President Trump has unleashed new weaponry in his war against Democrats, liberals and the left. Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition.
Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten businesses with bankruptcy, the criminalization of free speech and the blackmailing of corporate America into obedience.
At the memorial service for Charlie Kirk last month in Phoenix, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, described in great detail how the administration plans to deal with its domestic opponents: “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
For Trump and his allies, recent developments, including the government shutdown, the indictment of James Comey and the assassination of Kirk, are openings to escalate the attack on institutions and programs identified with liberalism and the Democratic Party. For the MAGA right, any crisis is an opportunity. In fact, every crisis is.
The assault has become increasingly brutal as Trump and his allies intensify their demonization of all things left of center, by which they often seem to mean anything to the left of the hard right.
Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, emailed me in response to my inquiries about the rapid series of developments after Kirk’s death:
There is no doubt about what Trump is doing in the wake of Kirk’s killing. His attacks on his political opponents are purely authoritarian, and he sees the killing of Kirk as an opportunity to accomplish what he has been talking about since he entered politics: using the power of the state to punish those who defy him.
The reason that the Reichstag fire is such a poignant example of a pretext for an authoritarian power grab is not because it is unique, but rather because the consequences are now seen as so severe.
There is a crystal-clear pattern of leaders throughout history using moments of threat to expand power, usually at the expense of legal processes or civil rights. In retrospect, we can see those moments for what they were, but at the time, they are hard to push back on.
For his part, Trump makes no secret of his intentions, writing on Truth Social on Thursday:
I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.
I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Asked if Trump’s comments were real or just a negotiating tactic, Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told Fox News:
Oh, it’s very real, and the Democrats should know that they put the White House and the president in this position, and if they don’t want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It’s very simple: Pass the clean continuing resolution, and all of this goes away. We would not be having these discussions here at the White House today if not for the Democrats voting to shut the government down. This is an unfortunate consequence.
The brazenness of Trump and his MAGA loyalists has turned out to be one ingredient of their power.
Last Wednesday, the Energy Department announced the cancellation of 321 energy project awards totaling $7.5 billion, almost all of which are in states that share three telltale characteristics: They voted for Kamala Harris; they have Democratic governors; and they have two Democratic senators, a group that includes California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.
As my Times colleagues Brad Plumer and Maxine Joselow reported, “The move underscored how the Trump administration appeared to be using the government shutdown as a pretext to punish its political opponents.”
On the same day, the department announced that it would withhold $18 billion that had been previously awarded to New York City for two massive public works projects: extension of the Second Avenue subway line and a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River.
The assault is relentless.
On Sept. 25, the Justice Department, under intense social media pressure from Trump, persuaded a grand jury to indict James Comey, a former F.B.I. director, on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding, in connection with his testimony before a Senate committee in September 2020.
My Times colleagues Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer wrote that the indictment “represents the most significant legal step yet by the Trump administration to harry, punish and humiliate a former official the president identified as an enemy, at the expense of procedural safeguards intended to shield the Justice Department from political interference and personal vendettas.”
On Sept. 27, The Associated Press reported that the F.B.I. had fired as many as 20 agents who had been photographed kneeling in connection with the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Five days later, the director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel, fired a longtime bureau employee who displayed a Pride flag in his work space.
On Sept. 30, Trump told top military officials gathered in Quantico, Va., that some Democratic-run cities should be used as “training grounds” for the military to crush “the enemy from within.”
Crucial to the Trump agenda is the drive to “cleanse” the federal work force of “woke” employees, prosecutors seen as anti-Trump — or even those who are pro-Trump but won’t do his bidding — and top-ranked military personnel whose loyalty to Trump is uncertain.
On Thursday, Sam Fellman, deputy editor of Business Insider’s military and defense team, published a long article describing the climate of fear and paranoia resulting from a “broad crusade against so-called ‘woke’ ideology in the military. Active-duty troops stationed at bases across the country say the effort has helped unleash a free-for-all of leaks and accusations, feeding an atmosphere of intense suspicion.”
