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mass deportations
Authoritarian Clickbait: Trump’s Spectacle Distracts From His Corporate Power Grab
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history.
Mar 24, 2025
Traditionally, authoritarian regimes were defined by their capacity to control information. Critics were silenced, press outlets were shuttered, and opposition voices were imprisoned or worse. Power was exercised through fear, secrecy, and violence. But in President Donald Trump’s America, authoritarianism has evolved. It no longer hides behind walls of censorship—it thrives in plain sight.
Trump’s political style isn’t about suppressing attention. It’s about seizing it. Whether threatening to annex Greenland “one way or another,” mocking Canada as the “51st state,” or pressuring Columbia University to abandon free speech protections, the goal isn’t to avoid controversy. The aim is to create it.
In Trump’s case, the provocation is the point.
This shift reflects a deeper transformation in how power is exercised in the 21st century. In a world governed by algorithms, virality, and information overload, authoritarianism no longer seeks silence—it seeks spectacle. Trump’s provocations are not mere outbursts. They are designed and timed to dominate headlines, crowd out serious scrutiny, and keep the public in a state of reactive agitation.
These performances are not without precedent. But in Trump’s case, the provocation is the point. His administration has leaned into fascist-style imagery, with symbolic salutes, rallies drenched in nationalism, and open threats against political dissidents—both foreign and domestic. But this isn't authoritarianism for the sake of totalitarian control. It’s authoritarianism repurposed for an attention economy—where outrage drives clicks, and distraction enables deeper, quieter abuses of power.
The Distraction Machine: Authoritarianism in the Age of Virality
In previous generations, authoritarian leaders worried about hiding abuses. Trump, by contrast, seems to invite public attention to his most outrageous behavior—not in spite of its controversy, but precisely because of it.
What happens when Trump threatens journalists? When his administration cracks down on campus protests, or fans conspiracy theories about foreign states? The media—both traditional and social—explodes with takes, outrage, and analysis. These cycles create a spectacle that consumes public attention. And while Americans are arguing over whether Trump’s statements are ironic, dangerous, or “just trolling,” his administration is quietly enacting policies that concentrate wealth and corporate power behind the scenes.
This is by design. When Trump publicly praised authoritarian leaders while floating the idea of withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, or when he staged a militarized inauguration complete with nationalist salutes and fascist-style imagery, outrage predictably dominated headlines and flooded social media. While commentators debated the symbolic threats to democracy, far less attention was paid to the administration’s simultaneous efforts to expand fossil fuel drilling, dismantle environmental protections, and push through financial deregulations that directly benefit corporate donors and billionaire allies.
This is the sleight of hand that defines contemporary authoritarian populism. Performative controversies act as bait. While political opponents and the press react to each new provocation, policy moves quietly. Headlines focus on Trump’s tone, but not his taxes; on his insults, but not his infrastructure contracts; on his speeches, but not his subsidies.
As Trump escalates mass deportations, including the forced removal of immigrants to El Salvador, the moves are framed as tough-on-crime, anti-immigrant theater—crafted to energize his base and dominate the media cycle through performative spectacle. But behind the headlines, there are real victims: parents separated from children, asylum-seekers denied due process, and vulnerable people sent back to life-threatening conditions. At the same time, while public attention is consumed by immigration crackdowns, the administration is quietly advancing energy deals and deregulation efforts that benefit economic elites.
Rather than suppressing debate, Trump drowns it in noise. His style weaponizes the velocity of modern media, not to clarify public discourse, but to overwhelm it. And in that chaos, the structure of governance shifts: away from democratic accountability, and toward unregulated corporate control.
Authoritarian Theater, Corporate Power
While the world watches Trump’s political theater, his administration is quietly engineering one of the most aggressive transfers of public wealth to private interests in modern American history. The façade of populism masks a policy agenda deeply aligned with corporate elites, billionaire donors, and the industries that stand to gain from the dismantling of public regulation and oversight.
Tax policy remains one of the clearest examples. The tax law passed during Trump’s first term overwhelmingly favored the wealthy, while doing little to stimulate broad-based economic growth. Now, in his return to power, he’s doubling down. His 2025 budget proposal slashes funding for housing, food assistance, and healthcare. Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk gleefully proclaim they’re slashing government waste in the name of efficiency, yet remain conspicuously silent on the bloated corporate excesses of defense spending—where billions vanish into unaccountable contracts, overpriced weapons, and Pentagon boondoggles cloaked in patriotic branding.
The U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy.
Trump’s cabinet and advisory circle are drawn from the ultra-rich—CEOs, private equity barons, and political megadonors. The revolving door between his administration and industries like oil, finance, and private prisons ensures that public policy is crafted not to serve the electorate, but to entrench elite interests. The prison industry, in particular, has seen surging stock prices and expanding contracts as Trump ramps up deportation efforts and privatizes detention infrastructure.
