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Trump Is Copying From the War on Terror Playbook—in CAPS LOCK
The deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past.
Mar 28, 2025
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done—through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort—left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And—lo and behold!—now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as—if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours—the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
Racism
Among the numerous anti-democratic trends of this century, state-sponsored racism has been a constant concern. Of the many low points in the response to 9/11, the unleashing of government policies of racial and ethnic discrimination stands out. Fearing a follow-up attack, law enforcement targeted Muslim Americans, surveilling mosques, and casting a startlingly wide net of suspicion with a sweeping disregard for civil liberties. That approach was only strengthened by the militarization of police forces nationwide in the name of targeting Arabs and Muslims. In 2002, the government even introduced the NSEERS program, a “Special Registration” requirement mandating that all males from a list of 24 Arab and Muslim countries (as well as North Korea) register and be fingerprinted. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the program amounted to “a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection.”
A dangerous template for discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin was thereby set in place. In his first term in office, Donald Trump promptly doubled down on that Islamophobic trend, even though his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had revoked the registration requirement. By Executive Order 13769, Trump authorized a ban on the entry into the U.S. of citizens from seven Muslim countries, an order that would be reined in somewhat by the courts and finally revoked by then-President Joe Biden.
The discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Nor, in Trump’s first term, was discrimination limited to those from Arab and Muslim countries. As the Costs of War project has pointed out, the Islamophobia of the war on terror years had set a racial-profiling precedent and example for the more broadly racist policies of the first Trump administration. “The exponential surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups… and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter.” Yes, Trump did indeed go after Black Lives Matter protesters with a vengeance during his first term, even unleashing armed federal agents without insignia to tear gas, beat, and detain such protesters in Portland, Oregon.
While Obama would end the Special Registration program and Biden would revoke the Muslim ban, no preventive measures were undertaken to guard against future racist policies and, all too unfortunately, we see the results of that today.
Trump 2.0 has already escalated discriminatory policies, focusing on protecting white males at the expense of people of color and women. In fact, his very first executive orders included several measures cracking down on asylum-seekers and closing off legal avenues to citizenship, as well as a brazen decree aimed at eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the country. Executive Order 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) was issued on January 21, 2025, the very day he took office. It ordered organizations and entities—from government offices and the U.S. military to schools, businesses, and more—to end their DEI policies “within 120 days” or risk losing government funding.
Recently, making good on its threats, the Trump administration canceled $400 million of federal funding in the form of grants and contracts to Columbia University as a sign of disapproval of that university’s supposed tolerance of pro-Palestinian protests, “described,” as National Public Radio reported, “as the school’s failure to police antisemitism on campus.” Nine other universities are believed to be under similar scrutiny.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, Trump is planning to issue a new travel ban, including a “red list” of countries whose citizens will be prohibited from entering the United States and an “orange list” of those whose citizens would, in some fashion, be curtailed if not completely barred from entry. As yet, the specifics remain unknown.
In other words, the discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Disappearing the Record
Secrecy was likewise baked into the government’s response to the war on terror, often to keep what would have been obvious abuses of the law well hidden. Whether it was the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—the phrase employed by the administration of former President George W. Bush for acts of straightforward torture—or mass surveillance, the authorization for the targeted killing of an American citizen, or the implementation of other policies that deviated from accepted law and practice, all of that and more was initially kept well hidden from the American public.
Now, many have described the brazen upheavals decreed by the Trump administration as being the very opposite of secrecy—as, in fact, “saying the quiet part out loud.” In reality, however, in these first days of his second term in office, Trump and crew have taken secrecy to a new level, replacing it with a broad policy of erasure and invisibility. In fact, despite the administration’s pledge of “radical transparency” in areas like spending, a hostile onslaught against the written record has prevailed.
This determination to bury the record was apparent during the first Trump administration. He repeatedly asserted his right, for instance, not to document his meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In 2017, he reportedly confiscated notes that were taken at a meeting with Putin. In 2019, at the G-20 in Buenos Aires, he met Putin without either a translator or a note-taker present. The Washington Post reported, that “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.” In other words, on a matter of top national security concern—U.S.-Russian relations—a “cone of seclusion” was created, effectively leaving it to the two presidents to make decisions in secret. (Meanwhile, in his first term in office, Trump allegedly flushed down the toilet certain records relevant to the classified documents case against him.)
