Why Trump seeks to create a government of one person

“Do you believe I am unwittingly supporting the Antichrist?” Benjamin Cole asked BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield in perhaps the most contentious episode of BNG’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast to date.

In an hour-long conversation on current politics, the temperature started to rise when Cole brought up what Wingfield has written about Trump in recent months: “The way you have spoken of Trump, sort of the Republican Party, those who are complicit in this new fascism is so … it’s so over the top. It’s just so over the top. … You are overstating your case for effect, and I think you do so intentionally.”

But Wingfield countered, “I don’t intend to overstate. I think we understate the case, because I think Donald Trump is the greatest threat to the world we’ve seen in our lifetime. He is a menace. I believe he’s against everything Jesus Christ teaches. I believe he is cruel. I believe he is evil. I believe he is Satan in disguise, and I’m not overstating that.”

Then Cole responded, “I just don’t even have words, really, quite frankly, to respond to that, except to say I think that is so beyond rational.”

“Why is the language from the left so much more extreme now in warning about Trump’s second term?”

The two men went on to discuss past presidents or presidential candidates who people on the opposite side of the aisle could disagree with but not consider to be anti-Christ. But Cole seemed bothered by two questions. Why is the language from the left so much more extreme now in warning about Trump’s second term? And does that mean Trump supporters are unwittingly supporting an Antichrist?

Libertarianism or authoritarianism

I had a similar contentious conversation two decades ago with a friend who became the best man in my wedding. At the time, we both were conservatives. But California was trying to pass laws to lower the risks of second-hand smoke.

“I hope they’re successful,” my conservative friend said.

“Why?” I asked. “That’s big government.”

“Because smoking is sin,” he replied.

“But that doesn’t matter,” I said. “The government shouldn’t have that level of control in our lives.”

Our conversation may not have gone to discussing whether or not one of us was supporting the Antichrist. But it touched on one of the disconnects many of us have today with our Trump-supporting family and friends.

Prior to the 2024 election, whenever we would bring up Project 2025, many of our acquaintances on the right thought we had become the conspiracy theorists, that there was no way Trump was this fascist dictator who planned to do the things we were saying Christian nationalists wanted to do. And when we pointed to Trump and JD Vance’s own words, they’d laugh and say, “That’s just Trump being Trump. He’d never actually be able to do those things.”

My impulse not to ban smoking 20 years ago was the impulse of small-government libertarianism. No matter what my personal beliefs about smoking were, I didn’t want the government forcing others to live according to my personal beliefs. And I believed that because I didn’t want to have to submit to someone else’s personal beliefs. It’s not fun to be on the underside of someone else’s hierarchy.

So if you would have told me back then that I was a fascist authoritarian who is unwittingly supporting the Antichrist, I likely would have laughed and echoed Cole’s words to Wingfield that such an accusation was “beyond rational.” And my guess is many of our conservative family and friends today view themselves in that light. They’ve always voted Republican. They don’t like big government. And Trump’s the Republican candidate. So they vote for him.

“The other impulse in conservatism is authoritarianism.”

But what they don’t realize is there is another impulse at play in conservatism. As illustrated in the story of my conservative friend wanting to ban smoking, the other impulse in conservatism is authoritarianism. He believed smoking was wrong and wanted the government to dictate his morality to the rest of the country in law. This is conservatives at the top of the hierarchy, wielding power over those below.

That’s the impulse Wingfield and many of us on the left are calling out in Trump and Vance. So there are three questions we need to consider:

• Is it accurate to call Trump and Vance’s politics authoritarianism?
• Is this authoritarianism something new for the United States in 2025?
• How does this authoritarianism fit into conservatives’ view of small government?

Vance’s call for the oligarchs

Conservatives have “very few oligarchs on our side,” JD Vance said in 2021. It makes sense that Vance would call for oligarchs, given who funded his rise to power.

It all started at Yale in 2011, when a billionaire named Peter Thiel came to speak. Vance later called it “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School.” Having been so inspired by Thiel’s talk, Vance reached out after graduation and began his career working for one of Thiel’s friends.

Over the years, Thiel and Vance connected enough until Thiel donated to Vance’s campaign “the largest amount ever given to boost a Senate candidate.”

And what are Thiel’s politics?

In 2009, he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He also said, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the (voting) franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Vance on wielding power in ‘wild’ ways

“Republicans, conservatives, we’re still terrified of wielding power, of actually doing the job that the people sent us here to do,” JD Vance told The Claremont Institute Dec. 23, 2023. “We’ve got to get comfortable with wielding power.”

Two years earlier, when Vance was talking about the need for oligarchs, he told the podcast Jack Murphy Live: “If you’re not recognizing in this moment how crazy things have gotten and how outside the box we need to think, then I think you’re ultimately not really serious about taking back the country.” Then he added, “We are in the late Republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

If Vance’s vision of conservatism is so wild and far out that he says a lot of conservatives would be uncomfortable with it, then it seems rational to me that our libertarian conservative friends might be curious what that would be.

“Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit.”

“Among some of my circle, the phrase ‘extra-constitutional’ has come up quite a bit,” Murphy told Vance. “We do need to take a much more aggressive stance, a much more muscular stance. We’re going to have to become a little bit more robust in our behavior.”

Then Vance replied, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”

Again, when I was a conservative, language like this coming from other conservatives would have raised some questions for me.

