Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury

Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration used secret “administrative subpoenas” to access the telephone, email, and social media communications of U.S. citizens who had criticized the government’s anti-immigration positions. The content and rationale of the subpoenas are not revealed to the targets. Instead, people are receiving vague legal notices from Google and other tech companies that the government has sought access to their accounts, making it virtually impossible for them to challenge their validity.

It is a sort of Kafkaesque twilight zone that would have been all too familiar to Eastern Europeans during the decades they spent under the Soviet heel.

For Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU Foundation’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the use of these subpoenas speaks to the increasingly extra-constitutional, even unconstitutional, nature of Trump’s second term. “The right to criticize the government and expose government abuses is at the heart of what is protected by the First Amendment. Government agents abusing these administrative subpoenas to target people who are exercising their First Amendment rights is not only outrageous, but also unconstitutional,” he says. “Congress gave DHS the authority to issue administrative subpoenas in connection with specific types of Customs and Immigration investigations. But here, the government is violating the law by issuing these subpoenas – which do not involve the approval of a judge – to investigate people regarding their lawful and protected speech. This is illegal, and it is a betrayal of our fundamental guarantee that the government cannot punish people because they does not agree with their speech.

He’s right. Increasingly, on one issue after another, Trump 2.0 dispenses with the niceties of the rule of law and moves toward a Big Brother Is Watching You vision of governance.

Time and time again, the government makes it clear that it views the First Amendment as an inconvenience to be avoided whenever possible. Witness the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson, targeted for writing articles about workers laid off during the DOGE purges.

Or recall that, last week, Trump ordered Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to go to Fulton County, Georgia, to personally oversee an FBI raid of election offices there, looking for nonexistent evidence of “fraud” in the 2020 presidential vote. There is nothing in Gabbard’s job description that gives her a legitimate reason to accompany the G-men. But she wasn’t there to do her job; she was there to make a phone call to Trump, then hand the phone to the agents on the scene so the “president” could give them what sources later called a “pep talk” about the greatness of their ridiculous stunt. This is not about law enforcement; it’s simply an exercise in raw power.

Anarchy is everywhere you look. Trump has begun to step up his demands for political prosecutions against those he says were involved in a massive fraud ring aimed at denying him election victory in 2020. Expect the indictments that Pam Bondi’s Justice Department will surely now seek in Fulton County. The “president” has also made increasingly inflammatory calls to “nationalize” and “take control” of the electoral system in the run-up to the midterm elections, although the Constitution prohibits such actions. And his Svengali, the odious Steve Bannon, this week called on ICE agents and military personnel to invade polling places on Election Day.

As poll numbers sag and public opinion turns against all of his signature policies, Trump retreats further and further into a fantasy world in which he remains a strongman, relentlessly imposing his will on hundreds of millions of Americans. Either way, in reality, this audience is blowing more and more raspberries at him.

Witness: After renaming the Kennedy Center the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Trump faced massive boycotts from artists and the public. The Washington National Opera has decided to move; Philip Glass announced he would not perform. Rhiannon Giddens and Renee Fleming have withdrawn from planned concerts. The cast of Hamilton said thank you but no, thank you. The Kennedy Center Honors broadcast recorded the lowest television ratings in its decades-long history. And the number of in-person audiences dropped by almost half.

What was Trump’s irritable and weak response, trying to look like a strong man? He announced he would close the center for two years for a major renovation.