Policy / Column / January 16, 2026
The news was a series of stories of authoritarian behavior. We cannot let ourselves drown.
President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he walks toward Marine One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, January 11, 2026.
(Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images) A few months ago, when my editors asked me to try my hand at a new Authoritarian surveillance chronicle of the new year, part of me worried that some weeks I would struggle to find material. After all, even the Trump administration would surely slow down, surely not all their actions would be authoritarian.
Turns out I shouldn’t have worried.
Take Venezuela, or, more precisely, take the Venezuelan leader and take him to a Brooklyn prison, then take Venezuela’s oil and sell it on the open market. Who will determine the distribution of profits? “Me,” Trump said.in a rare moment of honesty.
Or take Greenland, or more precisely, well… “take Greenland”. Because, as Trump so piquantly puts it, “Property is very important. » He continued by telling his New York Times to interviewers that “this is what I believe is psychologically necessary to be successful.” This is a 21st century version of British imperialist policy. Cecil Rhodes’ Arrogant Claim”I would annex the planets if I could; I think about it often. It makes me sad to see them so clearly and yet so far away.” (Well, Elon Musk East determined to colonize space and realize Rhodes’ dream.)
Meanwhile, Trump is increasingly determined to create his own living space here on planet Earth. While Hitler sought living space for his German volk, Trump seeks to secure resource space: access to unlimited oil via Venezuela, access to rare earths via Greenland, and access to flexible markets across Latin America and the Caribbean. All of this is underpinned by a commitment to significantly increase US military spending (Last week, he posted on social media that he needed a 50 percent increase in military spending over the next year) – putting the entire economy and country on a permanent war footing. And he might actually need the army afterwards declaring that the entire Western Hemisphere now exists solely for the pleasure and enrichment of the United States. He calls this grotesque philosophy by the innocuous name “Donroe Doctrine.”
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“In foreign policy, he has discovered that he can do whatever he wants,” Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, said of Trump’s new doctrine. “There are no constraints. This should be terrifying for anyone who believes in the international order.”
In one sleepy blink of Trump’s eye, the world has regressed from a supposedly postcolonial era to a supposedly postcolonial era. a clearly colonial policy. And, as the United States presents itself to the world in its colonialist finery, Stephen Miller, Trump’s ghoulish immigration official and now foreign policy guru, has confessed that the great European powers were wrong to abandon their empires and even more wrong to then allow these brown and black ex-colonials to emigrate to the First World and emigrate there. “reverse colonization” them.
You can almost see Miller, in khaki and pith helmet, guarded by Pete Hegseth and his hordes of vandals, making his way through the jungle quoting Rudyard Kipling – or, since 21st-century American colonialists seem a little less poetically inclined than the former British empire-builders, singing a skinhead anthem while subjugating the natives.
Miller’s white nationalism infects every aspect of American government. Recently, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a video requesting that white men who have experienced employment discrimination contact the government to see if they can file a claim for racial or gender discrimination. Because, of course, when you consider the vast history of discrimination in the United States, it is white men who have been treated most unfairly. This is now the official view of the Trump administration. After all, Trump recently pointed out that the result of the civil rights movement was this: “White people were very mistreated” and that the country has adopted “reverse discrimination”.
After ICE agents murdered Renée Good in Minneapolis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a multitude of lies about Good from a podium emblazoned with the logo. “one of us, all of you.” In other words, “dare piss us off as we carry out our government-sponsored pogrom against Somalis and other non-white residents in Minneapolis, and we will come after all of you.”
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Stories have emerged in recent weeks that as part of DHS’s $100 million effort to recruit 10,000 additional ICE agents, recruiters target gun shows, UFC Fight Nights and other far-right hangouts; and in these efforts they are using what critics called the neo-Nazi song “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” The ministry also published recruitment posters for Uncle Sam which read: “America has been overrun by criminals and predators. We need YOU to drive them out.”
It’s hard to look at all this without thinking of the fascist paramilitaries and nativist propaganda machines run by men like Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Pinochet. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, take Joe Rogan. The podcaster, whose support for Trump was instrumental in his 2024 election victory, now describes ICE as a “gestapo” agency.
Reports from Minneapolis detailed ICE agents repeatedly cite Good’s murderessentially warning protesters that what happened to Good will happen to them if they continue to oppose the government’s pogroms. This is not about law enforcement; This is terrorism with a federal uniform. And to make this threat a reality, Trump is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy heavily armed military personnel to Minneapolis.
In 2025, the administration virtually ended the country’s refugee resettlement program, only letting right-wing white Afrikaners from South Africa enter. In 2026, Trump has upped the ante again, announcing this week a ban on immigrant visa processing for people from 75 countries. Look at the list, which encompasses about a third of the countries on the planet, and almost all of them are majority non-white, majority non-Christian, or, in the case of countries like Colombia and Brazil, led by presidents who had the temerity to defy Trump.
Normally, an action as extraordinary – and illegal – as upending US immigration policy without any input from Congress would dominate the news; This week, the country has sunk so far into the muck of Christian white nationalism, and we are so acclimated to Trump’s rule by executive order rather than legislation, that it barely merited mention.
Likewise, the The FBI is under attack Washington Post journalist Hannah Nathanson was buried under the avalanche of other examples of authoritarianism. Agents searched her home this week to search for records she had compiled reporting stories about fired federal employees. And while the astonishing news that The chairman of the Federal Reserve was facing a clearly politically motivated investigation. in spending decisions surrounding the renovation of Reserve headquarters in Washington did creating waves, by midweek it had also been largely lost amid the rest of the authoritarian clutter.
“I said in February that I thought we were in a constitutional crisis,” outgoing New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, whose term ends Jan. 20, told me this week. From the president on down, he said, members of the administration “repeatedly mock the rule of law.”
Platkin — who says that privately, many Republican attorneys general agree with his critics but are too afraid to publicly voice their concerns — explained that he remains hopeful that lower courts will continue to combat Trump’s excesses and that ultimately an excited public will expel these lawbreakers from the halls of power. “This is not who we are as a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept a scenario in which federal law enforcement agents working for a rogue and untrained agency can kill American citizens with impunity. »
Platkin is scathing in his observations about Trump cabinet members enabling the slide toward fully authoritarian governance. “They act like the laws don’t apply to them and that’s simply not true. Trump has shown us how fragile our system is. And unless people realize there’s a cost to this, it will happen again.”