Energy policy tells the same story. While the administration rails against international climate accords and environmental “wokeness,” it is quietly threatening to sell off public lands and roll back environmental policies as a windfall for the fossil fuel industries. The beneficiaries are not small businesses or working Americans. They are multinational corporations and a handful of ultra-wealthy shareholders.
This isn’t an accidental byproduct of Trumpism—it is its core. Despite branding himself as anti-elite, Trump’s political machine is funded and sustained by America’s richest families and corporate lobbies. His alliance with figures like Elon Musk reflects a broader trend: the convergence of authoritarian populism with a new form of oligarchic capitalism—one where billionaires publicly attack “the establishment” in order to pursue their own profitable agenda.
As inequality deepens and democratic norms erode, the U.S. faces a dangerous convergence: a political class that performs populism while practicing plutocracy. This is the new authoritarianism—not built on repression alone, but on distraction, deregulation, and the strategic manipulation of spectacle.
Looking Beyond the Noise
Donald Trump’s political style is often dismissed as chaotic or unserious—a constant stream of tweets, outbursts, and provocations. But behind that chaos lies a deliberate structure: a feedback loop of distraction and policy, performance and power.
What looks like madness is often method. The attention-consuming controversies, the culture war posturing, the outlandish threats and statements—all function to consume public focus while his administration executes a radical, elite-centered program of capitalist plundering.
The real danger of Trumpism is not just what he says and does, but what it prevents us from seeing. As media cycles churn and social media outrage erupts, entire layers of policy are being written to serve corporate interests, privatize public goods, and redirect national wealth upward.
This isn’t just about optics or inflammatory rhetoric—it is a substantive and growing form of authoritarianism. Trump is using real tools of state power to target dissent, intimidate opposition, and punish vulnerable communities, turning repression into a political strategy. From aggressive crackdowns on student protesters to the mass deportation of immigrant families, these actions are not symbolic—they are deliberate mechanisms to consolidate control and clear the path for a hyper-capitalist plutocratic agenda. The victims are real, and the consequences are structural, not theatrical.
To resist this model of governance, we must not only confront its authoritarian aesthetics and the very real victims it creates—but expose its oligarchic foundation. It requires dismantling the capitalist plutocracy that thrives within—and actively sustains—this viral authoritarian political and media culture. That means cutting through the noise, tracking the money, and asking not just what Trump is doing, but who is benefiting too often in the shadows while the cameras roll.
In the end, Trumpism thrives not on silence but on spectacle—a new model of power built on authoritarian clickbait, where outrage fuels distraction, and distraction clears the path for profiteering.
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IRS, ICE Near Deal to Share Confidential Tax Data on Undocumented Immigrants
"No undocumented will trust the IRS ever again, and so they'll stop paying taxes," said one journalist. "And that was a pretty sweet deal for the U.S., since they did pay their fair share—billions of dollars each year."
Mar 24, 2025
Undocumented immigrants, who contribute nearly $100 billion in taxes each year and help fund benefits like Social Security and Medicare while remaining ineligible to receive them, are expected to soon lose the privacy afforded to them by a long-standing Internal Revenue Service policy as the IRS nears a deal with the Trump administration to help with immigration enforcement.
The IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are reportedly closing in on an agreement under which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons could request taxpayer data, including names and addresses, of undocumented immigrants who are being investigated for violating immigration laws in order to help officials locate them to carry out deportations.
The Washington Postreported Saturday that after weeks of negotiations, the Trump administration is close to finalizing the deal in an effort to speed up its mass deportation agenda, under which hundreds of immigrants have been rounded up and sent to be detained in El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting their deportation. ICE deported 11,000 immigrants last month, with people who were only accused of committing civil immigration offenses targeted despite Trump's claims that people who had committed violent crimes would be targeted for deportation.
The IRS deal represents "a shocking breach of trust," said former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Juliette Kayyem.
The former IRS commissioner, Doug O'Donnell, refused to hand over taxpayer data when the administration requested it last month, and resigned shortly after. Melanie Krause, who replaced O'Donnell as acting commissioner, "quickly signaled an interest in collaborating with Homeland Security," according to the Post, and has met several times with DHS and Treasury officials.
Two immigrant rights groups, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity Dupage, sued the IRS earlier this month to stop the agency from releasing taxpayer data to ICE and DHS, but last week the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia refused to issue a temporary restraining order "after the IRS represented that information had not yet been released," according to government watchdog Public Citizen, which represented the plaintiffs.
