NR PLUS Politics & Policy

Saying ‘Regime’ Is Bad, Except When We Say It

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Then-president Donald Trump, April 20, 2020; President Joe Biden, February 22, 2021 (Kevin Lamarque, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post thinks this rhetoric is violent and authoritarian, except when his own side uses it.

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Greg Sargent of the Washington Post thinks this rhetoric is violent and authoritarian, except when his own side uses it.

O ne of the iron rules of progressive punditry is that, when Democrats are in power, everything that was done or said about the times they were out of power is memory-holed, and when Democrats are out of power, everything that was done or said about the times they were in power is memory-holed.

The Washington Post’s progressive activist Greg Sargent is nothing if not obedient to this rule. In a recent column, you can find him dutifully explaining that using the word “regime” to describe a presidential administration of the opposing party is a threat to democracy and a veiled call for violence:

The term “regime” is a mainstay of [Marjorie Taylor] Greene’s political vocabulary, and right-wing authoritarian nationalists in Congress and the media are using it more and more prominently. Understanding the term is essential to grasping what’s happening with today’s MAGA-fied right and why some experts fear we may be hurtling toward rising political violence and instability. . .

To call this the work of the Biden “regime” is really to say that the act of applying the law to Trump will be treated as fundamentally illegitimate. When Greene claims this is the stuff of civil wars and rogue regimes, she really means that holding Trump accountable to the law should be regarded by his supporters as an act of war.

That’s a pretty sweeping indictment of the term, leaving no room for moral ambiguity: If you say “regime,” you’re promoting “political violence” and rejecting legitimacy. As usual, Sargent then launders his opinions through sympathetic “experts”:

Conservatism scholar Joshua Tait explains how this works in his etymology of the “regime” term for the Bulwark. The word, Tait notes, is meant to invoke a sense that a range of U.S. institutions — the administrative state, the media, universities, etc. — have been irredeemably captured by the left, creating a “regime” that in some vague sense exercises hidden but tyrannical control. . . . “What do people ultimately do to regimes?” Tait asks rhetorically. “They topple them.” To call the legitimately elected Biden administration “the regime,” Tait argues, “is an implicit call to overthrow it.”

Steven Levitsky, a scholar of democratic breakdown, sees this as roughly analogous to Latin American countries in which the concerted delegitimization of elected governments was followed by coups. “To call a democratically elected government a ‘regime’ is to deliberately undermine its legitimacy and justify authoritarian and violent acts against it,” Levitsky tells me. . . . Now the term “regime” is being employed strategically to justify the further abandonment of democracy, Levitsky notes: “This is clear evidence that a big sector of the party is now on authoritarian terrain.”

Authoritarian terrain and justification of violence, you say? Sargent is not alone in pushing this line. Georgetown professor Don Moynihan says: “A weird linguistic trend to watch on the right is the term ‘Biden regime.’ We usually reserve ‘regime’ for authoritarian governments, but in the US the most anti-democratic actors use it to undermine the winner of a free and fair election.” Dartmouth professor Brendan Nyhan refers, in a multi-tweet thread, to the use of the term as a “dangerous discourse of illegitimacy.”

I consulted my own expert, Mr. Google, who responded to me in an interview that took 0.52 seconds. He returned many examples of this authoritarian language of violent illegitimacy being wielded against Donald Trump, either by progressives or by their allies against “the Trump regime.” Some of these people are prominent opinion leaders, some political leaders, some reporters or professors, and some just crackpots. Some made explicit arguments for treating Trump and his government as a regime; others just seeded the phrase seamlessly into their discussion of issues, treating it as understood that one was dealing with a regime. Here’s a sampling (emphasis mine):

