The Tyrant Test
A leader who uses military force to suppress his political
opposition ought to lose the right to govern.
By Adam
Serwer
California Highway Patrol officers
arrest a demonstrator in the overpass of the 101 Freeway as protests continue
in response to federal immigration operations in Los Angeles on June 10,
2025. (Apu Gomes / AFP / Getty)
June 16, 2025, 12:43 PM ET
For as long as I’ve been alive,
American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military
force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a
staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on
Terror era.
Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships,
not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose
their system on others.” His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in
1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been “lashed together by
occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use
of tanks against its own people.” Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against
the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his
arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his
own people.” George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in
2003, saying that Hussein’s government “practices
terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on
behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said “he
would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people.”
It would be absurd to say that
American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and
democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is
one who oppresses his own. So it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants
in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate,
democratic leaders elected the United States of America, now apply to the
sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally powerful
formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political
opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the “tyrant test,”
and Trump is already failing it.
Trump came into office promising to
carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled
with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this
meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was
allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers,
families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for
deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to
secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have
been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while
others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face
dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced
a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has
sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American
citizens from expressing opposition to these methods.
Although there are circumstances where
an intervention by the National Guard might be justified, such a decision
typically involves the judgment of local authorities—and what’s happening in
Los Angeles now is nothing like Arkansas’s school-segregation crisis in 1957,
when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black
students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.
Targeting California is no accident.
Republican propaganda consistently paints blue states such as California as
unlivable hellholes. Some of the protests have been violent and have
given way to vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military
deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets’ best
efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction. American
service members have been ordered there not to protect their compatriots but to
intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing the president. On Friday,
for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs
building in L.A.
The president and many of his
prominent supporters seem eager for escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles
has been “invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and that
“violent, insurrectionist mobs” have been “swarming and attacking” immigration-enforcement
officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “insurrectionists carrying foreign
flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of
America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.”
Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass,
who had pointed out that the city had been more peaceful prior to the
administration’s response, of “insurrection.” Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the
military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to “liberate
the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor
and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to
insert into the city”—just moments before federal officers forcibly removed
Senator Alex Padilla of California and pushed him to the ground when he tried
to ask questions.
Right-wing media, aware that the
administration’s actions and rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have
been telling their audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by
Democrats to trap Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious
fondness for dictatorship. “Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so
when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more
hatred and violence against him,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday. “They’re
burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they’re
fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.” Someone
might be bloodthirsty, but it’s not the Democrats.
If L.A. had been taken over by
insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them and give them money—though
only insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf, of
course. Instead, the protests provoked by the administration’s authoritarian
tactics appear to be mere pretext for using force against Trump’s political
opposition. The L.A. police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city’s police force could handle the protests without
assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for using the military
against Americans who have the temerity to oppose him. This has long been a
fantasy of Trump’s—he praised China’s crackdown on the
Tiananmen Square protest movement as having “put it down with strength.” Last
week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful, self-worshipping military parade would be met “with very big force.”
How did Republicans go from condemning
leaders who threaten their own citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here,
too, we find a holdover of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to
describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.
In the 1950s, the terms First
World, Second World, and Third World emerged
as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned governments, and
emerging nations not allied with either faction, respectively. Third
World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite
countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.
And that’s exactly how Trump officials
and their allies are referring to communities such as Los Angeles in order to
justify using military force. Last night, following the massive “No Kings” protests across the
country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social
that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal
Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called “the core of the Democrat
Power Center”; he further described immigration as turning America into a
“Third World dystopia.”
The post echoed similar language from
right-wing-media figures who, last week, began repeating the same rote talking
points about the need to ban all “Third World” immigration.
The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies during the
2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of an argument for
Trump using the military to “take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it
fast,” a chart from a white-nationalist website showing
the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made explicit that he
wasn’t borrowing just the chart from a white-nationalist website but also its
ideological conclusions about the threat that nonwhite people pose. “This is the Great Replacement Theory,” Kirk
explained. “Remember we talked about how they want to replace white Anglo-Saxon
Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians.” The
term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What’s next in
the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and
perfidious Jews?
The increased support Trump received
in the 2024 election from nonwhite voters hasn’t altered prominent Trump
proponents’ view that America is the white man’s birthright and that all others
are merely interlopers. “The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically.
It is to make America less white, less European by descent,” The Daily
Wire’s Matt Walsh declared. “You’re not gonna destroy
Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever. You destroy
it by importing non-Western people.”
These ideas weren’t coming from just
commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A.
“looked like a Third World country” on Fox News; Miller posted on X that “huge swaths of the city
where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured,
balkanized society of strangers.” If Los Angeles is “balkanized,” that is
because it has a long history of being forcibly segregated by race, starting decades
before Miller was born. But here, Miller’s objection is not a call for
integration but an expression of rage that the city is less white than it used
to be. On Thursday night, Trump said “illegal aliens” were turning America into
a “Third World Nation” and declared, “I am reversing the invasion. It’s called
remigration,” using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from
European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.
The math here doesn’t take much
effort. In the view of these officials and commentators, California (and, by
extension, America) has been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa,
and Asia, which is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military
force against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather
neatly with Miller’s expressed view that the repeal of racist
restrictions on immigration in the 1960s destroyed the country. Both inside and
outside the administration, the consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you
are not white, you are a threat to Western civilization. This is how they
rationalize Trump failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being
made against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see as
not truly American.
This is how a tyrant thinks. Every
dictator who has ever cracked down on political opposition has done so by
rendering them internal foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body
politic who can justly be crushed like insects. Those serving in uniform,
military or civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant’s
instrument against their own communities is what they had in mind when they
signed up.
