Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely. We agree on the basic haphazardist account of the Trump presidency — that it is taking authoritarian actions without effectively changing the operating logic of the system to sustain an unfair lock on political power.
Author: Zack Beauchamp
Published at: 2025-12-15 23:27:41
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