignore American court orders.
And so Trump has opened up a trapdoor beneath the American legal system. This trapdoor is wide enough to swallow the entire Constitution. So long as he can find at least one foreign strongman to cooperate, Trump can, if he wishes, imprison any dissident, judge, journalist, member of Congress, or candidate for office.
If this sounds hyperbolic, bear in mind that Trump has expressed his desire to do these things. He has built an administration dedicated to turning his whims into commands, however fantastical or dangerous they may be, and he has systematically disabled every possible check on his power by training his party’s voters and elected officials to treat dissent as betrayal.
The execution of this strategy has hardly been flawless. (If the administration had the chance to do it again, it would probably have taken care to ensure that the test case for its maneuver concerned an actual gang member, which very few of the deportees to El Salvador appear to be.) Still, in contrast to the shambolic, halting rollout of Trump’s tariffs, the transformation of the world’s oldest democracy into a competitive authoritarian system—rivaling that of Bukele’s regime in El Salvador, Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary, and Vladimir Putin’s in Russia—has the earmarks of careful planning. Every element of Trump’s assault on democracy was broadcast well in advance.
It has been widely observed that Trump entered his second presidency surrounded by slavishly loyal acolytes who would not dare defy his wishes. But even this understates the degree of the danger. Trump’s closest allies are not merely acquiescing to his desires; they are fueling them. In the years before Trump returned to office, a key faction of Republican activists and intellectuals radicalized themselves against fundamental democratic norms. They came to believe that their survival required gaining control of the state and using it to destroy their opponents. Now in power, they have begun to apply this strategy across a wide array of fronts, coercing law firms, universities, media owners, and other bastions of civil society. Trump’s determination to use immigration power as a limitless weapon to intimidate and imprison his enemies is not just a manifestation of his character. It is the most frightening element of his administration’s plan to crush liberal democracy itself.
The Trump administration’s illiberalism has two main sources. One is the personality at the center of its cult. Donald Trump gravitates instinctively toward despots, sees the constraints that democracies place upon elected leaders as a form of weakness, and refuses to accept the legitimacy of any electoral or judicial proceeding that goes against him. His authoritarianism is sub-intellectual, rather than a philosophy of governance.
Trump’s personal contempt for liberal democracy has been augmented by a growing school of “post-liberal” thought on the right, with liberal referring not to the American center-left, but to the broader philosophical tradition that emphasizes that the state be governed by neutral rules that all sides agree to abide by. The post-liberal right believes that the left poses an existential threat to American society, and must be extinguished through the harsh use of state power. What makes this power illiberal is that its proponents don’t believe the state has a general right to employ these weapons; they believe only their side is entitled to do it.
J. D. Vance represents the intellectual side of Republican illiberalism. He has spoken at the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of post-liberal thinkers on the right dedicated to using state power to entrench right-wing control of society. “There’s this thing called national conservatism, and it is vibrant and young people are excited about it,” he told a reporter in 2021. In addition to listening to previously marginal post-liberal thinkers on the right, Vance has soaked up ideas from Orbán, whose use of government power to crush the opposition has made Hungary a model for national conservatism.
The ideas that have circulated on the post-liberal right are important to grasp, because they closely predict the second Trump administration’s behavior thus far. Many figures may have claimed that they would influence Trump’s policy agenda—you may recall Wall Street Republicans confidently predicting before the election that Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff would never happen—but the post-liberal right is the faction that turns out to have its hands on the wheel.
This group experienced Trump’s first term as a discouraging failure culminating in a humiliating defeat. They blamed the fiasco not on Trump, but on a vast conspiracy to undermine him, stretching from the federal bureaucracy to higher education to the media. National conservatives believe that these sectors have all been captured by the far left, via what they call a “long march through the institutions,” which can be uprooted only through brutal application of government power.
The post-liberals are not completely imagining the rise of left-wing social theory or its spread through elite spaces; the spate of social-justice panics and cancellations over the prior decade was very real. What’s striking is their interpretation of these events. They might have understood the spike in left-wing censoriousness as an abuse of power, or perhaps as a political gift handed to them by their enemies, as the fear of being canceled made Democrats hesitant to challenge electorally unpopular left-wing ideas within their own camp.
Instead, the post-liberals saw left-wing illiberalism as a powerful weapon used to take down Trump. They have accordingly set out to replicate it. “The Right’s longstanding proposal—to ‘cancel cancel culture’—might make for a good slogan, but it is not sufficient as a governing philosophy,” Chris Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow and influential Trump-administration adviser, wrote earlier this year. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”
Vance, in an interview last year, characterized the opposition to Trump as completely unprincipled. “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—there’s no law, there’s just power,” he said. “And the goal here is to get back in power.” I’ve never heard of a progressive citing Carl Schmitt, a notorious right-wing German theorist who influenced the Nazis, as a theoretical model. Yet his imagined (or, dare I say, projected) influence over the left became transmuted into the conviction that Trump lost because he and his supporters had failed to match the left’s will to power.
This helps explain why the second Trump administration has behaved so differently from the first. The characters staffing and advising this administration are far more radical. The previous Trump White House allowed all kinds of kooks and extremists into its ranks, but the new version has pushed the boundaries even further. Darren Beattie, who briefly got a job in the first Trump administration before being fired over ties to white nationalism, was welcomed back into the new administration. Marko Elez, a staffer for Elon Musk, lost his DOGE job over recent social-media posts explicitly endorsing racism; Vance intervened to restore him. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist once banished from Trump’s orbit, was able not only to brief the president, but to persuade him to fire half a dozen senior national-security officials.
