Unmasking Trump: The Weakness That Could Bring Him Down

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Podcast 126

By Jackalyn Rainosek, PhD

The Power of Knowing the Truth

I have no idea how many 1,000s of articles I have read in the last ten years to be able to confront the various obnoxious and harmful things that Trump has done. I finally found an article that literally describes what he is doing and how his style has all kinds of weakness. It is clear how he can be destroyed so it is important for you to listen carefully or read my blog to know exactly what he is doing.

Taking Action: How We Can Stop Trump and Musk

In the podcast I will also be providing ways that people are taking significant actions to stop Trump and Musk from doing what they are doing. You and I need to be educated about what we know and then share it with others. We also need to appreciate the media that keeps us up to date with the next things Trump thinks he will get away with and then the courts and many lawyers and organization step it to stop him. They are both vulnerable and have not created savings by their firings and destruction of agencies.  They are spending yours and my money on all these legal actions that have been brought again both of them by using the Justice Department as their personal legal team.

The Atlantic’s Revelations: Exposing Trump’s Game Plan

The Atlantic on February 24, 2025, 6 AM ET by Jonathan Rauch entitled, “ONE WORD DESCRIBES TRUMP,” which tells us all exactly what Donald Trump is doing. I have never been so relieved to have this article since now I understand and so can you what his game plan is. Now we can counter and discuss in detail what we can all do. Here is the article that I have quoted directly from or summarized some of it:

“Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.”

Two professors published a book, The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine. They bring to our attention a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms. That is the American system we all took for granted until January 20. Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear an oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—’the default form of rule in the premodern world,’ Hanson and Kopstein write. ‘The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.’ Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

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.”

The Fatal Weakness of Patrimonialism

“In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business. It can be found in many countries, but its main contemporary exponent—at least until January 20, 2025—has been Vladimir Putin. In the first portion of his rule, he ran the Russian state as a personal racket. State bureaucracies and private companies continued to operate, but the real governing principle was Stay on Vladimir Vladimirovich’s good side … or else.

Seeking to make the world safe for gangsterism, Putin used propaganda, subversion, and other forms of influence to spread the model abroad. Over time, the patrimonial model gained ground in states as diverse as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and India. Gradually (as my colleague Anne Applebaum has documented), those states coordinated in something like a syndicate of crime families—’working out problems,’ write Hanson and Kopstein in their book, ‘divvying up the spoils, sometimes quarreling, but helping each other when needed. Putin in this scheme occupied the position of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses. Until now. Move over, President Putin.”

It is important to understand the source of Trump’s hold on power so we can see the main weakness defined in the article. It requires us to understand what patrimonialism is not. “It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic.”

“Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos. They legitimate their power with legal codes and constitutions. Orwell understood the bureaucratic aspect of classic authoritarianism; in 1984, Oceania’s ministries of Truth (propaganda), Peace (war), and Love (state security) are the regime’s most characteristic (and terrifying) features.

By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So, patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

Also, unlike classic authoritarianism, patrimonialism can coexist with democracy, at least for a while. As Hanson and Kopstein write, A leader may be democratically elected but still seek to legitimate his or her rule patrimonially. Increasingly, elected leaders have sought to demolish bureaucratic administrative states (deep states, they sometimes call them) built up over decades in favor of rule by family and friends. India’s Modi, Hungary’s Orbán, and Trump himself are examples of elected patrimonial leaders—and ones who have achieved substantial popular support and democratic legitimacy. Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the “unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government” be ‘responsive to the people.’

Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism. ‘Electoral processes and constitutional norms cannot survive long when patrimonial legitimacy begins to dominate the political arena,’ write Hanson and Kopstein.

Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor.

To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal. ‘He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is,’ John Bolton said, who served as national security adviser in Trump’s first term, told The Bulwark. As one prominent Republican politician recently told me, understanding Trump is simple: ‘If you’re his friend, he’s your friend. If you’re not his friend, he’s not your friend.’ This official chose to be Trump’s friend. Otherwise, he said, his job would be nearly impossible for the next four years.

