Trump Is the State

The perils of personalist politics

President Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts before Trump delivered his address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

I never realized my training as a political scientist would prove so useful right here at home.

I don’t mean political theory. That was my major field in graduate school, and I draw on that education in everything I write. I’m talking about what I studied in my secondary major field, which is known as comparative politics. That’s where I learned about the differences between presidential and parliamentary systems, the effects of different electoral systems on the outcome of democratic elections, the many ways authoritarian systems can evolve in the direction of liberal democracy, and also the various ways liberal democracies can decay into multiple forms of authoritarianism.

In my coursework, we learned about those latter processes by looking at other countries. We had to, because the United States, despite its many faults, was a stable liberal democracy that had become increasingly liberal and democratic over the course of the 20th century. But that is no longer true.

I don’t merely mean that the country is in danger of devolving into a form of competitive authoritarianism. I mean that the country is actively and rapidly devolving into a form of competitive authoritarianism right now, every day, on multiple fronts. I’m hardly alone in saying so. In fact, some of the smartest political scientists, legal thinkers, and generalist intellectuals I know are saying it loudly and clearly in cogent essays and Substack posts.

This post will draw on some of that work in order to connect various dots hurling past us in the whirlwind news cycle. The connecting thread is what I’ve called clientelism in previous posts and others are labeling “repatrimonialization” or “patronage politics.” None of those terms are especially headline-grabbing. They sound like the kinds of concepts academics would talk about at a soporific professional conference attended exclusively by professors. But that is misleading. The Trump administration is personalizing the government to an extraordinary extent, making Donald Trump himself the focal point of federal power. How he’s doing that, and what the consequences will be, is something we need to understand, regardless of the terms we use to describe it.

The Personalist President

My first post-inauguration essay referring to Trump’s efforts to institute a form of “clientelism” was published on February 3. Since then, many others, including Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Chait, Francis Fukuyama, and Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, have noted similar things using related terms I listed above. All of them refer to the personalization of politics—that is, replacing depersonalized bureaucratic rationality and procedures designed to treat all citizens equally with a system based on favoritism (who you know, whether people in power are friends or enemies, whether you have the means of bribing them with gifts or helping them in some other way, etc.). Standing at the center of that kind of system is a monarch (a king or tyrant) who is synonymous with the state.

Until the late 19th century, something like this kind of arrangement was the political norm throughout human history, despite exalted rhetoric about the “rule of law,” which in most circumstances was more aspirational than descriptive. But then Europe developed, and the U.S. mimicked, an institutional alternative. A professional civil service independent of partisan politics was hired and trained to develop intelligently devised policies and regulations and then apply them fairly to various domains of life. This amounted to a great depersonalization of politics.

In the U.S., presidents sat atop this bureaucracy at the head of the executive branch, giving it broad directives to fulfill the intensions of Congress in passing laws. The ideological orientation of the administrative state would tilt from the left to the right and back again as the presidency was handed off from one party to the other, but neither party rejected the legitimacy of the administrative state as such.

That has now changed. The second Trump administration, armed with a legally ambiguous army of DOGE disrupters, is actively gutting the administrative state, firing or displacing civil servants by the thousands and tens of thousands across the federal bureaucracy. What will remain when this has been completed is a system much more directly tied to the will of a single individual: the person of the president.