Trump and his allies seized upon Kirk’s assassination to justify a sharp acceleration of their attacks on the left, which, along with a number of other commentators, I was worried about from the start. Now it’s getting worse.
“I can’t pretend to know what the Trump administration is intending or planning behind the scenes,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, wrote by email.
But I can say that taking advantage of a violent event to advance the oppression of a disliked group is a classic technique of aspiring autocrats. In my own research with Nathan Kalmoe, we have found that leaders are uniquely capable of calming violent attitudes in the public, and as this administration does the opposite, it is certainly possible that they are throwing matches on dry kindling.
Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard who has been closely tracking movements on both the left and the right, showed no hesitation in declaring that Trump and his allies “are trying to provoke protests and demonstrations that they can call ‘violent’ even if there are fewer destructive elements than after the usual big football victory or loss.”
Cities, she continued,
have long been demonized on the G.O.P. Tea Party to MAGA right. I heard demonizing characterizing statements about cities and their residents in my field interviews with even otherwise reality-based right-wingers from 2011 through 2018, and Fox News, etc., has fed a steady stream of the same pictures of urban property attacks for years. By now, Trump himself, many in Congress and many in their voter followings live in a virtual world where cities are aflame and “leftists” are demons.
I noted that Trump and his allies moved with striking speed to capitalize on the Kirk killing and asked whether that suggested advance planning that quickly geared up to build momentum immediately.
Skocpol replied: “Of course this has all been planned for a long time, not always by erratic Trump himself, but by Stephen Miller and others around the president.” The strategy, she added, that underlies “Trump’s militaristic posturing and rhetoric is to lay the basis for sending in federal forces to scare away voters in 2026.”
One thing that is clear from recent events is that violence of any kind plays into Trump’s hand.
“Violence certainly benefits a leader with authoritarian ambitions, as it provides the pretext for further power grabs and clampdowns on civil society,” Rory Truex, a political scientist at Princeton, wrote by email responding to my inquiries.
“Trump,” he added,
wasted no time in blaming the left broadly for Kirk’s killing, and in short notice deemed “antifa” a terrorist organization (despite it not being an organization at all). This week he sought to socialize the military elite into the idea that American forces would be deployed to quell enemies from within. Violence in any direction plays into Trump’s narrative that America needs the brand of authoritarian law and order that he aims to provide.
Truex wrote that the Trump forces
certainly saw an opportunity when Kirk’s assassination unfolded and capitalized on it. They are trying to link the actions of the assassin to the broader claim that Trump is fascist or authoritarian, therefore immunizing themselves from that critique. This in turn intimidates the emerging pro-democracy movement and anyone who uses authoritarian language to describe this administration.
Everyone I contacted for this column described what Trump is doing as a clear violation of democratic rules and guidelines governing peacetime activities.
“Polarization feels almost quaint relative to the profound stress the Trump administration is imposing on our democracy,” Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email.
“What we are witnessing,” he went on to say,
is not yet a war, but it is far more than mere political division. It is a systematic terror campaign on institutional legitimacy. The president is brilliantly weaponizing the animosity cultivated in the electorate over the past 40 years, using it as a pretext to justify his attacks on his perceived enemies. While political violence and polarization remain serious concerns, our primary focus must shift to countering the deliberate democratic degradation unfolding before us. The conflict is no longer defined by the distance between the left and right, but by the state-sanctioned assault on the norms, laws and institutions that guarantee a liberal society.
How successful has Trump been so far?
Westwood said:
Trump’s enduring success is not in breaking a specific institution, but in the ideological capture of an entire political party. He has turned what was once Republican anathema into orthodoxy: the weaponization of the Justice Department against political enemies, the use of military force for domestic policing, and the casual suppression of speech. The most permanent damage, however, is the precedent. With these guardrails shattered, the temptation for a future Democratic administration to launch its own campaign of retribution — using a weakened system for its own ends — becomes immense. This is the grim, iterative nature of democratic backsliding: each transgression lowers the floor for the next, creating a cycle of political revenge that, once started, is nearly impossible to unwind.