In his onslaught against record-keeping and the public’s right to know, the National Archives has become a prime target. Trump’s battle with the archives had its origins in his legal struggle over the classified documents he was alleged to have kept in his possession in violation of the law after his first administration, even supposedly destroying security camera footage taken at Mar-a-Lago that showed boxes of those documents being moved. Now, the president has fired the U.S. archivist, replacing a professional academic with Marco Rubio, despite his duties as secretary of state.
His outright refusal to keep a record of his administration’s activities is also reflected in his insistence that the records of the Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) fall under the Presidential Records Act, which applies to the records of the president and vice president, and which comes with the guarantee that they can be withheld from the public for up to 12 years after he leaves office. The act also allows for the disposal of records, pending the approval of the national archivist.
In a further example of denying information as a form of politics, Trump’s Office of Professional Management ordered the removal of gender-related content from its websites (as well as the erasure of gender-identifying pronouns from e-mail signatures and an end to all gender-related programs and grants). This led to the removal of pages from the Census.gov website, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and military websites, and the replacement of the acronym LGBTQ+ with LGB. Under court order, some of these webpages have been put back up, even if with this defiant note:
Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.
In other words, the Trump administration’s claims of legitimacy for its purge of information remain strong. The legacy of state-sanctioned secrecy and a parallel burying of the record, inextricably tied to the post-9/11 era, has already found a secure footing in the second Trump presidency.
Undermining the Courts and the Law
Time and again in the war on terror, the Department of Justice and the courts deferred to the federal government in the name of national security. As a 2021 Brennan Center report noted, national security deference was apparent in decisions not to hear cases due to “states secret” claims, as well as in decisions that prioritized over civil-liberties guarantees and human-rights considerations what government lawyers argued were the constitutionally granted powers of the president in national security matters.
Under Trump, the second time around, it’s already clear that there’s going to be a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the legal system. Witness the administration’s attacks on judges whose decisions have gotten in the way of his agenda. When a judge ordered the restoration of public health data that had been removed from government websites, he was summarily castigated by Elon Musk as “evil” and someone who “must be fired.” Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has already moved to squelch independent decision-making by immigration court judges, threatening them with nothing short of dismissal should they rule against the president’s prerogatives.
Then there are the attacks on law firms that have opposed Trump. Recently, for instance, security clearances were removed for lawyers at the law firms of Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election, and Covington Burleigh, which represented Jack Smith, who investigated Trump in the Biden years. Lawyers from those firms were also banned from federal buildings. And don’t forget the all-out attempt to go after officials who investigated and prosecuted January 6 cases.
The idea of an independent Justice Department has been severely damaged, with the promise of so much more to come.
Evading Accountability
More often than not, the significant transformations of law and policy that grew out of the response to 9/11 were relegated to the pages of history with little or no accountability. The Senate, under Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) leadership, did produce a report on the CIA’s use of torture. It detailed despicable acts of cruelty, and ultimately concluded that such techniques, decreed to be legal by the Department of Justice, were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” And immediately upon taking office in 2009, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order officially ending the use of torture. But he was decidedly against holding any officials accountable for what had occurred, preferring, as he so memorably put it, to “look forward, not backward.” In addition, Obama refused to call torture a “crime,” labeling it a mistake instead.
Today, in more mundane matters, the distaste for accountability has been institutionalized throughout the government. In his first term in office, Donald Trump dismissed or replaced five inspectors general, officials assigned to departments throughout the executive branch of government to monitor waste, abuse, and fraud. Almost immediately upon taking office this time around, he dismissed “roughly 17” of them. For the moment, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which, from its creation, never included an inspector-general position, is now under review by the Department of Treasury’s inspector general.
Trump’s aversion to accountability clearly reflects a desire to protect his own efforts to totally control executive policy. It should, however, also serve as a striking reminder of the aversion to accountability that followed the legalization and uses of torture in the post-9/11 years, the fabricated decision to go to war in Iraq, the mass surveillance of Americans in that era, and so much more. All of this set in place a grim template for the second Trump era—the notion that no one is ultimately accountable for abusing the law when their actions have been ordered (or simply approved) by the president.
