Get Ready for Trump’s TV Government

In 2018, a joke tweet went viral suggesting that then-President Donald Trump spent 17 hours a day watching “the gorilla channel,” a fake TV channel featuring footage of gorillas fighting created by his staffers. In 2024, President-elect Trump nominated Peter Hegseth, whose primary qualification is appearing on Fox and Friends, for secretary of defense. Trump nominated Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz), whose primary qualification is appearing on Oprah, to be Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator.

Since Trump’s election, some on the left have given in to the impulse of doom. They talk as if Trump is a god-emperor who will sweep away the American republic with a wave of his hand. Some on the right believe this too, though in their case, they approve of that course of action. Certainly Trump and his allies have declared their intention to reshape American society in an authoritarian direction.

But what we should expect is not an organized transformation. What we should expect is gorilla channel governance—chaotic, personalist, and based largely on what the president most recently saw on television.

Broadly speaking, there are two models of authoritarianism, one aimed at controlling society, the other aimed at controlling elites. The model of impersonal social control requires large, efficient bureaucracies that penetrate and permeate the masses. Such bureaucracies manage and transform the whole of society.

Stalin and the Bolsheviks are a model here. After they seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks inherited a country wracked by external war, civil war, and famine—in other words, a mess. Over the next two decades, they would establish governing institutions—Gosplan, the Red Army, the KGB—that permeated every aspect of Soviet life and transformed a messy and dysfunctional imperial system into a superpower capable of mobilizing 17 percent of the population into arms in wartime, 61 percent of GDP into war spending, and—when the party required—killing between 6 million and 20 million of their fellow Soviet citizens. The Soviet state permeated Soviet society, and was able to mobilize the Soviet people to extraordinary ends—for the first several decades, at least.

If this model of authoritarian governance is so effective, why choose anything else? In a word: coup-proofing. Personalist dictators find themselves threatened by the existence of efficient and impersonal bureaucracies. They fear their lieutenants more than their people. Nikita Khrushchev, after all, was removed in a quiet coup by his own lieutenants, who had only to suborn the head of a single security apparatus, the KGB.

The desire to avoid a coup produces the second model of authoritarianism, which requires numerous competing centers of power with unclear and overlapping mandates. This forces those lieutenants to constantly compete for the leader’s favor. The chaos and ambiguity of power undermines efficient administration but concentrates power in the leader’s person. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, there was a regular police force; the secret police force of the Directorate of General Security; the Iraqi Republican Guard; and finally the Fedayeen Saddam, all of which had the nominal role of controlling domestic dissent, but which operated along completely different lines of command. Men rise to the top of such systems not through competence but through personal loyalty to the boss. Trump’s personal inclinations, as well as the Republican Party’s longstanding opposition to “big government,” suggest that Trump’s second term will be characterized by a strongly personalist administration.

Personalist systems are less effective at managing a society than impersonal bureaucracies. Moreover, they are heavily reliant on the personal abilities of the leader. Trump is not a young, energetic dictator ready to spend the next 40 years remaking America. He is a tired old man who forgets what state he’s currently standing in.

And, for the most part, he is not appointing energetic young psychopaths to remake the entire system. He’s appointing people he saw on the teevee. This is gorilla channel governance: government based not on long-term plans to reshape society energetically and carefully pursued, but on the whims of an aging leader who surrounds himself with sycophants and lives in a world of television and social media.

The proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) illustrates how Trump favors the second model—that of personalist elite control. DOGE’s powers are vague and ambiguous, potentially involving major cuts to various other departments—or not, depending on the boss’s whim. On top of that, it is being created with two equal leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, precisely so Trump can play Ramaswamy and Musk off one another. Maybe DOGE is going to be given broad powers to cut a trillion dollars of government spending. Or maybe that’s just a threat Trump intends to hold over whoever he appoints to those other government departments. It’s up to him—by design.

This affects how Trump will interact with existing federal bureaucracies. Trump is not constructing his administration de novo after a revolution. Rather, he is confronted with an existing bureaucratic regime of immense size. The American federal government employs 4.5 million people and controls $6.8 trillion in spending. It can be very difficult for political appointees to control the large institutions of the permanent civil service.

This is true even when the political appointees nominally have total authority over the bureaucrats. There are large informational and organizational gaps between the bureaucrats and the appointees. A toy example: The appointee proposes some new policy. The bureaucrat, who does not want to enact this policy, says, “Yes, of course, sir, we’ll get right on it.” But the plan bureacrats enact is guaranteed to take forever, and likely be challenged in court. They will do a study to see if they should do it and a year later conclude they shouldn’t. Overcoming the preferred policies of the permanent civil service requires energy, area knowledge, and attention to detail. To put it bluntly: the ability to recognize when the civil servants are running a snow job on you.

Trump has suggested courts-martial for officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal. This will come to nothing, precisely because it offers the military bureaucracy an excuse to spend time “following orders,” preparing for these trials, and finally acquitting the officers (who indeed committed no misconduct). And by the time that’s all done with there will be something new on the gorilla channel.

We should expect Trump to see most success when he is “swimming with the tide” of existing bureaucracies or Republican priorities—much as happened during his first term, when his primary successes were a tax cut and installing conservative judges. One example is his program of mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have long desired to engage in more aggressive deportations than was allowed under President Joe Biden. Here, Trump doesn’t need to remake the bureaucracy to get it to do what he wants. He just needs to take the leash off.

Even in this arena, however, we should expect to see him struggle to co-opt blue states and their administrative capacity. Mass deportations are unlikely to involve a “whole of government” effort. Trump has also suggested denaturalizing American citizens and ending birthright citizenship by refusing to issue social security cards to the children of undocumented immigrants.

However, birth certificates are not issued by the federal government, but by a dizzying array of state agencies, municipalities, doctors, and hospitals. Denaturalization requires going through courts, which grind away at their own hideous pace. Trump cannot simply snap his fingers and transform American society from a jus soli regime to an explicitly white supremacist ethnostate.

Theories without predictive power mean little, and so let’s make a forecast here: We should expect Musk to be among the first of Trump’s picks to get shanked by Trump, precisely because he has too much of his own base and is not dependent on Trump for fame or power. A clash of egos, and Musk will be out, replaced by someone you’ve never heard of.

None of this is to say that the second Trump administration will be good. He will achieve some of his goals, especially when those goals are shared by existing institutional or party structures. And the chaos of illiberal governance is an acid wearing away at functional government and liberal society. When this ends, there will be a great deal of rebuilding to do. But opponents should expect chaos and cruelty, not well-organized fascism.