Patrimonialism explains what might otherwise be puzzling. Every policy the president cares about is his personal property. Trump dropped the federal prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams because a big-city mayor is a useful thing to have. He broke with 50 years of practice by treating the Justice Department as “his personal law firm.” He treats the enforcement of duly enacted statutes as optional—and, what’s more, claims the authority to indemnify lawbreakers. He halted proceedings against January 6 thugs and rioters because they are on his side. His agencies screen hires for loyalty to him rather than to the Constitution.

In Trump’s world, federal agencies are shut down on his say-so without so much as a nod to Congress. Henchmen with no statutory authority barge into agencies and take them over. A loyalist who had only ever managed two small nonprofits is chosen for the hardest management job in government. Conflicts of interest are tolerated if not outright blessed. Prosecutors and inspectors general are fired for doing their job. Thousands of civil servants are converted to employment at the president’s will. Former officials’ security protection is withdrawn because they are disloyal. The presidency itself is treated as a business opportunity.

Yet when Max Weber saw patrimonialism as obsolete in the era of the modern state, he was not daydreaming. As Hanson and Kopstein note, ‘Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.’ They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings.

The first is incompetence. ‘The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,’ write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are ‘simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,’ they write. ‘At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.’ Already, the administration seems bent on debilitating as much of the government as it can. Some examples of incompetence, such as the reported firing of staffers who safeguard nuclear weapons and prevent bird flu, would be laughable if they were not so alarming.

Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging. Read: This is what happens when the DOGE guys take over

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, ‘I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.’ (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: ‘It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.’)

The Democratic Uprising: Fighting Back Against Trump and Musk

The Washington Post article, “A populist uprising stirs among Democratic furious at their leaders,” by Maeve Reston on March 27, 2025, gave us multiple examples of people coming to Democratic meetings of congressional representative in thousands across the country. They want action by Democrats in congress against President Trump’s drastic cuts to government agencies and demanding that their leaders fight harder to save programs that benefit the middle class.” Reston gives you plenty of comments from angry attendees at these meetings.

Now, remember in my past podcast, I commented on the angry crowds that Republican congressional members had at their town hall meetings, so they went to phone calls to control the angry crowds, or they were told to stop having the meetings.

Another Washington Post article written by Paul Kane “Democrats confront the wrath of their voters, just as Republicans have,” March 22, 2025, make clear they see the democratic leaders capitulating to Trump and Musk rather than taking a stand. I appreciate this vote, which is so true—’ Rather than relying on a base of voters cheering them on, congressional Democrats are confronting liberal activists who deem their timidity toward fighting President Donald Trump and Republicans as a failure for this particular moment. Until now, Democratic voters have mostly favored good governance over the confrontational and chaotic tactics that conservative tea party types have used to drive GOP leaders crazy for 15 years. Yet there are crowds pouring out to cheer liberal icons promising to fight Trump, having a similar fervor to those that showed up to the April 2009 tax day protects that launched the tea party.’

With the poll counts from this article they show two polls naming specific congressmembers who are losing ground to the ones that want to fight Trump and Musk. “Roughly 6 in 10 Democrats want their party to take the fight to Trump and Republicans, particularly after Elon Musk has been given free rein to lead a chainsaw-wielding approach to dismantling congressionally sanctioned federal agencies.”

“How Democrats can seize this moment” in The Washington Post on March 27, 2025, is the latest ‘impromptu’ debate among columnists about who can turn Democrats around. Some of the things they think need to be addressed are:

  • Face the fact that for decades the government has needed to be seriously evaluated, reformed and streamlined. “Which they refused to do because they were the party of ever-expanding government.”
  • They need to focus on all the people that are joining them in this fight that want them to focus on all of the people not specific groups.
  • Recognize that AOC’s or Bernie Sanders’ are bringing very large crowds out across the country. They are lining up, excited and we should value what we are seeing.