Lessons (Un)learned
Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the war on terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we’re now witnessing, it’s worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country—and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation’s laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms—all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today’s quagmire.
Today’s horrific moment should, in fact, be considered—to return to that word of mine one last time—a true perversification of past misdeeds, made all too possible by a failure in the post-9/11 years to take measures to prevent their recurrence.
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Serbian Students Remind Us of the Power We, as People, Hold
Amid profound shifts in power and governments across the world, they are embodying the hope and power that lies within grassroots movements and activism.
Mar 27, 2025
On the corner of West 25th Street and Broadway, a sea of blood-stained hands gather silently amid the noises of Midtown Manhattan. As tourists and locals rush across the intersection, some attempt to decipher the demonstration. A sign in Serbian Cyrillic reads, "Love for students, the ocean divides us, the fight connects us." After 15 minutes, the crowd breaks their silence, embracing one another through a shared goal, to show support for the students of Serbia.
This demonstration is part of a larger student-led resistance sweeping Serbia over the past three months. After the deadly collapse of a canopy at a newly renovated railway station that claimed the lives of 16 people in Novi Sad, the country's second-largest city, public outrage has sparked a monumental fight against corruption. Protesters first took to the streets to demand accountability from government officials for the negligence and dishonesty that resulted in the tragedy. They staged silent protests starting at 11:52 am, the time the canopy collapsed, standing silently for 15 minutes, one minute for every life lost. After students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts were assaulted during a peaceful protest on November 22 by pro-government thugs who may have been directed or even paid by government officials, anger over the collapse gave way to broader outrage.
The attack on the students, the lack ofaccountability from the corrupt populist government, and the deceit behind the construction of the railway station have led to a larger demand to restore justice and accountability. A bloody handprint, which has grown to be the symbol for the student movement, represents the culpability that the Serbian government has in the canopy collapse and for years of an oppressive and controlling regime. The protests are writing history, leading to the resignation of more than a dozen government officials and growing to become the largest student-run movement Serbia has seen since the 1990s and possibly the largest in Europe since 1968.
For most Serbians, a movement of this magnitude seemed unimaginable, especially from a generation with high emigration rates, yet the students have made the impossible a reality.
The Serbian Progressive Party or Srpska Napredna Stranka has been the ruling political party since 2012 when Aleksandar Vučić took office. In the years since, his government has been accused of having ties to organized crime, bribing voters, and abusing its political power to threaten opposition. His populist government, and the oligarchy it perpetuates, have threatened and dismantled civilian rights and freedoms within the country.
The renovation of the train station, which began in 2021, was the product of a larger project led by Serbia, China, and Hungary to develop a fast rail pathway between Belgrade and Budapest. Vučić's boasting about the station's upgrade and the project during his 2022 election campaign only increased suspicions following the collapse when he claimed that the canopy had not been renovated during the reconstruction. Documentation that later emerged proved this to be false and showed that at minimum some work was done on the canopy. The glorified reconstruction of the station and its ultimately deadly faulty construction is seen as an emblem of Vučić's neglect of public safety, infrastructure, and well-being to strengthen political and monetary relationships.
Rather than be intimidated by the assault on the November 22 protest, the Faculty of the Dramatic Arts students blockaded university buildings three days later, inspiring universities across the country to do the same. As protests intensified, so did the message unifying the students and protesters: Serbian citizens deserve better than a government that puts its political and financial interests above its people.
The demands set forth by the students are simple yet effective: First, they demand the release of all documents relating to the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station and full transparency on how such an avoidable tragedy could occur. Second, they demand accountability for those who have attacked peaceful protesters, going so far as to ram cars into crowds and injuring several people. Third, they demand that the criminal charges of those arrested during the protests be dropped. Lastly, they demand a 20% increase in the budget for higher education.
Students are demanding that the government abide by the same laws it imposes on its citizens. After students were injured by drivers who deliberately rammed cars into their peaceful protests, Vučić reacted by saying that the drivers were simply "trying to go about their way," a statement that made clear that his interests don't lie in the safety of his citizens but rather the preservation of his control. The students have developed an impressive tactic in response, shutting Vučić out and appealing directly to the judicial system, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Construction.
