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Trump’s “Personal Touch”

Published by digby on March 14, 2025

It’s called “patrimonialism”

Donald Trump held a press availability with the NATO Secretary the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte on Thursday which was anticipated to be a bit contentious considering Trump’s hostility to the alliance. After all he has made it very clear that he has nothing but contempt for the organization and could be expected to pull the U.S. out of it with the smallest provocation. And he was already very angry that Europe was retaliating against the tariffs he had enacted for no reason, writing on Truth Social that the EU is “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.” His fuse was short.

But Rutte was deferential to Trump, laughing excitedly at his “jokes” and making sure to let him know how much he appreciated him and it seemed to loosen the president up. He regaled the press with anecdotes about how he “invaded Los Angeles” and reiterated his plan to seize Greenland saying “Denmark is very far away. A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually” before declaring that there may have to be more soldiers there. He called the EU “nasty” and again made it clear that he is dead serious about annexing Canada:

He seemed, as he often does lately, more than a little bit off his rocker. But the demands for obeisance from everyone around him, foreign and domestic, aren’t new. It’s just that now that he believes that he’s achieved vindication for his Big Lie about the 2020 election and all the criminal and civil investigations from which he escaped, he’s demonstrating that he’ll use the power of the United States government to punish any offender if they look at him sideways.

In the last administration Vice President Mike Pence set the standard for adoring toadyism but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has taken it to a whole new level in this term:

As Bloomberg reported, Lutnick is very upfront about what Trump expects:

Lutnick says Europe and Canada are being disrespectful and Trump is growing tired of it. “If you make him unhappy, he responds unhappy,” Lutnick said of Trump’s threat to put a 200% tariff on wine, champagne and other alcoholic beverages from France and elsewhere in the EU.

It’s been clear since the campaign that he was serious about exacting revenge on his enemies and he’s doing just that, every day. (He’s even going after the law firms that defended them.) But never let it be said that Trump doesn’t also do favors for his friends. Just this week it was reported that his DOJ (and it is “his”) fired a pardon attorney for balking at restoring his friend Mel Gibson’s gun rights without any vetting. (He was convicted of very serious domestic violence.)

And everyone knows that if you want an exemption from Trump’s tariffs, you have to ask very nicely and even then he might or might not agree. The same holds true for the DOGE billionaire Elon Musk who is in charge of destroying the federal government. CNN reported that he met with Republican lawmakers and gave them his phone number if they wanted to make the case to him directly to reverse a cut that hurts their constituents. (Needless to say, Democrats have not been offered the same privilege.)

I think everyone has struggled to perfectly define what’s going on here. Is this autocracy, oligarchy, kakistocracy? Is Trump simply out of control, behaving like a Mad King, even worse than the one this country rebelled against in the first place? A widely read Atlantic article from last month by Jonathan Rauch gives a definition to the process that makes the most sense to me. He reaches back to German sociologist Max Weber who defined this as something called “patrimonialism.”

Weber believed that rulers gain legitimacy from two one of two systems, the first being what Rausch calls “rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms.” That would be the system we have been operating under since the founding of our country under the Constitution. Patrimonialism is the system under which nearly everyone on earth lived until pretty recently in human history. Quoting a book called  The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, by Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, this is defined as the state being “little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler. Rausch writes:

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.

That’s what Trump and Musk are in the process of creating — a pre-modern patrimonial government where everything is decided through them on a personal basis.

Rausch makes the case that this is not necessarily authoritarian since authoritarian systems like Hitler’s Germany or the Soviet Union were heavily bureaucratized. It can even begin as a democracy. But over time it almost always devolves into autocracy.

Rausch says that patrimonialism has two inherent weaknesses that make it vulnerable: incompetence and corruption. Once you chase out all the people who know how to make things run (bureaucrats) and allow corruption to supercede the needs of the people it breaks down.

Rausch says, “corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you.” It’s the most potent argument against this patrimonial presidency, that’s for sure.

I’ve never understood why more wasn’t made of Trump’s outright corruption in his first term. Now they are just waving it in our faces and it’s a thousand times more blatant. Musk waving around a chainsaw and Trump hawking Teslas on the White House driveway last week says it all. Let’s hope the opposition can get it together enough to pound that message home this time.

Salon

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