Vance’s advice to Trump

In a piece for BNG last July, I shared what JD Vance said his advice to Trump would be at the time. Consider Vance’s words now that we’re aware of what Trump has been doing for the last two weeks.

Vance said: “I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”

This is exactly what Trump has been doing. Many of us are quite concerned the Democrats have not seemed up to the task of challenging him on this. Even if they did, would the conservative Supreme Court hold him accountable? And if they did, would Trump even listen to them? According to Vance’s words, it appears his advice would be to ignore the courts.

And whose portrait has Trump put up in the oval office?

Andrew Jackson.

It seems rational to me that even a libertarian conservative might have some concerns here.

Installing an American political religion

Going back to his conversation on Jack Murphy Live, Vance said, “Step one of the process is to totally replace, like rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion.”

The government installing an American political religion? Again, the past conservative in me would have had questions.

For example, Murphy asked, “How do we, aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? … These institutions are corrupted and rotted to the core. This elite ideology is everywhere and in all the things. What other options do we have besides voting them out, which we’re seeing is ineffectual?”

Vance responded, “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who’s written about some of these things.”

A CEO and a dictator

On the Jan. 30 episode of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow began introducing the world to the ideas of Curtis Yarvin.

Again, consider the words of Yarvin in the video Maddow shared in light of Trump’s actions over the past two weeks.

“It’s a very, very large system. And it all needs to be destroyed.”

“Why has no one ever suggested let’s just get rid of this thing?” Yarvin asked. “You have a government in Washington. You’re either for it or against it. … What is government? A government is just a corporation who owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. It so happens that our sovereign corporation is very poorly managed and there’s a very simple way to replace that, which is what we do at all corporations that have failed. We simply delete them. We haven’t been able to do that with our government for 200 years. So it’s gotten a little bit stale. The other thing about getting rid of your government is you can’t just say, well, the limits of the government are the limits of the formal government. You have to say, well, what is the system actually? And it includes a lot of things that are called NGOs, things that are called universities, things that are funded by the state. It’s a very, very large system. And it all needs to be destroyed.”

So what does Yarvin recommend?

“You need a CEO. And a national CEO is what’s called a dictator. It’s the same thing. There’s no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

How Yarvin’s dream dictator would govern

In case anybody is wondering, Yarvin explains exactly what his dream dictator would do. “So I have reduced this very complicated problem to a simple four letter acronym, which is RAGE,” he said. “And RAGE stands for Retire All Government Employees. Very, very, very simple.”

Then he adds, “All employees should be thanked for their service and discharged with no hard feelings and a pension sufficient to retire.”

In other words, Yarvin wants a dictator to offer a buyout program to federal employees.

Imagine that.

Again, this is exactly what Trump is doing. Trump’s offer to the federal employees says: “If you choose to remain in your current position, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity. If you choose not to continue in your current role in the federal workforce, we thank you for your service to your country and you will be provided with a dignified, fair departure from the federal government.”

The legality of this buyout offer is currently pending in the courts.

As Maddow reflected on Yarvin’s vision and Trump’s actions, she said, “This is not something that anyone would do if they actually wanted the U.S. government to continue. Even if they wanted to change what the U.S. government did, they would want to keep federal employees in positions so that the federal government could do anything. The idea of retiring all government employees — every, every employee of the federal government — this is an idea that comes from one weird place. It comes from the very weird, eccentric, right-wing tech billionaire world, where in their eyes, this is the end of the American Republic. And thank God because this lousy democracy thing has been holding us back. And what we really need is a CEO, a national CEO.”

A small government dictator

I think the reason Cole and many of our friends on the right balk at our warnings about authoritarian conservatives is that they associate conservatism with small government and authoritarians with big government.

But what we have here with Trump’s second term is something we’ve never experienced before as a nation. During the 2024 election, Democrats tried to paint Trump as wanting to take us back to the past. But that’s not what’s going on here. Trump and Vance want to take us forward into something Vance says would make a lot of conservatives uncomfortable. He says his ideas come from Yarvin, who promotes the concept of having a national CEO as our dictator.

“Trump can create the smallest government imaginable by essentially creating a government of one.”

And that’s what’s ironic about this whole thing. Trump can create the smallest government imaginable by essentially creating a government of one.

One thing Yarvin and Cole seem to agree on is that Trump’s second term is likely to be quite different from the first. Cole told Wingfield, “I’ve not been surprised that he hit the ground running because because really he’s had four years of preparation for this term and four years before that of having served in that role. And so it’s kind of it’s been fascinating to watch.”

Yarvin told Politico  he’s skeptical that Trump is going to go as far as Yarvin would like but his impression is that for Trump’s second term, “They’ve figured some things out.”

So the answers to our questions are quite clear:

• Because Vance is promoting a dictatorship that Trump is following, their politics are authoritarian.
• Because they’re completely dismantling the federal government, it’s something new we haven’t seen before.
• Because they’re centralizing all power into one dictator, their government is technically small.

The question our more libertarian conservative friends will have to ask themselves is whether it’s rational or beyond rational to be concerned about overturning our entire government in exchange for a dictatorship like Vance and Yarvin want.

Yarvin’s vision seems to be happening before our very eyes thanks to Trump. And the irony isn’t lost on Yarvin, who told Politico on Jan. 30: “There’s an old blog post of mine from 2011 where I talk about kingship and the vibe of being a king, and I’m basically like, the guy in America who has this vibe is Donald Trump.”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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