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totalitarianism
Are We on the Road to a Totalitarian US?
In important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Oct 07, 2025
Americans of a certain age are well acquainted with the idea of totalitarianism—a regime or form of government that exercises total control over all aspects of life in society. We were bombarded with warnings about the totalitarian Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. George Orwell’s 1984 showed us a world where people could never escape the all-seeing eye of “Big Brother.” If they acted in any way the Party considered suspicious or subversive, they would be brainwashed or vaporized.
The United States was widely assumed to be the counterweight to these totalitarian systems, given the principles of liberalism—government limited by the individual rights of people with protections against the arbitrary exercise of power—that legitimized our constitutional system of government. Yet, Orwell himself was critical of Western groupthink during the Cold War, and the US had launched the long era of post-WWII imperialism and consumer-driven capitalism.
We are currently living under an authoritarian regime. At the national level, we live in a one-party state. Each of the three branches of government are controlled by the Republican party–checks and balances are meaningless or ignored. The president rules by his self-serving personal whim. He has assembled an administration of misfits and incompetents who will never challenge his views in public. Donald Trump's rule is by definition arbitrary rule. Rather than giving sound reasoning and evidence to support his claims, he just makes stuff up. He got where he is by ridiculing and attacking others, particularly those who are vulnerable.
Back in 1951, as the Cold War cast a huge shadow over American life and the Red Scare was taking off, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, focusing on Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Here are three brief quotations from Arendt:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
I ask you, do these words remind you of anything going on under the Trump administration?
Authoritarianism relies on keeping the people isolated, divided, and fearful—which underscores the importance of communities coming together, protecting valued institutions, and raising our voices effectively. Yet in important ways the Trump brand of authoritarianism contains hallmarks of totalitarianism in seeking to ensure that there is only one permissible way to think.
Thus the intimidating attacks on universities, seeking to rewrite their curricula and admissions policies to conform to the administration’s “values.” Thus, too, the intimidation of corporations, especially the mass media, including efforts by Trump henchmen to take ownership of CBS and CNN. Also efforts to ostracize, if not imprison, critics of Israel—to say nothing of critics of Trump himself. Thus, too, the Department of Government Efficiency's effort to access individuals’ social security data and the Republicans’ quest for voting data. And of course, corporations have for years been gathering data on gullible consumers. Even our phones can be used to spy on our thoughts and conversations.
After spewing outrageous claim after outrageous claim before the United Nations General Assembly (not to mention the military brass), Trump declared, “You [the other nations of the world] are going to hell.”
The reality is the United States under Trump totalitarianism is going to hell. Policies his administration has imposed will inevitably lead to a rapid decline of the quality of life in the United States and elsewhere around the globe. The short-sighted stupidity of boosting fossil fuels and eliminating renewable energy as much as possible, and of slashing funding for scientific and medical research—these will result in untold numbers of people needlessly dying from illnesses, epidemics, or increasingly horrific environmental disasters.
And of course, there are the special targets of the Trump agenda. Not only does his administration make clear their intention of making life miserable for anyone who is economically or socially vulnerable in this country, the Republicans are actively cutting them off from voting. Arendt refers to these targets of totalitarianism as “superfluous people.”
In the end it’s up to us, the American people, to come together around a vision of a humane, fully democratic society, and rise up in determined opposition to these forces who so perilously threaten our world.
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Totalitarian Rule Is Here: Project 2025 9 Months Along
MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
Sep 10, 2025
I had the opportunity to engage the author of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” Paul Dans, this Saturday on BBC World News Radio. The essential question was whether Project 2025 was a document of totalitarian rule. Dans, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation during the presidential campaign for linking Donald Trump to the fascist playbook, has returned in full force as a MAGA senate candidate in South Carolina. He is a conservative committed to attacking democratic institutions, although he would claim that Project 2025 centers on returning the federal government to the hands of the people.
According to various trackers, the Project 2025 agenda has been nearly 50% completed. The assault on the federal system is well in hand. But is this totalitarianism?
Yes, it is.
I have written earlier about totalitarianism in the science policy of the White House. The totalitarian model extends further, up and down from the White House to the reactionary Supreme Court and especially to MAGAlytes in Congress. MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
First, recall that Project 2025 is a 900-page cornucopia of conservative delights. It calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of such critical law-enforcement agencies as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It promotes the closing of the Department of Education and the restructuring of museums, foundations, and even private universities to challenge fact-based institutions in their primary missions. In the economy, Project 2025 institutionalizes trickle-down economics: It reduces taxes on corporations, cuts social welfare and medical programs, draws financial and communications firms into the totalitarian fold, and rewards wealthy collaborators and industrialists as Hitler did in Nazi Germany with access to the halls of power. It promotes anti-LGBT discrimination; it ends Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In fact, Project 2025 does not rein in the administrative state, its major stated goal, but gives additional tools to weaponize the corrupt Trump presidency.
