The personalist presidency

CONTEXT

Political scientists, sociologists, investigative journalists and others have been trying to figure out what is going on with djt and his MAGA wealth and power movement. To some people, e.g., me, the main goals have been clear since 2016, accumulation of wealth and power for himself and some other elites. That was to be done by attacking democracy, the rule law and civil liberties, especially their restraints on unlimited political power. But that does not explain in detail how djt's and elite MAGA's attacks on power restraints are being accomplished. 

Lots of analysts focus on comparisons between djt and MAGA elites with dictators of the past, including Hitler, and how djt and MAGA elites are establishing Americans authoritarianism as dominant over democracy and the rule of law. There are parallels and similarities between djt and past despots, but is that alone be enough to overthrow the American democracy and rule of law? Nearly all people who see little to no threat to democracy keep pointing out how strong American democracy and the institutions that support it are. The bottom line for most of those people is simple: Dictatorship can't happen here.  

The personalist presidency

One line of research that seems to be fairly new is a recognition of what researchers call the personalist presidency (PP) that djt and MAGA elites are well on their way to establishing. The PP is a form of dictatorship centered on the dictator who relies on loyalty to himself and key tactics to gain and keep power. Political scientist Don Moynihan describes the PP concept in a substack post (this peer-reviewed paper). He writes in his substack post:

Right now, so many things are happening so quickly that it is hard to keep up. This is part of a deliberate strategy to “flood the zone” with so many changes that it is impossible to make sense of them all. I’ve been trying to step back and identify bigger patterns that help us to frame and understand these events, rather than just respond to them.

For a considerable period, from about the 1970s until relatively recently, politicization of the U.S. federal government describes a President using two basic strategies: centralizing policy expertise within the White House, and using political appointees to strategically manage agencies, especially agencies that do not ideologically align with the President. Both political parties applied such strategies, to varying degrees, within a certain equilibrium. The President was assumed to value a balance between loyalty to his policies, and administrative competence in delivering those policies. The civil service system was assumed to be a stable source of institutional capacity, with basic workforce protections for employees. Within that equilibrium, the number of political appointees has gradually increased, from about 3,000 in 1990 to about 4,000 today, even as the number of career federal employees they supervised remained relatively stable since the 1960s.

That equilibrium no longer exists. Direct forms of political control are more extreme, and the types of politicization are more varied than the centralization of policymaking power and strategic use of appointees. The core components of the new politicization are

1) The personalist presidency - centered on loyalty to Trump with a legal infrastructure built to serve and protect him

2) Governing by fear via conspiratorial messaging towards the public sector and threatening individual public servants

3) Purging of career officials, expansion of appointee class by weakening of civil service systems, and dismantling civil service protections. 

The emergence of Trump has compelled scholars focused on US domestic politics and policy to look to comparative research for useful explanatory concepts, such as populism and personalism. While populism centers on a grievance-driven us-vs.-them ideology, personalism centers on the idea of a political movement built around loyalty to an individual leader. Personalism is more likely to prevail in settings featuring weak political, democratic and governance institutions, and so the emergence of personalism in the Grand Old Party and the United States challenges prior assumptions. While loyalty to Trump may falter in his last years in office, he has been able to silence or drive from power dissenters within the Republican Party and seeks to do so within government.

Trump has created the conditions for a personalist presidency, reorienting processes and powers to reward the value of loyalty. Personalist systems are more likely to feature family members, or those who have passed extraordinary loyalty tests, such as joining in false claims the leader makes or defending damaging behavior, such as the denial of an election loss. 

His second term Cabinet nominations were largely not the type of generic Republican that characterized his first term, often holding few credentials for the position beyond their loyalty to Trump. A willingness to stand with Trump during his lowest period, after the 2021 January 6th assault on Congress by his supporters, became a key criterion. Donald Trump Jr described the appointee screening process: “Loyalty has got to be number one,” emphasizing that the Presidential Personnel Office “will diligently go through and understand not just where were they in 2015 and 2016, but where were they on January 7th”. Candidates for appointments were screened with questions like whether they believed Trump’s false claim he won the 2020 election and how they evaluated the 2021 January 6th insurrection.

To maintain Trump’s personalist Presidency requires defanging standard modes of presidential accountability. In his first term, Trump fired Inspectors General at an unprecedented rate, removed the head of the FBI, and complained about Department of Justice investigations. A key lesson he drew from his first term was to build an even stronger legal infrastructure to further shield him from risk and increase his power. Trump and supporters eliminated the long-standing norm that the Department of Justice maintain a measure of independence from the President, enabling him to directly intervene in cases involving investigation of himself, or his political opponents.

Purge competent bureaucrats and replace with 

loyalists, regardless of competence or honesty

Moynihan's post continues at length like this. But the key point he makes is that djt puts loyalty to himself far above the Constitution, the law, democratic norms and our civil liberties and legal protections. Competence is a minor to trivial concern. Loyalty matters first and foremost. Right now, the balance of power is solidly with djt acting as dictator. Musk losing his recent fight with djt is solid evidence of that.

Any deference Trump has left for democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties remain because djt sees enough personal value to leave them in place to (1) protect his power or (2) enrich himself when he sells off the remaining vestiges to special interests. The buyers can then profit or establish their own fiefdoms. What fiefdoms? These for example, (A) carbon energy corporations and their pollution of our environment and physical bodies, (B) unregulated billionaires preying on their deprotected, naked workers and consumers, (C) some Christian Zionists getting Iran bombed to initiate the rapture that saves Christians from an imminent global war that will lead to the deaths of most or all non-believers, and (D) Christian nationalists and their bigoted, hate-driven theocracy. Those are really big fiefdoms. Economically worth trillions. Socially probably worth at least as much in social capital.

Everyone will have to pay djt personally to get a slice of the pie taken from us and given to special interests. But whatever they have pay to djt, it will be well worth it. Almost every time they will win and we will lose.

Bottom line: Dictatorship can and is happening here, right now. 

Q1: Do you think that the PP concept adds much or anything new in understanding djt and MAGA elites, their tactics and their thinking? Or is all of this more or less obvious? 

Q2: Any predictions on what happens after Trump dies, e.g., Christian nationalist theocracy, continuing "secular" (pragmatic?) dictatorship, populist nationalism with at least semi-functioning congress, or modest restoration of the old normal? Is the old normal ever going to come back?

Acknowledgement: PD brought the concept of the PP and research on it to my attention