You are going to want to hear and read “Tim Walz Attacks Musk With Language From the Trump Playbook”—“The Minnesota governor derided Elon Musk, a naturalized United States citizen, as a ‘South African nepo baby” in The New York Times article by Jess Bidgood onMarch 19, 2025. “Mr. Walz, his party’s nominee for vice president last year, is one of several Democrats who have referred to Mr. Musk’s immigrant background as they ramp up attacks on the billionaire’s powerful role in the Trump administration. At times, their language, casting Mr. Musk as foreign outsider, has echoed aspects of President Trump’s own xenophobic insults of his political foes—although Mr. Trump’s remarks were typically directed toward elected officials of color, not white billionaires.’ It’s not just Democrats that aimed comments at Musk. ‘Stephen K. Bannon, one of Mr. Trump’s chief White Housse strategists during his first term, last month, derided Mr. Musk as a ‘parasitic illegal immigrant’ who lacked ‘respect for the country’s history, values or traditions.’”

Times article “Democrat Angie Craig on How to Win Back Rural Midwestern Voters by Charlotte Alter on March 14, 2025, at 10:18 AM CT has some wise and precise ways she won in a rural district. Here are some of her comments on how she won:

“People in a purple district in Minnesota that I represent, their primary concern is keeping their community safe. They have someone in Washington who is going to work to support the police, who’s going to work to secure the southern boarders, who’s going to make sure that we keep fentanyl out of our country. But we can have a secure border and a big gate that allows immigrants through into America. We do not have to choose between the two.

And I’m going to work to lower costs and put more money in your pocket. I think as a party, we get pretty caught up in a lot of other issues, and they aren’t the issues that my swing voter is talking about when I’m home.”

She believes the winning platform for Democrats is “the child tax credit over and over again comes back as the most substantial benefit to our economy from an investment perspective. Housing is something that we should be talking about more. How do we make sure that people have a good job, that their paycheck goes far enough to be able to buy a home. “Hakeem Jeffries gets it. The language that I’ve heard him using since we came back from this last election is very encouraging. How do we lower costs? And how do we keep our community safe? I’m hearing him say that, and that was the winning message in my outperformance this last election cycle.

3,14 Action Fund is reminding us this fact: House Republicans started off the year defending the SMALLEST majority in Congress history since the 1930s (218 to hold a majority). There are 213 Democrats and 118 Republicans. There are 4 vacant positions. “Fact: Polling shows that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans are becoming incredibly UNPOPULAR with party leadership ordering House Republicans to cancel ALL town halls and public events.”

“The Republic won’t save itself” How to fight back against an anti-Constitution president by Austin Weatherford on Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 9:13 AM from brightamerica@substack.com has a tremendous message for us. He says, “Let’s suspend the pleasantries and acknowledge reality, we’re experiencing a constitutional crisis with a president who is acting like an absolute monarch. I served as Director of Republicans for Harris within the presidential campaign. If you told me when I started my career in Republican politics, some 25 years ago, that I’d be working to elect a Democrat, I’d have thought you were crazy! But what that kid would have found even crazier, perhaps even impossible, is that his party would be the one to abandon its principles in favor of a cult personality. They say that the courts are the last federal check left until at least 2026, and that is the reason that are thrilled to fuel a major lawsuit by our strategic partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) to put an end to Elon Musk’s illegal and unconstitutional takeover of federal government decisions.

Conclusion

Now that we understand the full scope of what Trump is doing—and the weakness embedded in his approach—we have the power to act. Patrimonialism thrives on deception, personal loyalty, and an erosion of democratic institutions, but it crumbles under the weight of accountability and exposure. The courts, investigative journalists, and citizens committed to truth are already working to hold him and his enablers, like Musk, in check. The challenge before us is clear: we must stay informed, share what we learn, and take collective action to ensure that democracy prevails over corruption. Trump and Musk may believe they are untouchable, but history has proven that systems built on lies and exploitation always collapse. Our responsibility is to accelerate that collapse by speaking up, voting, and supporting those on the front lines of justice. The fight is not over—but we now know exactly how to win.

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