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In the global attention economy, one titan looms over all others. Donald Trump can command the gaze of the world at a click of those famously short fingers. When he stages a spectacular made-for-TV moment – say, that Oval Office showdown with Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the entire planet sits up and takes notice.
But that dominance has a curious side-effect. When Trump does something awful and eye-catching, nations tremble and markets move. But when he does something awful but unflashy, it scarcely registers. So long as there’s no jaw-dropping video, no expletive-ridden soundbite, no gimmick or stunt, it can slip by as if it hadn’t happened. Especially now that our senses are dulled through over-stimulation. These days it requires ever more shocking behaviour by the US president to prompt a reaction; we are becoming inured to him. Yet the danger he poses is as sharp as ever.
Consider the events of just the last week or so, few of them stark enough to lead global news bulletins, yet each one another step towards the erosion of democracy in and by the world’s most powerful country.
On Wednesday, Trump threatened to impose 50% tariffs – yes, he’s climbed back on that dead horse – on Brazil, if the judicial authorities there do not drop the prosecution of the country’s Trump-like former president Jair Bolsonaro, charged with seeking to overturn his 2022 election defeat and leading a coup against the man who beat him, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As concisely as he could manage, Lula explained, via social media, that Brazil is a sovereign country and that an independent judiciary cannot “accept interference or instruction from anyone … No one is above the law.”
This is becoming a habit of Trump’s. He made the same move in defence of Benjamin Netanyahu last month, hinting that Israel could lose billions in US military aid if the prime minister continues to stand trial on corruption charges. In both cases, Trump was explicit in making the connection between the accused men and himself, decrying as a “witch-hunt” the efforts to hold them to account. “This is nothing more, or less, than an attack on a Political Opponent,” he posted, of Bolsonaro’s legal woes. “Something I know much about!”
It’s easy to make light of the transparent effort by Trump to forge an international trade union of populist would-be autocrats, but he’s not solely moved by fraternal solidarity. He also wants to dismantle a norm that has long applied across the democratic world, which insists that even those at the top are subject to the law. That norm is an impediment to him, a check on his power. If he can discredit it, so that a new convention arises – one that agrees that leaders can act with impunity – that helps his animating project in the US: the amassing of ever more power to himself and the weakening or elimination of any rival source of authority that might act as a restraint.
He is being quietly assisted in that goal by those US institutions that should regard themselves as co-equal branches of government – Congress and the supreme court – and whose constitutional duty is to stand up to an overmighty executive. Republicans in Congress have now approved a mega bill that they know will leave future generations of Americans drowning in debt and deprive millions of basic healthcare cover. Even so, they put aside their own judgment and bowed to the man who would be king.
Less discussed was the bill’s extraordinary expansion of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice. Its budget has been increased by a reported 308%, with an extra $45bn to spend on detention and $29.9bn for “enforcement and deportation”. It will soon have the capacity to detain nearly 120,000 people at any one time. And, remember, latest figures show that about half of all those detained by Ice have no criminal record at all.
No wonder even conservative critics are sounding the alarm. The anti-Trump Republicans of the Bulwark warn that within months, the “national brute squad” that is Ice will have twice as many agents as the FBI and its own vast prison system, emerging as “the primary instrument of internal state power”. In this view, Trump has realised that corrupting the FBI is a tall order – though still worth trying – so he is supplanting it with a shadow force shaped in his own image. As the Bulwark puts it: “The American police state is here.”
Those most directly threatened might share clips of masked Ice agents snatching suspected migrants off the streets and manhandling them violently, just as reports circulate of appalling conditions in Ice premises, with people held in “dungeon-like facilities”, more than 100 crammed into a small room, denied showers or a chance to change clothes, and sometimes given only one meal a day and forced to sleep on concrete benches or the floor. But it is hardly a matter of national focus. Because it is not accompanied by a neon-lit Trump performance, it is happening just out of view.
The same could be said of a series of recent decisions by the supreme court. They may lack the instant, blockbuster impact of past rulings, but they accelerate the same Trump trend away from democracy and towards autocracy.
On Tuesday, the judges gave Trump the green light to fire federal workers en masse and to dismantle entire government agencies without the approval of Congress. Earlier, the supreme court had ruled that Trump was allowed to remove Democrats from the leadership of government bodies that are meant to be under politically balanced supervision.
More usefully still for Trump, last month the judges limited the power of the lower courts to block the executive branch, thereby lending a helping hand to one of the president’s most egregious executive orders: his ending of the principle that anyone born in the US is automatically a citizen of the US, a right so fundamental it is enshrined in the constitution. In ruling after ruling, the supreme court is removing restraints on Trump and handing him even more power. Small wonder that when one of the dissenting minority on the court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was asked on Thursday what kept her up at night, she answered: “The state of our democracy.”
Meanwhile, Trump is succeeding in his goal of cowing the press, extracting serious cash from major news organisations in return for dropping (usually flimsy) lawsuits against them, a move that is having the desired, chilling effect.
It all adds up to the steady erosion of US democracy and of democratic norms whose reach once extended far beyond US shores. Even if it is happening quietly, by Trump’s standards, without the familiar sound and fury, it is still happening. The work of opposing it begins with noticing it.
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Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
