The Israel-Hamas peace plan brokered by Donald Trump has brought a ceasefire to Gaza. Yet as Robert H. Wade argues, this success has done little to dampen Trump’s appetite for waging war against his domestic political opponents.
It has been exhausting to follow the feverish news cycle in Washington during the first half of October. Every hour of every day brings a new shock. One shock has been positive, namely the deal substantially achieved by President Trump and the leaders of Qatar and Egypt for Hamas to release the hostages and Israel to stop – at least temporarily – its war in Gaza. If Trump had not invited Netanyahu to the White House and metaphorically put his hands to Netanyahu’s throat and said “sign this”, the deal would not have happened.
But the later-stage conditions of the deal make it very unlikely that its outcomes will bring anything close to “liberty and prosperity” for Gaza. Israel’s troops will remain in half of the area until Israel agrees that Hamas has completely disarmed, which means these troops may stay indefinitely. Even implementation of the near-term conditions depends on whether Trump remains engaged despite his short attention-span. It is strange that his government has not paused its domestic attack agenda for even a week to have the media focus on celebrating the Israel-Hamas Gaza deal.
Instead, it is pushing full steam ahead on the larger strategy to eviscerate the federal government (the “deep state”). The strategy was well signalled in advance. In 2021, JD Vance compared his ambition for the reform of the US government to US policy in postwar Iraq, stating that “we need like a de-Baathification programme, but a de-wokeification programme in the United States”. He went on to say that if and when Donald Trump returned to the White House, he should “fire ever single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.
Domestic chaos
Since the start of the second Trump government, many thousands of federal employees have been fired, and the firing or furloughing has intensified with the government shutdown in October. At the same time the president has been sending military troops onto the streets of Democrat-governed big cities like Chicago and Portland without the approval of the state or city government, in response to alleged crime waves – for which there is no evidence.
Trump declares “Portland is burning to the ground”, when the protests against the ICE agents operating in Portland to round up “illegal immigrants”, which have provided video scenes of police-protester violence from time to time, are confined to one city block. The larger purpose of the military on the streets of these cities seems to be to make voters – who vote majority Democrat – afraid to come out to vote in the approaching mid-term elections in 2026.
Watching television coverage and talking to people in Washington brings to mind the tactics enunciated by prominent Republican influencer Steve Bannon in November 2021. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” – meaning to bamboozle the public to the point where it mostly loses track of what the Trump government is doing to undermine US democracy, leaving people fearful and prone to supplicate or keep silent.
Trump and his government are empowered by the decision of the US Supreme Court during the campaign of the 2024 presidential election that the president has immunity from prosecution while performing the duties of the office. On taking office, Trump knew he would not face prosecution almost irrespective of what he did, which is something none of his predecessors knew.
Eroded state capacity
Trump has used government – particularly the Department of Justice – as an instrument of retribution against those he sees as “enemies” who do not submit to him, as though federal employees including the military owe their loyalty to him, not the Constitution. In October, a message Trump sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi, the head of the Department of Justice, was accidentally put into the public domain by Trump himself.
He told Bondi that the prosecutions against three named people – James Comey, former head of the FBI in the first Trump government, Letitia James, Attorney General of New York, and California Senator Adam Schiff – were going too slow and must be speeded up.
This is just one example among many of how Trump is using the Department of Justice as his personal law firm and the Attorney General as his personal lawyer. No other president has treated the Department of Justice in this way. No other president has gone so far in converting “rule of law” into “rule by law”. This indicates a serious erosion of US national “state capacity” going forward.
Some have speculated that one reason for the current federal government shutdown is that Speaker Mike Johnson does not want to call the House back into session because a newly elected Democrat – not yet sworn into office – has indicated she will vote in favour of releasing the full Epstein files (which the Trump government has strongly resisted). Her vote would tip the House decision in favour of releasing.
The enemy within
Pushback against the Trump agenda has been slow. Republican officeholders and would-be officeholders are afraid that if they do not toe the Trump line, enough finance will be provided to opponents to have them unseated at the next election. Many law firms and elite universities have struck compromise deals with the administration.
But pushback is growing. On Saturday 18 October, thousands of protest marches are planned across the country under the banner “No Kings Day”. Republican leaders refer to them as the “Hate America” marches. They say the No Kings protesters are the enemy within – domestic “terrorists”, “Antifa”, pro-Hamas, pro-ISIS, Marxists.
Eight years ago, a Rutgers University Professor, Mark Bray, published a short book called Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. He described a very loose movement of left-leaning people in America, with no formal organisation. Recently Trump and Vice President Vance started referring to Antifa (anti-fascist) as the blanket term for the highly organised “enemy within” – including sponsors of the Hate America marches, who are determined, they say, to bring violence across America.
A heading in Bray’s book says “A call to arms”. The text makes clear this is not a call to violence or insurrection. But the Trump government has used this heading – among other arguments – to justify its threat to invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act (the last time it was used was in 1992 for the Los Angeles riots). The Act would give legal backing to the domestic deployment of the US military to suppress unrest and enforce laws, without the consent of the target states.
Meanwhile, following Trump’s invocation of Antifa as the omnipresent enemy of the American people, Bray started receiving death threats, to the point where he decided to flee the country. When he turned up at the airport to catch his flight, the reservation was mysteriously cancelled. When he turned up the next day he was interrogated by government agents, then allowed to board the flight. He is now in Spain.
Trump’s personalistic autocratic rule
The puzzle is that the Trump administration is intensifying the evisceration of the government, even as polls suggest the president is not approved of by a majority of the American electorate.
What is strange is that Trump’s approval has remained fairly constant for months, despite all the upheaval, rising inflation and unemployment, health insurance costs per month that will probably soon shoot up by three times and more, and despite the desperation of US farmers no longer able to access low-cost loans from the closed-down Department of Agriculture and whose crops are no longer being bought by China.
Perhaps the government is relying on the campaign against “enemies within” and the “de-wokeification” of the federal government to solidify the MAGA base by enough to keep control of the House and the Senate in the mid-term elections. Watch out for what happens on the “No Kings” march on 18 October. And watch out for what happens to US economic growth if subsequent administrations do not substantially reverse Trump’s push towards not just autocratic rule but personalistic autocratic rule.
Machiavelli warned that rule by princes was more prone to tyranny and wickedness than rule by more institutionalised oligarchies and republican elites. A new study confirms that personalistic autocracies have substantially worse economic growth performance than both institutionalised autocracies and democracies.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Joshua Sukoff/ Shutterstock.com
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