  • Law professors Nelson Tebbe, Micah Schwartzman, and Richard Schragger, in Vox (there’s always a Vox column), January 2017: “The new Republican regime will vigorously prosecute the so-called culture wars. (Not that this frame is the only or most useful way of understanding the Trump regime as a whole — we use it only as shorthand for the social questions that are likely to arise.) . . . Minimizing the likely impact of the Trump regime on social equality would be a mistake.”
  • McMaster University professor Henry Giroux in BillMoyers.com, January 2017: “Revisiting Orwell’s ‘1984’ in Trump’s America: The new regime evokes past totalitarian states, both historical and fictional”: “The arrogant and unchecked presence of this neo-fascist regime has also ignited the great collective power of resistance.”
  • Mike Mariani in Vanity Fair, March 2017: “White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s early press conferences suggest that he too will serve as media antagonist, baiting reporters with arrogant fallacies and extending the Trump regime’s brand of bullying truth and democratic values into wary submission. . . . It’s how Moscow has entrenched a super-rich oligarchy and a thinly veiled authoritarian regime.”
  • Virginia Heffernan in Wired, March 2017: “Samantha Bee’s Full-Frontal Assault on the Trump Regime.”
  • Susan Glasser in Politico, March 2017: “‘Everything I’ve worked for for two decades is being destroyed,’ a senior Republican told me—and he was considered one of the Republicans more open to the Trump regime.”
  • David Biello in Scientific American, April 2017, drawing an unfavorable parallel to Xi Jinping: “As many see the Trump regime abandoning U.S. leadership in the fight to restrain global warming, China seems willing to step up, at least in rhetoric.”
  • New York Civil Liberties Union executive director Donna Lieberman, in a press release, May 2017: “Yet another court has rejected the Trump regime’s attempt to pretend that this second executive order was anything but an attempt to fulfill the president’s campaign promise to ban Muslims.”
  • Matthew Yglesias in Vox, May 2017, on “The function of bullsh** in the Trump regime”: “Trumpian bullsh** involves the transplantation of the kind of social and political role that Havel envisioned into a society that is much closer to the one Frankfurt lived in. Nobody in America is coerced into parroting the Trumpian line, and indeed, elements of the media that lie outside the Trumposphere appear to be prospering and flourishing under his regime . . . Bullsh** plays a genuine functional role for the Trump regime.”
  • Emory University professor and chairwoman of African American Studies Carol Anderson, in the Guardian, July 2017: “Don’t call it the Trump administration. Call it a regime”: “While governing and administration have fallen by the wayside, the signs of a Trump regime are everywhere. . . . There’s the gaslighting of the American people as his regime destroys or tarnishes alternate sources of facts, such as the media, the Census Bureau and climate change data from government websites, leaving only his regime as the authoritative dispenser of reality. . . . Throughout his regime, vacancy signs hang on key posts. . . . Trump does not want a governing apparatus in place. He wants a regime.”
  • Charles Blow in the New York Times, July 2017: “I know that there are things of graver consequence in Donald Trump’s regime than his diction, but as a person whose vocation concerns him with language, I am simply appalled by Trump’s savage mauling of that language.”
  • Paul Abrams in the Contributor section of the Huffington Post, July 2017: “This Simple Law Would End the Trump Regime, With Barely a Whimper.”
  • In August 2017, former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson launched “The Resistance Political Action Committee” with a vow to “end the Trump regime.”
  • Henry Reichman of the American Association of University Professors (in which he has held several offices including the group’s vice president and chairman of its foundation), January 2018: “Facing the Reality of the Trump regime”: “On November 9, 2016, we awoke to the shocking realization that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States. Many wondered what this would mean for our country in general and academia in particular. We are now well into the Trump regime. . . . We are seeing once again a frontal assault on tenure that may only intensify under the Trump regime, even if the president is not directly implicated.”
  • Martin Neil Baily in a report for the Brookings Institution, February 2018: “EPA does not control state laws, but under the Trump regime it will be easier and cheaper for companies to resolve environmental concerns—at the price of more pollution.”
  • Christopher Dickey in the Daily Beast, July 2018: “When Does the American Government Become the Trump Regime?”: “‘We are rapidly approaching the moment when we should stop referring to the American government and start referring to the Trump regime.’ That single sentence [I] posted on Twitter last Thursday resonated far and wide. . . . If the Democrats fail to win enough races across the country in November to take control of Congress, there very likely will be no future for the party, and then the American government really will have become the Trump regime.”
  • The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson, in the Daily Beast, November 2019: “Barr is the attorney general of the Trump regime, and protection of the maximum leader is his sole mission. He is a weapon, not a servant.”
  • Boston College law professor Mark Brodin in the National Lawyers Guild Review, December 2019: “From Dog-Whistle to Megaphone: The Trump Regime’s Cynical Assault on Affirmative Action”
  • Adam Serwer in the Atlantic, February 2020: “The First Days of the Trump Regime”: “The Senate acquittal marked the beginning of a fundamental transition of the United States from a democracy, however flawed, toward authoritarianization. It was, in short, the end of the Trump administration, and the first day of the would-be Trump regime.”
  • John Horgan in Scientific American, April 2020: “In a recent column, I expressed the hope that the coronavirus epidemic, by exposing the incompetence and mendacity of the Trump regime, will bring it to an end.”
  • Lincoln Mitchell of European Interest, May 2020: “The Collapse of the Trump Regime.”
  • Franklin Foer in the Atlantic, June 2020: “The Trump Regime Is Beginning to Topple.”