On December 15 during a television interview, Prime Minister Milos Vučević made the abominable statement, "You can't bring down a country because of 15 people who died, nor 155, nor 1,555." This comment provided a comical victory for protesters after Vučević resigned on January 25, making him one of several officials to do so alongside the mayor of Novi Sad, Milan Đurić, and the Minister of Construction, Goran Vesić. On December 30th, Serbia's Public Prosecutorindicted 13 individuals regarding the collapse of the canopy. Vučević's resignation followed a general strike on January 24 that captured the country and increased pressure on the government. As the sun rose over Belgrade on January 25, protesters celebrated the 24-hour blockade of the city's largest road junction, Autokomanda, and the new chapter that the resignation of the prime minister brings to their movement.
Most recently the students have blocked off bridges in Novi Sad that serve as the main roadways between the city and Belgrade. In January their movement was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But perhaps their biggest success has been in restoring hope across borders, professions, and generations.
Their resistance has spread beyond the protests and blockades. It's seen in communities set up by students in universities with kitchens, tents, and donation points. It's seen as high school students join them in the streets. It's seen in the songs they sing, the food they cook for one another, and the games they play as they block off one of the country's largest highway intersections. It's seen through the car horns, cheering crowds, and people running out of their homes with food and drinks for students marching 80 kilometers to join the Danube bridge blockade. It's seen when the Bar Association of Serbia goes on strike. It's seen as bikers, agricultural workers, and taxi drivers show up to support and protect students from the opposing violence. It's seen as peaceful demonstrations of support are spreading across borders and oceans to over 150 cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. It's seen as students marched over 100 kilometers in the cold to join a massive blockade and protest in the city of Kragujevac, tearfully cheered on by bystanders.
Despite their success, domestic and international media coverage has been essentially nonexistent since the protests began. It wasn't until the historic protest held on March 15 where hundreds of thousands gathered in Belgrade's city center to protest the Vučić regime, that the Western media started covering the students' feat.
The suppression of protests and blockades by Serbian media is a deliberate effort to silence the students' voices and demands. With Vučić's foreign policy juggling act among major international powers, the resistance in Serbia has been mistakenly painted as anti-Putin by Western media outlets. Despite Vučić's delicate balance between the West and the East, the ideological conflicts arenot the driving force for the students; rather, their activism is rooted in the pursuit of justice and accountability from their government.
For most Serbians, a movement of this magnitude seemed unimaginable, especially from a generation with high emigration rates, yet the students have made the impossible a reality. Amid profound shifts in power and governments across the world, they are embodying the hope and power that lies within grassroots movements and activism. "Turn off the TV. Tune In" is a slogan that has been used by student blockade accounts in response to the government regulation and censoring of the media. It stands as a powerful call to action for Serbian citizens and a message that can resonate with activists and changemakers globally.
When looking at the crowds of students holding the symbolic blood-stained hand over their hands, we should be reminded of the blood washing over the hands of governments internationally. At a recent solidarity demonstration in New York, a sign reading "Jedan Svet, Jedna Borba / One World, One Fight" showcased the hope that lies within global solidarity. The tenacity, resilience, and perseverance of the students in Serbia have ignited a wave of hope, serving as a reminder that true power resides in the hands of the people.
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DOGE Is Hitting the Accelerator on the Creeping Privatization of the US Government
Trump’s latest moves can be viewed as a massive speedup of a decades-long trend, rather than a break from the past.
Mar 22, 2025
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has aggressively moved to shrink the federal government. His administration has frozen federal grants, issued executive orders aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and, most prominently, created what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
DOGE has been billed as a cost-cutting initiative, although the actual amount of money being saved remains unclear. To lead DOGE, Trump appointed Elon Musk, a megadonor whose companies hold federal contracts worth billions. Musk has already moved forward with major cuts, including sweeping workforce reductions, the curtailment of government operations, and purges of entire agencies. Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs.
While certainly dramatic, these actions reflect a longer trend of privatizing government. Indeed, my sociological research shows that the government has steadily withdrawn from economic production for decades, outsourcing many responsibilities to the private sector.