"Attempts by the Trump administration to gain access to the confidential taxpayer databases to engage in mass removal of workers would violate the tax law that protects the privacy of all taxpayers and undermine the protections promised to every taxpayer who files tax returns with the IRS," said Nandan Joshi, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group. "Attempting to gain access to personal and confidential taxpayer information crosses a line that Congress put into place after [former President] Richard Nixon used tax records to go after his enemies during Watergate."
Joshi said the IRS must disclose the terms of its "unprecedented information sharing agreement."
"The administration's desire to speed up their deportation agenda does not justify jettisoning decades of taxpayer protections," he said. "If this deal is being negotiated in good faith, the government should not need to keep it secret."
Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian group, said the group has long assured undocumented immigrant communities that people can file and pay their taxes without fear of being targeted by immigration authorities "because the IRS explicitly promised they won't talk to ICE."
Under the proposed deal between the IRS and ICE, said journalist Rafael Salido, no undocumented immigrant "will trust the IRS ever again, and so they'll stop paying taxes."
The administration's "attempt to hijack confidential taxpayer data for immigration enforcement in the middle of tax season is not only disturbing and unprecedented, it is reckless," said Kevin Herrera, legal director of Raise the Floor Alliance, which is also representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the IRS.
Undocumented immigrants who file their taxes with individual taxpayer identification numbers "rely on legal protection of their private information to feel safe paying into programs like Social Security, Medicare, and thousands of other essential government services that all Americans use," said Herrera. "Without the assurance of privacy, our entire tax system will be eroded. We will not be idle while our communities are under attack. We will continue to seek judicial intervention and use every tool at our disposal to stop this administration's campaign of prejudice and terror."
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GOP Congressman Wants to Impeach Judge Behind 'Alien Enemies' Order Trump Defied
"The U.S. continues its racist slide toward authoritarian practices," Amnesty International USA said of the administration ignoring the court decision.
Mar 16, 2025
As part of elected Republicans and billionaires' assault on the federal judiciary, a GOP congressman on Saturday night pledged to file articles of impeachment against a chief judge who issued an order against U.S. President Donald Trump's invocation of an 18th-century wartime power—a court decision that the administration intentionally ignored.
In a post on X—the social media platform owned by Trump's billionaire adviser Elon Musk—Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) shared the New York Post's coverage of the Saturday court order and said, "I'll be filing articles of impeachment against activist Judge James Boasberg this week."
Gill's post garnered support from multiple other Republicans in the House of Representatives as well as Musk, who has endorsed GOP lawmakers' previous efforts to impeach other federal judges who have ruled against his and Trump's agenda.
Boasberg on Saturday issued a nationwide temporary restraining order in response to legal groups challenging Trump's attempt to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for deportations. The judge, who was appointed to the district court in Washington, D.C. by former President Barack Obama, ordered any planes in the air to turn around.
However, "the Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply," Axiosreported Sunday, citing two senior officials.
While leading legal groups argue that Trump's attempted use of the law—previously invoked to send thousands of people to internment camps during World War II—is illegal, a senior White House official told Axios: "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win."
Axios' reporting came after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's signaled early Sunday on X that despite Boasberg's order, hundreds of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were sent to El Salvador—which the Trump administration will pay $6 million a year to imprison them, according toThe Associated Press.
Also sharing the Post reporting on Boasberg's order, Bukele wrote, "Oopsie… Too late," with an emoji crying from laughing. Separately, the Salvadoran leader posted a video of the prisoners' arrival—which Rubio responded to, saying, "Thank you for your assistance and friendship, President Bukele."
Bukele and Rubio noted that the Trump administration also sent to El Salvador over 20 alleged members of the gang MS-13.
The Trump administration's defiance of the judge's directive sparked fresh warnings about what lies ahead. Amnesty International USA said Sunday on X that "the United States is defying a court order in order to accelerate the complete erosion of human rights for Venezuelans seeking safety."
"This is yet another example of the Trump administration's racist targeting, detaining, and deporting of Venezuelans—many of whom haven't even been ordered deported—based on sweeping claims of gang affiliation," the human rights group added. "The U.S. continues its racist slide toward authoritarian practices."
Even before the defiance this weekend, the pro-democracy group Free Speech for People argued that the administration's recent "oversteps of the judiciary branch" provide new grounds for Congress to launch another impeachment investigation in the twice-impeached president.
Trump went into the weekend doubling down on his attacks on the judicial system with Friday remarks at the U.S. Department of Justice that triggered widespread alarm. ACLU executive director Anthony Romero—whose group is involved in the challenge against the 1798 law—said in a statement about the president's speech that "it's increasingly clear that we're entering a modern McCarthy moment. When the government is targeting a former ambassador, a legal permanent resident, law firms, and even universities and treating them like enemies of the state, it is a dark day for American democracy."
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