Welcome to the nihilocracy
Trump is blowing up essential functions in ways that might take decades or longer to restore. It is nihilistic and deserves a new name.
In many ways, President Donald Trump is a dangerously cartoonish version of his role model autocrats and dictators: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Mohammed bin Salman, Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But in one respect, he is different. The others at least want their governments to function. Trump, however, is operating by blowing up essential functions in ways that might take decades or longer to restore. It is nihilistic and deserves a new name—nihilocracy.
Trump checks most autocrat boxes. Cult of personality? Trump has put his picture everywhere he can, and his Cabinet meetings are devoted more to slavish compliments than to substance. His reported golf scores and “championships” resemble Kim’s boasts of superhuman prowess, and AI-generated pictures of Trump with a body Arnold Schwarzenegger would envy are littered all over Truth Social. For most dictators, this is a natural part of building loyalty in a country; with Trump, it is also his ingrained grandiosity, the product of his lifelong narcissism.
Corruption? Putin and Erdogan, have shown Trump the way, even as he has outdistanced them in open and blatant moves to enrich himself and his family, including high charges for rooms, golf carts and more for the Secret Service members who protect him, selling access through million-dollar private or semi-private dinners, and his cryptocurrency. As David Frum wrote in the Atlantic, “There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.”
Fealty? Every dictator surrounds himself with lickspittles and sycophants and ensures that everyone else in a position of authority is first and foremost loyal to the dictator, not the country’s constitution, laws, rules, or national interest. Trump failed at this in his first term, with several of his administration figures putting country and law first; he has made sure in this second that loyalty is the main, if not the only, consideration for a post. Now he is trying to take it to an even more absurd level: trying to require applicants for civil service jobs to sign a kind of loyalty oath to him, not the Constitution, the rule of law, or their sworn duties.
Punishing enemies and protecting and rewarding friends? Use of prosecutorial power and the investigative authority of agencies like the FBI to punish, humiliate, and bankrupt adversaries is a core feature of Trump and Trumpism. Proclaiming that former Trump official Miles Taylor committed treason for criticizing Trump’s actions in his first term, investigating Biden White House aides for their alleged cover-up of Biden’s health, having a U.S. Attorney charge a member of Congress conducting official business, and charging a judge with obstruction are all of a piece. On the other side is pardoning or commutating the sentences of every violent insurrectionist from Jan. 6, 2021, no matter the evidence against them, while having his pardon attorney effectively proclaim that the goal is to pardon every MAGA person loyal to Trump, including the most violent and corrupt.
Showing disregard for human life, including but not limited to your own country’s residents and citizens? Putin is fine with using hundreds of thousands of young Russian men as fodder to carry out his invasion of Ukraine. Xi sends millions of Uighurs to the equivalent of concentration camps. Kim starves, tortures, and kills dissidents. MBS assassinates foes and cuts limbs off others. But Trump showed in his first term, with the callous disregard for the hundreds of thousands who died from Covid because of his policies, that indifference to lives was a feature, not a bug, of his governance. Add his use of child separation and masked operatives manhandling families going to immigration hearings, sending people without hearings to a hellhole prison in El Salvador, and attempting to send others with no ties to the country to Libya to the roster.
The real difference between Trump and the others was heralded in his first run, when campaign manager Steve Bannon called for “deconstruction of the administrative state.” That goal, of course, was not achieved then—but it and Bannon were supplanted in Trump’s second term by Elon Musk, DOGE and Project 2025. The latter’s progenitor and major force, Russ Vought, became key to Trump’s second term, with Vought taking the role of head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget.
The result is that in less than five months, vital government agencies, bureaus, and programs have been obliterated and left without the talent or the resources to carry out their vital functions. It started with the U.S. Agency for International Development, destroying a key part of American diplomacy. The experienced civil servants running programs that ranged from humanitarian assistance to economic development are nearly all gone, and the web of partners, such as Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children, were deeply damaged by the loss of resources. The immediate results have been tragic—over 300,000 unnecessary deaths from AIDS, other deadly diseases, and starvation. More broadly, the vital tool of development—supported by nearly every former top military leader as a way to avoid war and by the business community because vibrant economies are good for the American economy and its businesses—is nearly gone, leaving the field to China. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s move to hollow out the diplomatic corps by getting rid of 18% of the State Department staff will deal a serious blow to American diplomacy.
Trump’s threats to our allies, including NATO, and embrace of our enemies have made our national security more vulnerable to terrorist threats. Our partners are now reluctant to share sensitive intelligence, fearing that it would be exposed to Russia. And many threats from terrorist groups have been thwarted by warnings from our allies. And high tariffs and threats of tariffs have breached trust across the globe and threatened broader economic catastrophe, including the decline of the dollar as the international currency.
The same is true of vital health agencies, like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA,) the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, losing key scientists and medical professionals and eliminating clinical trials and blocking the development of vaccines for deadly viruses. The medical research into the widest range of diseases that made the U.S. the global leader has been eviscerated, including governmental partnerships with universities. Drug safety is damaged, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to remove standards for supplements threatens deaths from unregulated substances. Cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs will make veterans with PTSD more vulnerable to suicide.
A slew of other agencies and their key personnel have been blown up as well, from the Justice Department’s civil rights and voting rights divisions, the Public Integrity Section, and the criminal division to the Federal Aviation Administration’s aviation safety specialists, to the FBI’s special agents, the latter adding to the threat of domestic or international terrorist attacks. Even as agents are purged, many others have been redirected from terrorist threats to aiding Trump and his henchmen in their goal to deport millions of undocumented individuals and families.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is on its way out, while the meteorologists and other experts in charge of forecasting weather disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods have been shown the door—just as we approach hurricane season. Amid an e. Coli outbreak, food safety inspectors are out on the street. Trump’s pledge to eliminate the Department of Education has not been met, but federal support for education is being shredded, threatening students with special needs and potentially taking meals from students in need. Trump’s efforts to ban foreign students from universities will not just harm Harvard; most foreign students pay full tuition, meaning the loss of revenue will hit all colleges who rely on them to reduce costs for their other students, damaging all higher education—and adding to the trade deficit. And the companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that benefit from the talent from around the world that stays after getting advanced degrees will suffer as well.
There is also a double whammy built in by the Trumpists in Congress. Buried in the “big, beautiful bill” is a provision to sharply increase taxes on foundation endowments, something conservative Daniel Stid has written “could lead to profound changes in civil society—and not for the better.” Where federal aid is disappearing, foundations that can ease the trauma and dislocation will themselves be crippled if it passes.
Whether Trump meant DOGE to be a paper tiger or a serious effort, the reality was that Musk and his tech bro cohorts took a meat ax to a broad swath of the government, aided and abetted by radical or weak Cabinet officials and pliant members of Congress. And Trump, signing executive orders written by Vought, shows no qualms about blowing up the infrastructure of government, including public safety, economic well-being, and national security. Frantic efforts to bring back some who have been cut have been largely unsuccessful and are meant to stave off immediate catastrophe, not repair the damage long term.
Vought heralded this outcome with Project 2025 and his dictum that federal workers should be “traumatically affected” to the point that they would “not want to go to work.” Tragically, he is succeeding, and it will take decades to rebuild.
This is no ordinary autocracy in the making. It is far worse: a nihilocracy.
Norman Ornstein is a political scientist, co-host of the podcast “Words Matter,” and author of books, including “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”
