EVEN UNDER FASCISM, PERSONNEL IS POLICY

Many of us feel the way Garrett Graff feels.

I have to say that the unraveling of American democracy has proceeded far faster than I thought it would: I always assumed concentration camps for Donald Trump’s enemies was somewhere at the end of the road toward American authoritarianism....

But I never imagined that not even three months into the administration we’d already be negotiating and debating the precise legal fig leaf necessary for masked state agents to sweep everyday Americans off the streets and disappear them to specially designed torture gulags in Central America without due process for indefinite (and nearly surely permanent) detention.

And yet here we are.

Why is this policy being implemented so quickly and ruthlessly?

I keep thinking about an old politcal adage: Personnel is policy. It's used by people on the right and the left as a shorthand way of saying that if you have certain policy goals, you should appoint people to key positions who share those goals and are capable of successfully implementing them.

Our current fascist presidency has a number of policy goals, which it's implementing with varying degrees of success. I assume that the totalitarian crackdown on immigrants is happening quickly because it's the work of Stephen Miller, who's young (39) and tireless in addition to being smart and sociopathic. I think he knew from the start how much pain he wanted to inflict and the specific ways he could inflict it. We know he hates Latin American immigrants, but he also has ties to the groups that are outing pro-Palestinian protestors.

Source also confirmed to me Stephen Miller is close to the groups behind Canary Mission and Betar. This is from 2018, about the board of the nonprofit believed to operate Canary Mission in Israel.

[image or embed]

— Jacqueline Sweet (@jsweetli.bsky.social) April 14, 2025 at 8:45 AM

(The Forward article is here.)

Miller is a creature of right-wing media -- he's a frequent Fox guest who began calling into right-wing radio shows when he was a teenager, and soon became an on-air guest -- which might explain why the Trump regime's immigration approach has featured so many conscience-shocking stunts. (ICE is actually deporting fewer people this year than the Biden administration had deported by this time last year.) Miller is good at getting on television and good at extreme cruelty -- and that's how the Trump regime's immigration policy has evolved. Miller also came from a liberal family and grew up right-wing in a liberal community, so I imagine he'll be deeply involved in the renditioning of U.S. citizens, which he'll regard as revenge against a class of enemies he's hated since his schooldays.

The dismantling of the government is being executed by Elon Musk, cruelly and with mixed success. Musk is good at moving fast and breaking things. He's also good at assembling teams that force their way into systems and take control of them. Musk likes mass layoffs conducted without much forethought, so that's what we're getting. One way he's less competent than Miller is that he's happy to be the story. Miller, for all his TV time, never acts as if he's anything but a loyal Trump subordinate. Musk likes to be the star. He's much more visible, so he's easy to blame when the regime is, for instance, laying off nuclear inspectors.

And then there's tariff policy. This is the most poorly implemented of the regime's policies because the president has assigned the job of constructing the policy to one man: himself. Trump is lazy, stupid, and arrogant. He's utterly incapable of executing a successful trade policy. We're lucky that the markets scared the bejeezus out of him and compelled him to pull back on the tariffs somewhat, although the ones that remain are still bad.

I encounter many people on social media who say that they wake up every day hoping to learn that Trump has died overnight. I don't share that sentiment. I think the death of Trump would lead to a J.D. Vance presidency that's exactly as cruel and vicious as Trump's, but without Trump's trade incompetence. I think that trade incompetence is the aspect of the Trump presidency that's most likely to lead to widespread public disapproval. I think a Vance presidency would be exactly as fascist as Trump's, but would lack this Achilles' heel. A Vance who gives us Trumpism minus tariffmania could rule for decades in a post-democratic America. So I guess I'm grateful that Trump hasn't done any delegating on tariffs.