Authoritarianism as Slapstick

The strange spectacle of grievance power repeatedly humiliating itself in public courtrooms

What we are watching unfold is the full force and effect of grievance politics colliding with reality, a kakistocracy built on loyalty tests, resentment, and performative rage running headfirst into actual competence and the rule of law.

Start with the Federal Reserve, where the timing alone raises uncomfortable questions. Jerome Powell’s term as chair ends in May, though he remains a member of the Board of Governors through 2028. Donald Trump, furious that Powell will not cut interest rates on command, appears to have decided that waiting out a routine leadership transition was insufficient. Instead of letting the chairmanship expire on schedule, the administration reframed the dispute as criminal. The problem, Trump concluded, was not monetary policy but criminality. The Justice Department was unleashed on the sitting Fed chair in what can only be described as an attempt to prosecute independence into submission, a pressure campaign aimed at coercing compliance before the calendar could do its work.

The backlash was swift and unusually blunt. Former Federal Reserve chairs and Treasury secretaries, Republicans and Democrats, Bush-era conservatives and Obama-era technocrats, issued a rare joint statement warning that criminalizing monetary policy is the behavior of weak states with collapsing institutions, not democracies governed by the rule of law. Republican senators, suddenly aware that markets notice these things and tend to react badly, demanded investigations not into Powell, but into Trump’s DOJ for weaponization.

If the message had landed, the story might have ended there, it didn’t. Senator Mark Kelly soon found himself threatened with punishment by the Pentagon for reminding service members of a basic legal principle: you are not required to follow illegal orders. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused a sitting U.S. senator of sedition and treason over a video that named no specific order and merely recited settled military law. The threat to strip Kelly of his retirement rank and pension followed. Kelly’s response was to sue, invoking the First Amendment, the Speech or Debate Clause, and the separation of powers itself, warning that allowing the executive branch to discipline legislators for oversight would invert the constitutional structure and chill Congress into submission.

The administration’s grievance politics began manifesting on the ground. In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to halt what he described as a federal “invasion” of the state following the fatal shooting of Minneapolis resident Renée Nicole Good by an ICE officer. Thousands of federal agents, many reportedly poorly trained, were unleashed into communities with a minimal non-citizen population, conducting warrantless arrests, raiding churches and schools, pepper-spraying journalists, and telling residents explicitly that they did not need warrants. Minnesota’s lawsuit does not merely allege misconduct; it argues that DHS violated the Administrative Procedure Act and constitutional protections, and that federal power is being wielded arbitrarily, dangerously, and punitively.

Illinois followed. Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Governor J.B. Pritzker sued DHS over “Operation Midway Blitz,” which resulted in more than 4,300 arrests and, according to the complaint, involved warrantless detentions, indiscriminate use of tear gas, and enforcement actions not authorized by Congress. The language was strikingly similar: federal agents acting without lawful authority, terrorizing communities, and undermining public safety in the name of enforcement that looked far more like spectacle than law.

On Monday, a senior federal prosecutor, Robert K. McBride, was fired from the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia amid turmoil over the administration’s ongoing effort to re-indict James Comey, a prosecution multiple judges have already rejected as legally insufficient. McBride’s sin appears to have been refusing to play along cleanly. He balked at simultaneously running the office and leading a politically charged re-indictment effort, and had not shown sufficient enthusiasm for immigration prosecutions or sanctuary crackdowns.

The Comey saga is instructive not because it is unique, but because it is emblematic. A U.S. attorney unlawfully appointed, with charges dismissed by judges. The same official continuing to sign court papers anyway. A deputy fired amid disputes over whether to carry out a prosecution rooted more in presidential vendetta than evidence. Today’s Justice Department functions as a grievance engine, repeatedly slamming into the judiciary and shedding parts on impact.

Put together, these episodes form a coherent picture. This is grievance politics as governance, performed with all the confidence of a schoolyard bully who has never once been punched back. What the kakistocracy did not plan for is what happens when the bully swings at someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

The result has been something closer to slapstick than domination. Keystone Cops charging headlong into Scotland Yard. A would-be strongman discovering he’s shadowboxing a black-belt constitutional order that doesn’t need to raise its voice to drop him on the mat.

For the viewing public, there is an undeniable element of dark entertainment in watching raw grievance power repeatedly bounce off systems it does not understand. Each tantrum produces another lawsuit, another round of evidentiary discovery, and another opportunity to place on the public record just how profoundly incompetent the Trump regime really is.

This is not the end of anything. But it is the failure mode laid bare, and in real time: a kakistocracy mistaking noise for dominance, running headfirst into the rule of law, and discovering, to its ongoing humiliation, that the law does not care how loud you yell.