Even before he took office, Donald Trump spoke of emergency: America is in the grip of a “woke” and weaponized federal government, he warned. Then came the catch: With the nation in such a state, the normal rules weren’t going to apply anymore. In the weeks since he has taken office, they haven’t, and we’ve seen the result: The president has set up opportunities for grift through meme coins and other means; he has violated administrative laws and usurped the power of the purse from Congress; he appears to be turning the Department of Justice into his personal legal team; and his billionaire co-president, Elon Musk, is involved in decisions related to agencies (supposedly) regulating his businesses, just to name a few. The goal posts have shifted so far that they can no longer be spotted on the playing field.
Those who study autocracy will tell you: All this talk of emergency is an emergency in itself. The road to authoritarianism is paved with this trope—the dire pending calamity that only the strongman has seen, and which only he can solve. The idea of a shared predicament adds gloss to the unthinkable, so that it starts to seem reasonable: Your pets aren’t safe living in the same neighborhood as Haitians, so 20 million people need to be deported, posthaste. The emergency, should it come, may not be entirely real. What is real is that before you know it, this rhetorical bait and switch has cleared the way for the further consolidation of authoritarian rule. It’s never been a more important time to learn to recognize this trick, and learn to decode it.
Even as we speak, the preparation appears to be underway. President Trump recently earned another cycle of disgust by posting a paraphrase of a quote traditionally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Whether or not Napoleon said it, he certainly meant it. He came to power in a 1799 coup on the pretext that the French republic faced an emergency. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, meant it in the same way, when he invoked the quote to justify the mass murder of 77 people, most of them young people at a summer camp.
The rhetoric of the emergency has been a part of MAGA from the beginning. In an influential essay published pseudonymously in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, the essayist and former speechwriter Michael Anton described the Clinton-Trump contest as “The Flight 93 Election.” A triumph for Clinton, he intoned, would be the moral equivalent of a terrorist attack on the United States. In the face of such a threat, any and all means of resistance were called for; it was time to rush the cockpit. Anton was recently confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s nominee for director of policy planning.
The same language showed up again in Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for a “conservative” administration coordinated by the Heritage Foundation. The federal bureaucracy has been weaponized, the document warns, and the wokesters are on the cusp of seizing power. The next president has at most two years to save the country.
Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the project, menaced that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” An internal document prepared by staffers and fellows at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank where Russell Vought prepared for his return as Trump’s director of Office of Management and Budget, listed as top priorities “promoting Christian nationalism” and invoking the Insurrection Act as a means of mobilizing the military to put down domestic protest.
The radicalized intellectuals behind MAGA didn’t just fall into this kind of authoritarian claptrap on their own steam. The trope of the emergency has a long history, upon which they’ve ably drawn. It’s all there in the annals of the Claremont Institute, a think tank with deep connections to MAGA and the Trump administration. (Claremont board member John Eastman, for example, was “co-conspirator 2” in the charges special counsel Jack Smith laid against Trump for conspiring to commit election fraud in 2021.)
Two twentieth-century political philosophers figure centrally in the backstory of the Claremont Institute and allied intellectuals at the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Renewing America, and elsewhere. The one they don’t mind talking about is Leo Strauss. A German-Jewish political philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and eventually landed at the University of Chicago, Strauss is important to the men of Claremont chiefly for the distinction he draws between “exoteric” and “esoteric” political philosophy. The exoteric stuff, as the men of Claremont appear to understand it, is what you tell the masses, that is, the people who show up at rallies and sit in the pews of conservative churches. The esoteric message, they seem to believe, is for the initiates, the Ivy-educated cadre that may be expected to assume command of the machinery of the state.