Hence, Project 2025 reflects totalitarian political culture, in particular the persistence of a one-party system with an authoritarian leader who uses extra-legislative means to achieve his goals. For example, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out “inefficiency” in government, but he in fact directed the faux department to emasculate agencies he and Project 2025 adherents disliked. In subservience to the president, MAGA republicans in Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their oversight. Further, while railing against executive orders (EO) of past presidents, Trump has used them in fact to replace policy making. Trump averaged 55 EO annually his first term; by mid-2025 he was averaging 330 per year with the goal to drown the courts and Congress in executive branch power.
Like in Hitler or Stalin who created a cult of personality, Trump has bullied MAGA to ensure allegiance to him as the all-powerful leader. This leader is the promoter of disorder, the arbitrator of conflict, the omniscient problem solver, the stager of domestic military sweeps and other Epstein flyovers to distract the populace, the organizer of state dinners and cabinet meetings in which his magalytes sickeningly faun for him. He is the Department of War lobbyist for the Nobel Peace Prize and the UFC organizer for a wrestling event on the White House Lawn. One senses he is jealous that Russian President Vladimir Putin miraculously scored eight goals in a charity hockey exhibition game (no one checked him, strangely). He is certainly angry that Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 will 11 holes-in-one, while the president must cheat at his golf game at his courses to win trophies.
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality.
Totalitarian governments bathe the public sphere with propaganda; the Soviets were masters at misinformation. Putin has reestablished state control of all media. For his totalitarian push, Trump promotes branded presidential newspeak on his own channel, Truth Social. Such loyal media outlets as Fox help him spread false claims. Indeed, totalitarians want to control the medium and the message, not educate the public; destroy expert independence in government agencies, not encourage it; and in general to sully data, not analyze them. The complete weaponization of government comes in the selective assault of academic and intellectual freedom in the Trump administration attack on universities, law firms, and other private businesses.
The totalitarian state embraces the veneer of legality, but engages extrajudicial confiscation of power. Like the Stalin Constitution of 1936 or Nazi laws of the 1930s, magalytes treat the US Constitution as vaguely important when its language fits their plans. Otherwise, they rely on executive branch overreach and on specious interpretation of congressional laws (the Enemy Aliens Act 1798; Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to end due process and deploy military troops in blue states. Partnering with such mega-maga-communications magnates as Peter Thiel, they deploy AI to create a surveillance state. DOGE sought personal information of US citizens to build a surveillance regime.
A signal action of totalitarian regimes is the identification of external and internal enemies, heavily colored with homophobia and xenophobia. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Patel are aggressively prosecuting people who crossed the president: former adviser John Bolton, prosecutors, judges, and even congresspeople. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other unidentified government police, their faces covered, their uniforms obscured, their racism barely concealed, resemble Stalin’s NKVD in their black overcoats as they round up, subdue, and cart enemies away to secret facilities. The major enemies are undocumented immigrants, which SCOPUS has now okayed to arrest on the basis of skin color alone. Recall that so fearful are the Trumpisti of immigrants that they have separated children from their parents to secret them out of the country; Putin, another authoritarian ruler, approves the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Project 2025 harps on the fear of internal enemies over alleged supposed additional rights given to individuals based on gender and color (“DEI”). In fact, like the Nazi prosecution of homosexuals or the Putinite illegalization of LGBTQ public existence, so the Trump administration has set forth a litany of enemies to be deprived of rights. They include Venezuelan gangs, lesbians, gays, people of color, Democrats, and trans individuals, the last who may be denied the Second Amendment right to bear arms by a finding that they are insane (“mentally ill”).
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality. Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy such as that imposed on women in socialist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. More and more gerrymandered states are following the examples of Texas and Florida to criminalize women and their personal physicians for not carrying fetuses full term—no matter the circumstances (rape, insist, mortal risk to the mother).
It's all there in Program 2025. And it’s all there in the White House.
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Totalitarian Science in the White House
By promoting pseudoscience, purging government scientists, and censoring their work and speech, U.S. President Donald Trump is following Stalin, Hitler, and Putin’s playbook.
Mar 12, 2025
As he sat in his Kremlin office in autumn 1948, Joseph Stalin faced hard decisions about the dangers facing Soviet science. Spies threatened to steal state secrets. Agents of capitalist ideology promoted false research paradigms. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin dictated real Soviet science. He endorsed the bogus theory of “Lysenkoism” with its rejection of genetics. He oversaw the firing, arrests, and imprisonment of biologists. He next identified so-called materialist state physics that repudiated relativity theory—Albert Einstein was a Jewish theorist, after all. And Stalin shut down cybernetics, which waylaid the development of computers into the 1990s.
Under Hitler, too, the Nazi state imposed restrictions on science owing to prevailing racist, antisemitic ideas. What had once been the world’s greatest scientific establishment was destroyed by ideological interference even before its physical devastation in World War II. Nonpareil U.S. science arose in the postwar years on the foundations of scientific freedom and extensive funding.
