For those who have not seen President Trump’s AI-generated video, posted after the No Kings protests last weekend, I suggest that you watch. Here is a link. Don’t watch because it’s funny or amusing. Watch because, as I wrote in the Atlantic, it places Trump squarely in a long tradition of autocratic leaders who seek to defeat their opponents through lies, slander, mockery and disgust.

Just as the Chinese leadership once described participants in popular, broad-based Hong Kong protests as “thugs” and “radicals,” the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, said before Saturday’s protest that the only people protesting would be “Marxists” or “pro-Hamas.” Just as Russian President Vladimir Putin has called democracy protesters “paid agents of the West”—he once even claimed that Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country”—Ted Cruz, among others, insinuated that the millions of American protesters were paid by George Soros. A host of Republicans tried to portray the protesters as dangerous or treasonous, or else, paradoxically, as elderly and ineffective.

For those using the oldest tools in the authoritarian playbook, the nature of the smear is unimportant. What matters is the intention behind it: Don’t answer your critics. Don’t argue with them. Don’t let them win over anyone else. Describe them as dangerous radicals even when they wear frog costumes. Imply, without evidence, that they were bribed to speak out, because there can’t possibly be any sincere idealists who criticize the Party and its Leader out of a genuine desire to help other Americans. Dump AI-generated sewage on their heads to discourage anyone else from joining them. And if they keep coming out, make the messages even harsher.

What could happen next? There are precedents for that too:

Protests could fizzle out, as often happens, because mocking, angry, and, in this case, scatological propaganda discourages people from joining them. Or the official reaction to them could turn uglier: Anyone who objects to the Party or the Leader will be described as not really American, not eligible for the rights of a citizen, not really entitled to protest at all. In authoritarian countries, state institutions—tax authorities, regulators, political police—would then begin to pursue them. That isn’t supposed to happen in America, but then, this isn’t an ordinary American political cycle.

Alternatively, the people who showed up on Saturday might be inspired to do more. For years, Americans at protests have been chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.” But the No Kings marches are actually what free speech looks like. Democracy looks different. Democracy requires organized politics, support for candidates, the creation of broad coalitions. Protests can only create enthusiasm, spread goodwill, and inspire people to dedicate time and energy to real political change. And the people who created the sewage video knew that too.

[Read the whole thing here]

In truth, the administration’s unannounced destruction of the East Wing of the White House reflects a similar kind of disdain, and belongs to a similar kind of tradition. Ignoring the National Capital Planning Commission, eschewing the deference that presidents have usually shown to public opinion and precedent, Trump sent in the bulldozers before anyone was able to stop them.

The message is the same as in the AI video: Trump doesn’t care about public opinion, or that it belongs to the American nation rather than himself, or that it was the product of Thomas Jefferson’s belief in order, proportion, and discipline. He believes that only he can decide what it should look like, and he wants it to reflect his Mar-a-Lago taste: bigger, uglier, with the Rose Garden covered in concrete and fake gold ornaments pasted onto the walls of the Oval Office. He is discarding history, tradition and propriety, destroying a symbol that belongs to all of us, weakening one of the few remaining images that unite us.

He is also doing so at the cost of $300 million, thanks to donations from wealthy Americans under conditions that are unclear. Why have Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, the Winkelvoss brothers, the family of Howard Lutnick and more than a dozen others given money to this project? What do they hope to receive in exchange? Secrecy is another hallmark of authoritarianism, and so are permanent conflicts of interest. Plenty of those surround this project too.

Kleptocracy Tracker, White House edition

In light of all that, I am continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and Trump administration policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc.) Here is this week’s edition:

October 18

• The Department of Homeland Security spent $172 million on private jets for Secretary Kristi Noem and other senior government officials—marking the latest in a series of lavish expenditures by Noem to draw scrutiny.
• Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety—a former chemical industry lobbyist—is poised for Senate confirmation.

October 20

• Fox News host Laura Ingraham joined Donald Trump Jr. as a director of Colombier Acquisition Corp. III, a special-purpose acquisition company seeking to raise $260 million in an initial public offering.

October 21

• President Trump demanded $230 million from the Department of Justice as compensation for investigations into his conduct—a request that will be reviewed by Trump’s former personal defense attorneys and other allies he has installed at the department.
• The US Army is courting private equity firms, including Cerberus Capital Management—founded by Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg—for investment opportunities across the service branch’s infrastructure projects.
• Trump fired the Export-Import Bank’s inspector general, marking the removal of nearly two dozen watchdogs responsible for overseeing fraud and mismanagement across federal agencies.

October 23

• Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of violating U.S. anti–money laundering laws, after the crypto firm heavily promoted the World Liberty Financial stablecoin—paving the way for Binance to resume operations in the United States.

   

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  Transnational Repression: the To-Read List

  Even as the United States stops promoting or even talking about democracy, the autocratic world continues not only to advertise and promote dictatorship, but to break the laws of the democratic world in pursuit of their dissidents. I wrote about this phenomenon back in 2021, after the Belarusian dictator forced a Ryanair flight out of the sky in order to arrest an activist on it:

  This is a story that belongs alongside the Russian use of radioactive poisons and nerve agents against enemies of the Kremlin in London and Salisbury, England; Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of one of its citizens inside a consulate in Istanbul; Iranian assassinations of dissidents in the Netherlands and Turkey; and Beijing’s kidnapping and detention of Chinese nationals living abroad and foreign citizens of Chinese origin. The human-rights organization Freedom House calls these new practices “transnational repression,” and has compiled more than 600 examples.

  All of these cases form part of what is becoming a new norm: Authoritarian states in pursuit of their enemies no longer feel the need to respect passports, borders, diplomatic customs, or—now—the rules of air-traffic control.

  This week, the Kremlin announced it was launching terrorist investigations of more than 20 Russian anti-war activists, all of whom live outside the country. Nataliya Vasilyeva of The New York Times notes that all of them belong to the Russian Antiwar Committee—a group of lawyers, law professors and exiled politicians led by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oligarch turned outspoken Kremlin critic. The investigation is the latest example of Russian state power—which has often included poisonings and shootings—being deployed against perceived enemies abroad. Read more here (gift link).

   

  China, meanwhile, has established shadow law enforcement agencies to harass its citizens the world, report Michael Forsythe, Jay Root, Bianca Pallaro, and David A. Fahrenthold, also for The New York Times. In 2023, for example, the FBI arrested the operators of a covert Chinese police station in New York, which tried to influence the behavior of citizens abroad by threatening their family members back home. Chinese consulate officials have also enlisted members of Chinese Communist Party–backed social clubs to harass and intimidate local politicians in New York who support Taiwan or are otherwise critical of the People’s Republic of China. China’s global influence apparatus has also harassed exiles in France, bribed academics in Britain, and targeted politicians in Canada for decades. Read more here (gift link).

   

  Smaller illiberal states are also capable of reaching beyond their borders. Rwanda’s longtime leader, Paul Kagame, has targeted political enemies in exile as well. In his review of Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong, Phil Clark writes about the 2014 assassination of exiled Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya, who had founded an opposition political party. Read more here (gift link).

  To sum up, Nate Schenkkan argues in the Journal of Democracy that we are living in a golden age of transnational repression, thanks to the decline of international law and the rise of sophisticated information and surveillance technologies. As autocracies around the world become more networked and coordinated, their ability to reach dissidents beyond their borders will only continue to grow. Read more here.

Afternoon in Antwerp

Rain, Rubens, a 15th century printers’ workshop, an 18th century Cicero. Plus sculpture on buildings. I would have liked another day.

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