The Tyrant Test

The Atlantic

5 hours ago

For as long as I've been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.
Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that 'it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose their system on others.' His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been 'lashed together by occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own people.' Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his arsenal 'against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.' George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein's government 'practices terror against its own people.' Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said 'he would show 'no mercy' to his own people.'
It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So it's striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic leaders elected the United States of America, now apply to the sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the 'tyrant test,' and Trump is already failing it.
Trump came into office promising to carry out a 'mass deportation' of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers— people who show up to their ICE appointments —for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes— masked and out of uniform —methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing opposition to these methods.
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Although there are circumstances where an intervention by the National Guard might be justified, such a decision typically involves the judgement of local authorities—and what's happening in Los Angeles now is nothing like Arkansas's school-segregation crisis in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.
Targeting California is no accident. Republican propaganda consistently paints blue states such as California as unlivable hellholes. Some of the protests have been violent and have given way to vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets' best efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction. American service members have been ordered there not to protect their compatriots but to intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing the president. On Friday, for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs building in L.A.
The president and many of his prominent supporters seem eager for escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles has been 'invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,' and that 'violent, insurrectionist mobs' have been 'swarming and attacking' immigration-enforcement officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that 'insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of America's political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.'
Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who had pointed out that the city had been more peaceful prior to the administration's response, of 'insurrection.' Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to 'liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city'—just moments before federal officers forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California and pushed him to the ground when he tried to ask questions.
Right-wing media, aware that the administration's actions and rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have been telling their audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by Democrats to trap Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious fondness for dictatorship. 'Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,' the Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday. 'They're burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they're fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.' Someone might be bloodthirsty, but it's not the Democrats.
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If L.A. had been taken over by insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them and give them money—though only insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government on Trump's behalf, of course. Instead, the protests provoked by the administration's authoritarian tactics appear to be mere pretext for using force against Trump's political opposition. The L.A. police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city's police force could handle the protests without assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for using the military against Americans who have the temerity to oppose him. This has long been a fantasy of Trump's— he praised China's crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protest movement as having 'put it down with strength.' Last week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful, self-worshipping military parade would be met 'with very big force.'
How did Republicans go from condemning leaders who threaten their own citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here, too, we find a holdover of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.
In the 1950s, the terms First World, Second World, and Third World emerged as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned governments, and emerging nations not allied with either faction, respectively. Third World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.
And that's exactly how Trump officials and their allies are referring to communities such as Los Angeles in order to justify using military force. Last night, following the massive 'No Kings' protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that he was directing ICE to 'expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities,' which he called 'the core of the Democrat Power Center'; he further described immigration as turning America into a 'Third World dystopia.'
The post echoed similar language from right-wing-media figures who, last week, began repeating the same rote talking points about the need to ban all 'Third World' immigration. The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies during the 2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of an argument for Trump using the military to 'take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it fast,' a chart from a white-nationalist website showing the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made explicit that he wasn't borrowing just the chart from a white-nationalist website but also its ideological conclusions about the threat that nonwhite people pose. ' This is the Great Replacement Theory,' Kirk explained. 'Remember we talked about how they want to replace white Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians.' The term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What's next in the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and perfidious Jews?
The increased support Trump received in the 2024 election from nonwhite voters hasn't altered prominent Trump proponents' view that America is the white man's birthright and that all others are merely interlopers. 'The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically. It is to make America less white, less European by descent,' The Daily Wire 's Matt Walsh declared. 'You're not gonna destroy Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever. You destroy it by importing non-Western people.'
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These ideas weren't coming from just commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A. 'looked like a Third World country' on Fox News; Miller posted on X that 'huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.' If Los Angeles is 'balkanized,' that is because it has a long history of being forcibly segregated by race, starting decades before Miller was born. But here, Miller's objection is not a call for integration but an expression of rage that the city is less white than it used to be. On Thursday night, Trump said 'illegal aliens' were turning America into a 'Third World Nation' and declared, 'I am reversing the invasion. It's called remigration,' using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.
The math here doesn't take much effort. In the view of these officials and commentators, California (and, by extension, America) has been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military force against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather neatly with Miller's expressed view that the repeal of racist restrictions on immigration in the 1960s destroyed the country. Both inside and outside the administration, the consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you are not white, you are a threat to Western civilization. This is how they rationalize Trump failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being made against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see as not truly American.
This is how a tyrant thinks. Every dictator who has ever cracked down on political opposition has done so by rendering them internal foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body politic who can justly be crushed like insects. Those serving in uniform, military or civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant's instrument against their own communities is what they had in mind when they signed up.