Despite its chest-beating rhetoric, President Trump’s regime is actually brittle and fated for ineffectiveness, collapse or both.
Americans may be startled by the all-encompassing nature of the regime, but it’s nothing new. History has seen many examples of regimes consisting of an all-powerful leader who makes all the decisions and who is surrounded by sycophantic underlings ruling over weak institutions and using their positions as platforms for self-enrichment.
Such regimes aren’t just run-of-the-mill dictatorships, as dictators don’t always enjoy untrammeled authority and obedience. In fact, Trump’s second administration resembles totalitarian political systems characterized by omnipotent rulers who claim to know everything about the totality of human experience, who aspire to supervise, guide and mold that totality. Unsurprisingly, totalitarian leaders often have revolutionary agendas intended to change everything according to the leader’s taste.
Such regimes look strong, because omnipotent leaders usually project a powerful, masculine image as exceptionally wise, fearless and capable rulers. In reality, their systems suffer from a fatal flaw, one that also serves as the central organizing principle of the regime: hyper-centralization.
The most important contribution to the theory of totalitarian decay belongs to the brilliant Harvard University sociologist Karl Deutsch. In a seminal article published in 1954, Deutsch constructed an ideal-type “totalitarian decision system.” A key function of such a system is “unity of command and of intelligence,” which “requires some machinery either to insure a single source of decision, or a set of arrangements or devices to insure consistency of decisions among several sources.”
Deutsch went on to show how such a system necessarily had a “limited capacity of centralized decision-making.” The result is that the system would be “overloaded with decisions with which it can no longer cope, except at the price of either intolerable delays or an increasing probability of potentially critical mistakes.”
“In the long run,” according to Deutsch, “there is thus perhaps inherent in every totalitarian system of government a tendency either toward overloading of its central facilities for the making of decisions, or toward an automatic corrosion of its original centralized structure and its disintegration into increasingly separate parts.”
In other words, hyper-centralized systems result in poor information, bad decisions, a weakening of the totalitarian ruler and the insubordination of subordinates — followed by the system’s collapse.
Disregard the social-science jargon and notice that Deutsch’s model nicely describes the Trump administration. The putatively omniscient and omnipotent president occupies the apex. Just below him are a score of fulsome yes-ministers too terrified to provide him with correct information or disagree with his views. Existing governmental institutions are being eviscerated by Elon Musk, leaving their remaining employees in exceedingly vulnerable, atomized positions that encourage buck-passing, kicking the can down the road and many other dysfunctional behaviors that merely compound the structural inability of the system to make decisions efficiently and effectively.
The president’s seeming disregard for truth may be due to the fact that he is being told what he wants to hear and not what actually is. How else can one explain such whoppers as Trump’s claim that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity is at 4 percent and not, as polls show, over 50 percent? Or that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia? Sycophants court the ruler’s favor, and they know full well that being the bearers of bad (or accurate) news can get them into trouble.
Unsurprisingly, Deutsch’s model is also an accurate description of Vladimir Putin’s regime. And, as the theory leads us to expect, Putin has managed to devastate the Russian army and economy in just three years, even as he believes, perhaps sincerely, that he has made Russia great again.
The first few weeks of Trump’s rule have already involved enormous blunders. Insulting scores of allies —Canadians, Mexicans, Panamanians, Europeans and Ukrainians — was surely unnecessary, even if one grants that Trump’s absurd demands were justified. Appointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center may be too much of a challenge for any president, even as it makes perfect sense in terms of his self-image as absolute ruler. Placing all his foreign policy hopes in Putin’s basket is asking for the Russian to make Trump look weak and silly.
Just as Putin has been a disaster for Russia, so too Trump will be a disaster for America. Fortunately, although hyper-centralization may sound like a good idea for a man who believes he is ushering in a golden age, it doesn’t work. Unbeknownst to them, both Trump and Putin are fated to find permanent residence on the ash heap of history.
The other bit of good news is that, since both men are at the cores of the hyper-centralized systems they have constructed, those systems are unlikely to survive in their absence. There is hope for a restoration of democracy in America, and perhaps even in Russia.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