  • Jack Holmes in Esquire, June 2020: “The Trump Regime Has Announced Its Intent to Crush Peaceful Protests With Military Force.”
  • George Packer in the Atlantic, June 2020: “Trump’s short walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church had all the trappings of a strongman . . . [including] his top general, wearing combat fatigues as if to signal that the army would defend the regime against the people, and his top justice official, who had given the order to raid the square.”
  • Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic, July 2020, in a lengthy essay comparing Trump to numerous East European Communist regimes: “In the United States of America, it is hard to imagine how fear could be a motivation for anybody. There are no mass murders of the regime’s political enemies, and there never have been. Political opposition is legal; free press and free speech are guaranteed in the Constitution. And yet even in one of the world’s oldest and most stable democracies, fear is a motive. The same former administration official who observed the importance of apocalyptic Christianity in Trump’s Washington also told me, with grim disgust, that ‘they are all scared.’”
  • Matt Novak in Gizmodo, August 2020: “Trump Regime Installs Conspiracy Theorist to Help Build Propaganda Network With Taxpayer Money”: “We’ll see if the Trump regime’s latest efforts to create a news network devoted to a cult of presidential personality rather than ‘the truth’ are successful.”
  • Chauncey DeVega in Salon, August 2020: “Acting on Trump’s commands, Attorney General William Barr and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf have created a de facto secret police force to be used against the regime’s‘enemies’ — meaning the majority of Americans who do not support Donald Trump. . . . In this fourth and perhaps final year of Trump’s presidency, the regime’s use of Vladimir Putin’s playbook is escalating. . . . Journalists and reporters must not allow themselves to be used as human props by the Trump regime at his press conferences and other events.”
  • Ron Elving in NPR, September 2020, in a review of H. R. McMaster’s memoir: “If all this is implicitly critical of the Trump regime, McMaster is more explicit about Trump’s drawdown of troops and negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
  • Robert Pozarycki at A.M. New York, October 2020: “Cuomo says Trump regime led ‘the great American surrender’ against COVID-19”: “As for Meadows and the Trump regime, Cuomo inferred that they could have controlled the COVID-19 pandemic nationally if they were actually interested in doing so.”
  • Rick Wilson again, in the Daily Beast, November 2020: “The Trump regime is in full and robust collapse. . . . Like every failing authoritarian regime, Trump’s followed the Hemingway Rule: The collapse came slowly, then all at once.”
  • Charles Pierce in Esquire, December 2020: “The Trump Regime Ends as It Began: Full of Clumsy Palace Intrigue, Serial Incompetence, and Wild Paranoia.” Pierce’s column appends an asterisk every time it uses the word “president,” “presidency,” or “administration.”
  • Anita Kumar and Alice Miranda Ollstein in Politico, December 2020: “Millions of immigrants — from those seeking to escape their countries to wealthy foreign investors — will likely remain under a lingering Trump regime for months, even years in some cases.”
  • DeVega again in Salon, May 2021: “America urgently needs a real investigation of the Trump regime — or it will all happen again”: “The full truth of the Trump regime’s crimes must be publicly revealed. . . . Public health experts have estimated that the number of deaths might have been limited to 100,000, had the Trump regime and Republican Party acted responsibly during the early months of the pandemic. . . . There is no full and genuine public accounting for the crimes of the Trump regime, it is all but certain that Donald Trump will not be America’s last neofascist president but instead its first.”
  • Washington University law professor Trevor George Gardner in the Stanford Law Review, June 2021: “Under the Trump regime, law-and-order politics exhibited an additional benefit to its purveyors: obfuscation of the threat to the criminal–legal order posed by the very purveyors of these politics. . . . The 2020 protests were subject to the same rule-of-law distortion as the Trump regime — namely, a fixation on minority violent crime — but to opposite effect. While much of the public did not consider criminal offending under the Trump regime as evidence of law and order’s decline, Black Lives Matter was often reduced within Trump’s law-and-order paradigm to the relatively few incidents of criminal violence committed by affiliated protesters.”
  • Dean Obeidallah at MSNBC, October 2021: “‘The Problem with Jon Stewart’ is he was absent during Trump’s regime.”
  • Democratic congressman Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, in a press release November 2021: “U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09) today praised a new report from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) finding a torrent of Hatch Act crimes by former officials in the Trump regime.”
  • Nina Burleigh in the NBC Think op-ed platform at NBC News, November 2021: “With each passing month, the likelihood of anyone in power being held accountable for the cavalier profiteering and science denialism that marked the Trump regime’s handling of the pandemic — and the resultant and ongoing Republican Party slide into vaccine hesitancy, misinformation monetization and science rejection — seems to grow dimmer.”
  • Derek Baine in Forbes, January 2022: “News channels OANN and NewsMax, who promoted conspiracy theories and other story lines that were popular at the time of the Trump regime, may have also lost interest in these story lines moving to more greener [sic] pastures like covering the Senate battles.”
  • Elie Mystal in the Nation, July 2022: “The country is demanding that the Trump regime be held accountable for its suspected role in trying to overthrow the government.”
  • Former congressman David Jolly (who left the Republican Party in 2018), on MSNBC, August 2022: “There’s a willingness inside the Trump regime to use violence.”
  • Dean Moses at A.M. New York, September 2022: “‘We wasted three years’: Velázquez blames Trump regime for leaving Puerto Rico vulnerable as pols seek Hurricane Fiona relief.”