For Trump, one danger lies in the flimsiness of his claims of generalized violence and disorder — assertions that are obviously pretextual — to justify his exercise of executive power in apparent defiance of the law and the Constitution.
Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email:
If Trump, Miller & Co. are not hoping to provoke violence, they sure act as if they are. It’s not simply about provoking violence, though, but inflicting it, as ICE has been doing all along. The spiral of violence usually begins with official violence.
“Shocking events like the murder of Charlie Kirk,” Wilentz continued,
can prompt either reflection or revenge. Recall Robert Kennedy on the evening of Martin Luther King’s assassination, recognizing the impulse to retaliate but speaking of compassion and love and forbearance. It’s hardly surprising that Trump rampaged in the other direction, taking the opportunity to canonize Kirk, blame the left and go on the attack.
Trump’s goal, in Wilentz’s view: “eliminate all political opponents, as, by definition, enemies of the state. This includes, above all, the Democratic Party, described by Miller even before Kirk’s murder as ‘a domestic extremist organization.’ ”
I asked Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start,” “Do you think Trump, Miller and other allies are hoping to provoke violence in order to justify further punitive or repressive policies?”
Her emailed reply: “The short answer is yes.”
The longer answer?
The biggest challenge that aspiring autocrats face is that their citizens still have rights, freedoms and real political power. In a functioning democracy, citizens can still vote their leaders out of office and there’s nothing a democratically elected leader can legally do about it. That’s why autocrats-in-waiting often look for ways to get rid of these constraints. They can rig elections, suppress opposition or, as history shows, manufacture a crisis that justifies emergency powers.
Provoking violence is a common way to do this.
Is it working? Walter:
The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.
Once citizens begin to view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this. In fact, that’s the point. They are not trying to restore order; they’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns. In the end, violence serves their ultimate end: They want to create the illusion of disorder so they can tighten control and stay in power indefinitely.
Walter wrote that what stood out in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination
wasn’t just the speed, but the discipline. The narrative of “left-wing extremism” snapped into place almost instantly, as if waiting for a trigger. This suggests that the plan was already in place, waiting for an inevitable tragedy to exploit for political gain.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email:
At this point in his second term, the president’s authoritarian power play is clear for all to see: use pretextual claims of urban violence and immigrant crisis to expand presidential power through emergency powers and intimidate the political opposition through muscular displays of National Guard and troops in urban areas. Pretextual claims, however, must be at least minimally plausible, or they will fail court tests.
There is no proof that the assassination efforts are tied to the Democrats in any way, so something needs to be done to make the emergency claims plausible. Ideally [for Trump], it would be large unruly mobs destroying property and beating up the police. This strategy might work because marches and demonstrations in the modern era are harder to control than in the 1960s and 1970s due to social media and the proliferation of causes seeking to publicize their own agenda. The best strategy for the Democrats is to keep demonstrations and marches at a manageable size, well behaved and focused on a common message.
To close this column, I want to juxtapose recent comments from Michael Ben’Ary, who was fired from his post investigating terrorism at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, and a comment from Miller that captures his beliefs in good and evil.
On Friday, Ben’Ary taped a statement on his office door that read in part:
I am disappointed to leave behind a national security and public safety mission that I truly believed in. I am even more disappointed to see what has happened to this office and the Department of Justice in just a few short months. The decision to remove experienced career officials from U.S. attorneys’ offices, the F.B.I. and other critical parts of D.O.J. undermine our country’s ability to counter terrorist organizations, malign nation-state actors and countless others that seek to harm our nation and its citizens.
On Sept. 21, at Kirk’s memorial service, Miller described his vision for America:
We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And for those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us: What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.
Ben’Ary describes the corruption of Trump’s approach to government; Miller reveals the hatred used to justify it.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
The post Trump Is Not Afraid of Civil War. Neither Is Stephen Miller. appeared first on New York Times.