But the thinker who arguably matters more in understanding the radicalized MAGA intellectual is Carl Schmitt. A conservative Catholic with a sex-addiction problem who managed to get himself excommunicated from the church, Schmitt defined a genuine sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Which is a nice way of saying “he who is above the law.” Schmitt also articulated the importance of the “state of emergency” as a means of separating out the genuine sovereign from the effete liberals who would otherwise betray the people and give in to the enemies of the state. He associated these woke wimps with the rationalist German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he accuses of trying to base the legitimacy of the state on reason and liberal values.
All this is music to the ears of Claremont intellectuals, who vie with one another in their condemnations of Hegel and the rational “administrative state,” which they associate with the dread evil of wokeism. For example, Charles Kesler, the longtime editor of the Claremont Review, implicitly follows Schmitt when he identifies the administrative state with all that is bad in America.
It is helpful to know that Schmitt was a full-on Nazi. When Hitler declared an emergency and seized control of the government in 1933, Schmitt was exultant. At last, the ghost of Hegel has been killed off, he enthused. He lobbied hard for a position as adviser to the Nazi government, and he did his part to condemn the work of Jewish scholars.
Make no mistake, I am not here instantiating Godwin’s law by comparing the MAGA intellectuals with Nazis. Rather, I am noting that they have borrowed directly from Nazi sources to make the very same points that the Nazis were making. They understand very well that the way to establish a form of government that is not bound by law or reason is to declare a state of emergency. And that is precisely what they are in the process of doing by giving everything they don’t like—expertise, swathes of the sciences, anti-discrimination law, any acknowledgment of socioeconomic or racial inequality—the moniker of “woke” and not only endeavoring to forever banish these enemies, but using the idea of an extended, wraparound emergency as an excuse to suspend the rule of law.
To see how the process works, it is helpful to remember a more prosaic aspect of those earlier chapters in the history of authoritarianism. Napoleon didn’t wait around for some fake emergency to present itself. He went out and spread rumors that the Jacobins were about to launch a coup. Hitler didn’t wait either; he famously exploited—many say orchestrated—the burning of the Reichstag to get the emergency he wanted. In other contexts—Venezuela after the election of Hugo Chávez, for example—the planning for the emergency exhibits less foresight, yet is ultimately no less effective in destroying democracy.
It is on account of this need for a semi-planned emergency in mind that we need to pay special attention the corrupt disruption of the federal government currently masquerading as an efficiency initiative. The overt goal of the effort is to eliminate within the administration of government all individuals perceived as not explicitly loyal to the president and the ideology of his movement—those who might, in other words, take their sworn fealty to the Constitution seriously. The obvious benefit for the president and his allies will be a federal government geared to serve his personal financial interests and their power.
You might think that the disruption of government services and risk of serious harm to the public would be a disadvantage. But you might be wrong about that. A little pandemic that slips through the cracks of a downsized Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a terrorist attack that gets past a weakened intelligence and law enforcement community; a peaceful protest that gets out of hand and provokes a violent response; an international conflict resulting from broken alliances, broken promises, or just plain lunatic adventurism—these self-inflicted wounds might prompt just the emergency that America’s authoritarians need.
When it comes to communicating the threat, let’s bear in mind that the rhetoric of doom can be part of the problem. Trump’s tireless trash-talking of the country should be understood as priming the public for emergency action. He keeps telling his base that America is a hellhole because he understands instinctively that the more hellish people think it is, the more likely they are to give him license to do as he pleases. The message those of us who believe in democracy and its institutions, including a functioning government, might seek to convey is something much closer to the truth: Most Americans would prefer to live in a democracy than a kleptocracy with authoritarian and theocratic features. A new “state of emergency” might be nothing more than an excuse for Trump and his allies to further the con.
More important work, however, needs to be done on the legal front. The nation’s lawyers, lawmakers, and judges are going to be tested as never before. They are going to face a fundamental challenge in the fact that the laws concerning declarations of emergency were mostly crafted on the premise that our commander in chief would be acting in good faith. But Trump is not acting in good faith, and his lawlessness must be met and challenged on every front. The way to secure the rule of law, to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, is to make sure that the law rules.