At the same time, Trump has taken care to exclude any appointees who might hesitate on moral, legal, or practical grounds to implement his proposals. His most effective technique has been to use January 6 as a screening device, filtering out any potential staff who condemn the insurrection or refuse to repeat his claim to have won the presidential election in 2020. Trump’s failed attempt to overturn that election posed a mortal threat to his career at the time, but what didn’t kill him made him stronger. The insurrection became the perfect tool to purge his party’s remaining pro-democracy faction.
Jack Posobiec is an embodiment of the transformed environment. Once a marginal social-media influencer known for circulating the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and promoting white-nationalist accounts, he is now treated by mainstream Republicans with the kind of respect once afforded to George F. Will. Vance blurbed Posobiec’s latest book about the left, Unhumans, and two Cabinet secretaries have already invited him to join their overseas delegations this year.
The combination of these changes has completely altered the character of advice Trump receives and the range of beliefs considered acceptable within his administration. With regard to democratic norms, the ideas circulating around Trump range from indifference to overt contempt. Where the first Trump administration contained a mix of authoritarian Trump loyalists and traditional Republicans, this one consists of authoritarian Trumpists egging one another on.
Trump’s showdown with the Supreme Court over the Abrego Garcia case has surfaced two ideas in particular that have been gestating for years on the right. One is the use of deportation authority not only to enforce immigration law but to intimidate Trump’s political critics. Another is to defy court orders.
A year and a half ago, Posobiec posted on X, “We used to strip foreign-born anarchists and communists of citizenship and deport them. Laws still on the books. Just planting seeds.” Another user replied, “Yes. We started a new denaturalization project under Trump. In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.” That was Stephen Miller, now Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of much of his policy agenda, above all on immigration.
Vance has been publicly floating the idea of ignoring court orders for years. “If I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” Vance said of Trump in 2021. “Replace them with our people. And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” He has repeated versions of this idea in subsequent interviews.
Why has the administration risked the brinkmanship of defying a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in order to sustain its policy of disappearing people without due process, when it has so many other available tools to handle border enforcement? Possibly it is just extremely stubborn. But there is also considerable evidence that the administration wants to preserve this constitutional loophole in order to use it more broadly to intimidate opponents.
In his meeting with Bukele, Trump stated that he wants to expand deportations to El Salvador to American citizens. (“Homegrowns are next,” he said to Bukele. “The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”) Asked if his deportation plan includes American citizens, he replied, “Yeah, that includes them—you think they’re a special type of people or something?” He reaffirmed the position on Fox News the following day.
The president depicted this method as a response to hardened criminals. (This is scarcely a defense—even the worst offenders are entitled to the protections of the Constitution.) But it’s important to understand that Trump habitually equates opposition, or any deviation from his goals, with illegality. He has labeled as criminals all three of his electoral opponents, a wide swath of media organizations, and many other people who made the mistake of publicly criticizing or disagreeing with him. Just days before his meeting with Bukele, he ordered the Justice Department to investigate the former cybersecurity official Chris Krebs for having “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.”
Trump’s allies in the administration have adopted this habit. Elon Musk has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” Republican politicians and media routinely depict protests against Tesla as part of a conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism, conflating a tiny handful of acts of vandalism with mass-scale peaceful protests.
The enthusiasm for expanding denaturalization should be understood in this context. “What’s going to be on the horizon are denaturalization cases,” Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer who has worked with the administration, told Axios last month. In 2023, Davis posted threats to denaturalize and deport the anti-Trump opinion journalists Mehdi Hasan and Tim Miller: “@mehdirhasan is now on my Lists 2 (indict), 4 (detain), 6 (denaturalize), and 3 (deport). I already have his spot picked out in the DC gulag. But I’ll put him in the women’s cell block, with @Timodc. So these whiny leftists don’t get beat up as often.”
These threats probably contain an element of performative trolling. But one pattern of Trumpism is that its most outrageous notions appear first as jokes, allowing them to be processed and denuded of shock value, before eventually being assimilated into Trump’s actual policy platform. High-profile conservative pundits such as Will Chamberlain and Charlie Kirk have proposed to denaturalize and deport Ilhan Omar; Chamberlain has proposed the same treatment for Hasan and Derek Guy, who runs a popular X account focused on menswear and routinely mocks the fashion choices made by MAGA figures. After Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to inquire about the status of Abrego Garcia, the “Trump War Room,” the official account of the president’s political operation, posted a photo mock-up depicting Van Hollen covered in gang tattoos, as if to suggest that he, too, belongs in Bukele’s dungeon. In the sea of ideas in which Trump and his advisers swim, deporting the libs is an established trope.
The Occam’s-razor explanation is that these people genuinely want to deport their political opponents without due process. The administration has certainly claimed the power that would enable it to do so. “They have the temerity to say that every single invader should get their own individual judicial trial before they are deported,” Miller ranted on Fox News earlier this month. “One at a time, each one gets a $1 million trial in front of a communist judge to decide whether or not we can send them home.” Without due process, of course, an “invader” is simply anybody Trump labels as such.
During Trump’s first term, fears of his authoritarian tendencies largely ran ahead of his actions. This time around, the opposite has occurred. Trump has fulfilled or exceeded his critics’ most hysterical-sounding predictions. He has mostly persisted with his trade war, but an incipient bond-market crisis seems to have spooked him into trimming its wildest excesses. His war on liberal democracy, by contrast, has not generated the kind of blowback that Trump has reason to care about. Why would he stop?
“Ideas have consequences,” the conservative philosopher Richard Weaver wrote in 1948. The post-liberal right’s ideas about revenge and power are currently the most influential ideas in the world. Their implications need to be taken with deadly seriousness.