When I published my book, Dictator From Day One, a got some responses complaining that Donald Trump could not possibly be a dictator, because otherwise, how could I write and publish a book criticizing him for being one?
Unsurprisingly, I answered that criticism in the book, where I point out that Trump’s dictatorship “has been asserted but not yet consolidated and entrenched.” It takes time to create a dictatorship, shore up its support, and put in place all the instruments necessary to suppress dissent. If you want to issue a warning against an incipient dictatorship, you have to do it before all those elements are in place. Which is what I’ve been doing.
Trump is in fact putting those elements in place, and his administration has quietly erected another one, which I just wrote about in The UnPopulist. This was the lead item in my Executive Watch roundup for a week or so ago, and my new piece expands on it.
[Trump’s] campaign for reprisals against political opponents temporarily foundered when FCC head Brendan Carr’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel’s show proved too open and reminiscent of a mob boss. Yet this is one of the big projects of Trump’s second term, which he is now pursuing through a larger, more sweeping, effort: a presidential national security directive called “NSPM-7” that lays the groundwork for a regime of full-blown ideological censorship, designating as “terrorists” the advocates of commonplace views protected by the First Amendment.
I present a quick recent history of Trump’s attempt to label anyone who disagrees with him as “antifa” and a “terrorist,” then I go into detail about the “NSPM-7.”
All of this is now being codified in a presidential directive known in the White House by the somewhat pretentious acronym NSPM-7, because it is Trump’s seventh “National Security Presidential Memorandum.” It was issued somewhat quietly but brought to wider attention by independent investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein, who points out that this is something more than just an executive order: “a national security directive is a sweeping policy decree for the defense, foreign policy, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus.”
This vast array of national security agencies is to be brought to bear on “left-wing terrorism”—which is then defined to include a broad collection of ordinary, even mainstream political viewpoints.
If you want to know if you will be targeted by this, or if you imagine you won’t be—well, here’s the list from the memorandum.
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
Remember that this is a list of “indicia” or indicators of terrorism. As I point out, only one of these, “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” actually qualifies as advocacy of political violence. As for “extremism,” that is a “rubber term” that can just as easily apply to Trump’s policies.
But that’s the point of expressing all of this in vague and undefined terminology. It creates a category so flexible that it can include any of the administration’s enemies—but never the administration itself or its friends.
The “indicia” that should concern, well, everyone, is “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” which adds a theocratic element to this memo and can be applied most broadly.
For many decades “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”—at least, as those traditions are defined by the religious right—have been on the decline. A traditional view on family, for example, would be opposition to gay marriage—which has been the law of the land for a decade now and is widely accepted. And if you look at the non-traditional structure of Donald Trump’s own family—kids from multiple marriages and a long history of flagrant infidelity—even he wouldn’t measure up.
A Pew survey a few years ago found the number of Americans who identify as Christians has declined from 90% in the 1990s to 64% today. Those who list their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular”—a mix of atheists, agnostics, and the merely uncommitted—are about 30% of the population. Combine this with liberal Catholics (such as the first American pope) and moderate mainline Protestants, and it is almost certain that what the Trump administration regards as “traditional American views on religion” are held only by a minority in this country.
That’s the central goal of NSPM-7: to establish special privileges for a conservative ideological minority, whose views are to be protected from certain forms of criticism or opposition, with such criticism in some cases treated as literal terrorism.
Now, the editors at The UnPopulist made me add in “in some cases,” and I didn’t fight it. But cautious understatement regarding the Trump administration’s authoritarian ambitions has not usually been warranted. The evidence so far indicates that these guys intend to go all the way. They’re just trying to work up the nerve for it and test how much they can get away with.
I think it’s fair to guess that a lot of the people on the mailing list for this newsletter hold views that do not conform to and are critical of “traditional American views” on religion and morality. At the very least, you are probably critical of what the Trump administration would choose to define as “traditional.”
This is partly because they are entirely wrong about what they regard as traditional. Their view of American tradition excludes almost all of our actual traditions, very definitely including the American view of religion, because “traditional American views” are broadly liberal. They’re about independence, equality, and individualism—not authority, obedience, and conformity.
But everything we’ve seen from this administration indicates that they will interpret “traditional American views” as narrowly as possible, putting most of us on the other side. And the whole point of this directive is to use the power of the state to cut off organized advocacy of those ideas “before they result in violent political acts,” that is, while they are still in the realm of ideas and advocacy.
This puts all of us in danger. It is an enabling directive that will make it possible for Trump to impose a comprehensive regime of ideological censorship.
Sherriff Weems-ism
If you want to see what this will look like in practice, I regret to inform you that it is already happening, on a small scale.
I have previously recommended to my readers the work of Nashville-area investigative reporter Phil Williams, and he has a revealing new report on the case of Larry Bushart, who has been languishing in a Tennessee jail for more than a month for posting a meme to Facebook.
No, really, that’s what he’s in for.
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