You know who else used this phrasing? Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, who framed his book on Trump’s lies around the conclusion that “a hallmark of authoritarian regimes is to call truth into question — except as the regime defines it.” That quotation was cited approvingly in May 2020 by none other than Greg Sargent, who made it the centerpiece of his article on Kessler’s book and led off his tweet promoting that article with that quote.

In April 2020, Sargent also defended the use of the word “regime” to reference Trump’s Covid “testing regime”: “‘Regime’ also means ‘a system or planned way of doing things.’” That’s not the same usage, but it illustrates how he does not see the same dark meaning in word usage when it’s his own language or his own side.

This is before we get to Twitter. Consider a sampling of the widely followed and prominent people who used the term “Trump regime” on that platform in tweets that were shared by hundreds or thousands of users:

United States Senator Brian Schatz:

Current Senate candidate Evan McMullin:

Representative Rashida Tlaib:

Billionaire Democratic donor and onetime presidential candidate Tom Steyer:

Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt:

Democrat activist Rachel Bitecofer:

Democrat activist and onetime Biden appointee Neera Tanden:

MSNBC host Joy Reid:

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1165399707344101377

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1311716160703025153

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/1266794423221923842

Mother Jones writer David Corn:

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas:

MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner:

Actress Alyssa Milano:

Actress Patricia Arquette:

https://twitter.com/PattyArquette/status/1227833799456776193

Writer Bruce Bartlett:

Writer Steven Beschloss:

MSNBC analyst Fernand Amandi:

Writer Sarah Kendzior:

Journalist John Pilger:

Writer Mikel Jollett:

Elie Mystal, again:

The “Trump regime” trend was already sufficient less than four months into Trump’s presidency to alarm liberal political-science professor Daniel Drezner, who wrote in the Washington Post about it in May 2017 — but Drezner was not alarmed enough to say that he wouldn’t use the term in the future:

I have noticed a disturbing trend in my social media discussions over the past hundred days or so: some of my colleagues refer to the current stewards of the executive branch as the “Trump regime” rather than the “Trump administration.”. . . When the political scientists I know talk about Trump, an increasing number use “Trump regime” rather than “Trump administration.” The implication might be subtle to you but it carries meaning to social scientists. Basically, many of my colleagues are saying that under Trump, America’s liberal democratic regime is changing into something else, a fact that should be acknowledged. . . . For now, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will continue to use “Trump administration.” But I can no longer dismiss my colleagues who say “Trump regime” out of hand. That is more than a little disturbing.

Damon Linker warned in the Week, June 2020, about “the dangerous fantasy of toppling the Trump regime,” noting in particular the prevalence of this framing at the Atlantic:

A number of the president’s most vociferous critics have long treated him as a tyrant lacking in democratic legitimacy. Early on in Trump’s presidency, these critics began to go by the name of “the resistance,” a moniker meant to suggest that they were more like dissidents standing against a despot than mere critics of an office holder facing an election in the not-so-distant future. Today this tendency to conflate the Trump administration with a “regime” that needs to be toppled through extra-constitutional means is becoming a commonplace, especially at the leading resistance publications. . . . As corrupt and malign as it is, the Trump administration isn’t a “regime,” and no American should want to see it “toppled” when it can be lawfully voted out of office on Nov. 3. . . . Trump is bad. But he’s not the tyrant he plays on Twitter. The “resistance” needs to remember that and stop indulging in fantasies of making him disappear through extra-constitutional means.

You could even buy “End the Trump Regime” T-shirts, complete with an image of Trump facing the guillotine.

In short, as we so often see, progressives are accusing others of things they themselves engage in with great profligacy.

For my own part, I dislike the use of “regime” to describe a president’s administration and think it coarsens debate, cheapens and weakens your arguments, and erodes trust in our system. But then, there are a whole lot of things in American political rhetoric that have the same effects. Politics, as the saying goes, ain’t beanbag. People who think the president is abusing the law or distorting reality need a language to express that, and sometimes that language will go too far. And there is a serious point being made by people on the right who think we have too much unelected government whose public and private power is immune to elections, free markets, or the marketplace of ideas. While some of those arguments are made by bad and violent people on the right, most of them are made by people invoking the small-r republican tradition and arguing that more power should be lodged in the winners of popular elections. This, too, is a serious argument.

But Greg Sargent would rather just pretend you were born yesterday.

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