3 indicators of privatization
At first glance, total government spending appears stable over time. In 2024, federal, state, and local expenditures made up 35% of the U.S. economy, the same as in 1982. However, my analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data offers a new perspective, recasting privatization as a macroeconomic phenomenon. I find that U.S. economic activity has become increasingly more privatized over the past 50 years. This shift happened in three key ways.
First, government involvement in economic production has declined. Historically, public institutions have played a major role in sectors such as electric power, water delivery, waste management, space equipment, naval shipbuilding, construction, and infrastructure investments. In 1970, government spending on production accounted for 23% of the economy. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 17%, leaving the private sector to fill the gaps. This means a growing share of overall government spending has been used to fund the private sector economy.
The privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities.
Second, government’s overall ability to produce goods and services—what economists call “productive capacity”—has fallen relative to the private sector, both in terms of labor and capital. Since 1970, public employment has lagged behind private sector job growth, and government-owned capital assets have trailed those of the private sector. Although public sector capital investments briefly rebounded in the 2000s, employment did not, signaling a shift toward outsourcing rather than direct hiring. This has significant implications for wages, working conditions, and unionization.
Third, and relatedly, government increasingly contracts work to private companies, opting to buy goods and services instead of making them. In 1977, private contractors accounted for one-third of government production costs. By 2023, that had risen to over half. Government contracting—now 7% of the total economy—reached $1.98 trillion in 2023. Key beneficiaries in 2023 included professional services at $317 billion, petroleum and coal industries at $194 billion, and construction at $130 billion. Other examples include private charter schools, private prisons, hospitals, and defense contractors.
The Meaning of Privatization
Privatization can be understood as two interconnected processes: the retreat of government from economic production, and the rise of contracting. The government remains a major economic actor in the U.S., although now as more of a procurer of goods and services than a provider or employer.
The government’s shift away from production largely stems from mainstreamed austerity politics—a “starve the beast” approach to government—and backlash against the New Deal’s expansion of federal economic involvement. In 1971, the controversial “Powell Memo,” written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, mobilized business leaders around the goal of expanding private sector power over public policy. This fueled the rise of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the eventual architect of the Project 2025 privatization agenda.
While government production shrank, government contracting expanded on promises of cost savings and efficiency. These contracting decisions are usually made by local administrators managing budgets under fiscal stress and interest group pressure, including from businesses and public sector unions.
Yet research shows that contracting frequently fails to reduce costs, while risking monopolies, weakening accountability and public input, and sometimes locking governments into rigid contracts. In many cases, ineffective outsourcing forces a return to public employment.
The Consequences of Privatization
Trump’s latest moves can be viewed as a massive acceleration of a decades-long trend, rather than a break from the past. The 50-year shift away from robust public sector employment has already privatized a lot of U.S. employment. Trump and Musk’s plan to cut the federal workforce follows the same blueprint.
This could have major consequences.
First, drastic job cuts likely mean more privatization and fewer government workers. Trump’s federal workforce cuts echo President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, a source of prolonged financial struggles and family instability for many fired workers. Trump’s firings and layoffs are already reaching far beyond Reagan’s.
As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private sector dominance.
In addition, since federal spending directly contributes to gross domestic product, cuts of this magnitude risk slowing the economy. The Trump administration has even floated the idea of changing GDP calculations, potentially masking any reality of economic decline.
Rapid privatization is also likely to trigger significant economic disruptions, especially in industries that depend on federal support. For example, USAID cuts have already sent shock waves through the private sector agricultural economy.
Finally, the privatization trend risks eroding democratic accountability and worsening racial and gender inequalities. That’s because, as my prior research finds, public sector unions uniquely shape American society by equalizing wages while increasing transparency and civic participation. Given that the public sector is highly unionized and disproportionately provides employment opportunities for women and Black workers, privatization risks undoing these gains.
As Trump’s administration aggressively restructures federal agencies, these changes will likely proceed without public input, further entrenching private sector dominance. This stands to undermine government functioning and democratic accountability. While often framed as inevitable, the American public should know that privatization remains a policy choice—one that can be reversed.
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