Autocrats are vulnerable

One thing you can do: exploit their weaknesses

Among the big unanswered questions after the November election was whether the Trumpists would be smarter this time about minding their politics, or at least more judicious in their pursuit of unpopular policies and narratives than they were during the last go-round.

During the transition, some commentators pointed to the structure of Project 2025 — organized, professional, almost militant in its efficiency — to forecast a change in the MAGA governing class. Perhaps they had learned some lessons about overplaying their hand and would now be both more attuned to how their hard-right lurches were playing in Peoria, and more savvy in the work of maintaining a fragile majority.

I had doubts. Function has always followed form in Trumpism, and the powerful impulses of personalist autocracy are rarely tamed by even the shrewdest operative. Kellyanne Conway couldn’t do it. John Kelly couldn’t do it. Why would Susie Wiles be any different? As Luís Roberto Barroso, the progressive chief justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court, said this week in a talk at Harvard: “Populists overvalue the power of majorities.” Overplaying their hand is the rule, not the exception.

But it was impossible to know for sure, so long as the new Administration was still operating as a player piano, just hitting the notes punched into the preloaded score of executive orders, policy memo, and directives. The piano was going to keep hitting those keys until sooner or later some event required a change, a response, some improvisation.

That event came in the tragic air crash above the Potomac this week, a serious crisis demanding a deviation from the script and some extemporaneous decision-making. We’ve now seen that Trump and Vance opted to hang the whole thing on diversity initiatives — before any investigation had begun and as bodies were still being recovered from the river.

As a matter of civic hygiene, I’m trying not to react to every individual move from the new regime, instead making an effort to watch and listen with what the writer Josh Marshall last week called “a serene impassivity.”¹ We are a nation in acute and prolonged crisis. For my part, and for now, I’m focused on mapping the themes and patterns of behavior we can draw from these early moments — not the politics that theorists and pundits projected, but the one that’s actually manifesting — to identify the new Administration’s vulnerabilities, and the most effective strategies to exploit them. We’re all sitting in the school of harm reduction, and the White House response to the aviation crisis turned out to be a good case study.

Here’s what happened:

• For Trump and the Trumpists, the DEI motif was a blunt instrument during the campaign, and it helped achieve a few narrow but important political aims (like winning an election against an unpopular incumbent Administration).

• In their first couple of weeks, it evolved to become an all-encompassing political posture, a dramatic blitz signaling to the expectant MAGA base that Trump would indeed use his legal and constitutional authority (and ignore its limits) to achieve cultural dominance. All systems go.

• Since Wednesday night’s deadly crash, we’ve seen the motif used for another purpose: as an operational posture — the explanation, the response, and the long-term plan. When the player piano stopped, the Trumpists just…played the same melody.

The problem, of course, is that when it’s time to sit down at the piano and tap the keys yourself, even the least discerning of listeners won’t really be fooled if the self-styled virtuoso only knows one tune.

I hope this is revelatory for the people who hope to be the leaders of the opposition, and they read this response as symptomatic of a deeper political vulnerability. Some of the most neutralizing arguments in American politics happen without much of an argument at all: Reagan’s “there you go again” comes to mind, as does Joe Biden’s takedown of Rudy Giuliani during the 2007 primary campaign: “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

Remember the moment Chris Christie knocked Marco Rubio out of the 2016 Republican primary? Early in a primary debate, after Rubio delivered a canned critique of the Obama presidency, Christie asked the audience to register the “memorized 25-second speech” Rubio’s advisors had fed him. Someone more prepared would never have fallen in the trap Christie set; but, sure enough, Rubio returned minutes later to the same talking points. The audience roared, and Rubio was cooked.

Inside the dystopic, often overwhelming abuses of power in the opening weeks of Trump II, it’s worth remembering that there is such a thing as political overreach, even and especially for personalist autocrats. The voters on the margins who delivered him back to the Oval Office are still watching. Soon they will vote in Congressional races. Even as the Trumpists plow through legal and constitutional barriers, consolidate power, and push institutional guardrails to their breaking points, they’re not immune to the laws of political gravity.

Walking back from the brink of whatever this is can feel like an improbable high-wire act, but it’s really a series of smaller, achievable steps: turning a few people’s attitudes, driving down the popularity of incumbents, and winning a handful of House seats in 2026. Not easy. But this week revealed one possible tool for doing that: helping Americans see that beneath all the bluster, there ain’t much there there.

More crises will come. In the meantime, all of us should prime voters so they know what to listen for — the scripts, the ideas, that the new regime falls back on in want of agile leadership. Earnestness has its merits; we can call them hollow and feckless, mean and cruel, corrupt and illiberal. And they are. But sometimes a light touch will do. Start with this: There you go again.

1. Others have smart things to say on the substance of the anti-DEI push. I’d recommend watching my former White House colleague Chiraag Bains talk about the real intent behind these anti-discirmination initiatives, and reading Jay Caspian Kang’s New Yorker essay that situates the DEI stuff as part of Trump’s broader effort to dismantle federal oversight. I also liked Symone Sanders Townsend’s thread this morning.