Shockingly, U.S. President Donald Trump also pursues pseudoscience through false proclamations. He hopes, with the stroke of a pen, to abolish transgender people, vaccinations, and climate change. To manage research and development, Trump has turned science portfolios over to singularly unqualified ideological agents. And he has adopted authoritarian tactics to control science in two major ways.
Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
First, Trump has purged thousands of scientists. Firings have been promoted as a way to cut waste in the federal government, but reflect the desire of the White House to halt research that Trump and his minions reject ranging from sickle cell medicine to obstetrics and gynecology; from ecology to climate change; and from vaccinations to Alzheimer’s investigations. Trump, still bruised from his failed attempt to force Hurricane Dorian to follow the path of his Sharpie, not scientific forecasts, fired 880 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists.
Like under Stalin, no bureaucracy is free from interference: the Food and Drug Administration (to prevent a range of medicines from being used), National Institutes of Health (to cut research on gender, health equity, and environmental justice), U.S. Fish and Wildlife (to limit the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act), the Department of Agriculture (to close down the battle with avian flu), and the National Nuclear Security Administration (to weaken the nation’s nuclear arsenal). The wanton firings include researchers, physicians, nurses, clinicians, and even park rangers and foresters, putting the nation’s natural heritage at risk.
Second, the Trump administration is censoring scientific speech and publication. Such world-leading publications as Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report were temporarily shut down. Federal scientists whose work uses “gender” and other suspect words are being required to withdraw in-press articles, and are being prevented from submitting future work using these terms. Zealous Trump acolytes have cleansed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) websites of information about immunization, contraception, racism, and health. Others have removed data on climate on which farmers and others rely. A French university in Marseilles is offering a research haven to U.S. scientists who worry about censorship of their work.
Federal scientific agencies have been told in recent weeks to remove such words as nonbinary, woman, disabled, and elderly from their purview. Only in the 1990s did U.S. scientific administrators and researchers began to redress the heavily skewed underparticipation of women in clinical studies, and the inattention to women’s health issues in the national research agenda. Trump administration policies will return women and minorities to being outsiders in R, D, and employment. Indeed, as in Nazi Germany there are natalist, racial, and homophobic overtones to current Trump scientific protocols, not the least in implicit prohibitions against research involving LGBTQ individuals. Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy asserts that Black people should follow a different vaccine schedule than whites on the basis of his false claims that Blacks need fewer antigens.
The Stalinists, similarly, slowed scientific publication through a censorship bureau called Glavlit. As a result of this censorship, Soviet science failed to perform well by many measures: scientific citation indices, Nobel, and other major international prizes.
To achieve censorship, Trump is pursuing scientific isolation. The Communist Party prevented scientists from attending international conferences from the 1930s until the 1980s, stultifying the development of Soviet science. In the U.S., the White House has embargoed travel funds. The president has closed down conferences and prohibited such groups as an independent expert vaccine panel from meeting which at the very least delays the funding of cutting edge research in all fields. Not content with the natural sciences, like the Stalinists in the 1940s, the administration has turned on the social sciences as well, for example, closing the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
The impacts are already being felt. Trump has long accepted baseless anti-vaccination propaganda. As a result, the CDC ended a successful flu vaccination campaign, while Trump signed a dictate to prohibit federal funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, over the past 50 years, vaccination against 14 major diseases has directly contributed to reducing infant deaths by 40% globally and saved over 150 million lives. Meanwhile, the worst measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico in the last 30 years has sickened 125 people, most of them children; measles can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and death. In a throwback to the medical nonsense suggested by the president to downing bleach to cure Covid-19, Bobby Kennedy is proposing drinking cod liver oil to combat the outbreak.
Engineering is similarly being hit with a funding cudgel, with programs in wind and solar power and high-speed trains cancelled. This can only lead to the end of U.S. scientific priority in a variety of fields, the closing down of promising research directions, and damage to strategic national interests. Personal whims play a role here. Embarrassed by the success of the Chips Act (2022) that rejuvenated the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump plans to destroy the “horrible, horrible” program.
If Trump seeks contemporary examples of authoritarian interference in modern science, he can look to Russia again. Under President Vladimir Putin, the security police have arrested scientists on accusations of espionage; several have died in custody. In May 2001 the Russian Academy of Sciences ordered specialists to report all their foreign contacts to the authorities for monitoring. Universities followed suit. Next the FSB closed down NGOs. And Russian scientists are again isolated.
Stalin purged his officer corps on the eve of World War II, severely handicapping the Red Army against Nazi Germany. Stalin published a book in 1948 called Marxism and Linguistics to establish himself as the leader in the field. Trump, apparently hoping to be recognized as a scientific expert, recently pontificated on “transgender” mice; of course, he does not understand the value of transgenic research with applications for human health from asthma to chronic wounds to heart disease any more than Stalin fathomed linguistics. But this utterance is in keeping with his firing of military personnel from leadership positions based on pseudoscientific notions of lower intelligence for soldiers of color. Trump once said he wanted the generals that Hitler had. He’s certainly working on getting the science that Hitler and Stalin had.
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