America’s Authoritarian Remodel Is Well Underway

Over the past few weeks, the Trump Department of Justice has been assiduously scrubbing press releases relating to the January 6, 2021, convictions. Hundreds of these documents announcing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of people involved in the insurrection have simply vanished. It is an astoundingly Orwellian effort at erasing history, at the same time that the agency has created, with taxpayer money, a multi-billion dollar slush fund to reward these men and women who flirted with treason on that dark winter day.

As Trump’s popularity continues to plummet, his authoritarian instincts have kicked into an even higher gear. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump and his administration are corroding not only basic norms about what the public purse can be used for, but they are also marshaling the entire apparatus of the federal government to retell the story of the past decade in a way designed to make the president and his henchmen—including his paramilitaries outside of government—look anything but the traitors to democracy and decency that they so manifestly are.

At the same time, the Trump regime is also putting extraordinary pressure on public officials to meet self-imposed authoritarian  targets on everything from mass deportations to cult homages to Trump himself.

When it comes to the deportations, perhaps no case better illustrates the Kafkaesque depths that the bureaucracy is now plumbing than that of Levi Mendez-Maldonado, a young Honduran asylum seeker in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Mendez-Maldonado arrived, unaccompanied, as a 17-year-old, in 2022, at the height of the most recent surge of asylum seekers at the southern border. He spent a few months in Texas and then relocated to Charlotte, where an older brother lived. A little over two years later, Mendez-Maldonado was shot and killed. 

The young man’s immigration attorney, Becca O’Neill, co-director of the Carolina Migrant Network, only found out about his murder months later, when her office received his work permit and she tried to reach him to give him the document. Unable to locate him, she contacted his previous attorney, in Texas, who in turn reached out to his brother, who told the attorneys that Mendez-Maldonado had been murdered more than a year previously.

At the next court hearing scheduled for Mendez-Maldonado’s case, O’Neill told the judge that her client was no longer alive, and she presented media accounts and police reports about his death. Given the circumstances, O’Neill asked the judge to dismiss the case. But, presumably under pressure to rack up as many deportations as possible, the DHS attorney in the courtroom urged the judge, Amy Lee to instead sign a deportation order, using the impeccable logic that Mendez-Maldonado had failed to turn up for a mandatory court hearing, and that, therefore, under US law his asylum case would have to be denied.

Judge Lee agreed. And in what must surely count as one of the more bizarre legal rulings in American history, Lee ordered the dead man deported back to Honduras. “It’s a case of ‘you can’t make this shit up,’” O’Neill told me. “I thought I’d seen it all.” For the immigration attorney “it’s a demonstration of how crazy the whole system is. They care not whether some man lives or dies, and they don’t care about him after his death either. It’s just absurd. They have to strip people of their humanity to do what they’re doing.”

While the Mendez-Maldonado saga is just weird, the saga of the Palm Beach, Florida airport has far more concrete impacts. Earlier this year, Florida officials decided to rename the airport after one Donald J. Trump. Now, local commissioners have gone one step further, giving Trump carte blanche to milk the airport for profit in pretty much any way he sees fit.

In a branding deal almost as iniquitous as the fascist slush fund set up by the DOJ and IRS, Trump can now choose which vendors will be permitted to set up shop in the airport and what they can sell, including as much gaudy Trump merch as they can hawk. Trump and his family can monetize the airport name in any way they see fit. They will also have the right to choose exactly how his name, image, and likeness are presented at the airport. 

Imagine a hybrid offspring of fascism and hucksterism and you have the newly minted Trump international airport down to a tee. It’s yet another way that Trump has found to use his public office to generate private financial windfalls. And it’s yet another example of the craven ways that state and local officials are finding to curry favor with Trump.

Of course, America’s authoritarian remodeling wouldn’t be complete without a tribute to the most violent and crude manifestations of American culture. As Trump’s 80th birthday nears, workers at the South Lawn of the White House are feverishly putting the finishing touches to an enormous United Fight Championship venue, where thousands will be able to watch cage fights on June 14—and a spillover area for tens of thousands of additional fans to follow the fights on big screens situated around the grounds of the White House Ellipse—while Trump and his minions sit like power-crazed Roman elites, their eyes glued on these 21st-century gladiatorial combats. It’s not exactly a huge leap to imagine the Trump crowd giving the life-or-death imperial thumbs’ up or down at the end of these spectacles.

Some presidents invite top writers and musicians and artists and philosophers and scientists and civil rights icons to the White House; others, it seems, invite blood-and-guts fighters to ply their wares on the grounds of America’s temple to democracy. For Trump, America’s first post-literate president, these cage-fights, the weigh-ins for which will occur at the hallowed ground of the Lincoln Memorial, are perfect manifestations of the caudillo’s relationship to the mob that he has so assiduously cultivated.

There’s an ick factor to Trumpism that is getting worse by the day. This most malignant of men is making filthy nearly every public institution in the country. As the United States gears up to celebrate its 250th birthday, Trump and his sycophants are plotting evermore creative ways to pillage and to plunder, to besmirch the concept of America, and to mock the high ideals of democracy. There are reports of the Treasury planning to print as legal tender a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-bill with Trump’s image on it. There are plans afoot to include Trump’s portrait on passports issued this summer of America’s 250th anniversary. One can only begin to imagine what the Founding Fathers, those men who were so adamant that the new country should never have a king, would have thought of this narcissistic little man and his lickspittle enablers.