Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
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Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
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Authoritarian Watch
/ February 6, 2026
Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
Trump is retreating into a fantasy world in which he remains an all-conquering strongman. Yet the American people are rejecting him over and over again.
Sasha Abramsky
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Donald Trump departs following an event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, January 27, 2026.
(Scott Morgan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration was using secretive “administrative subpoenas” to access the phone, e-mail, and social-media communications of US citizens who had criticized the government’s anti-immigrant positions. The content of and rationale for the subpoenas aren’t revealed to the targets. Instead, people are being sent vague legal notices from Google and other tech companies saying that the government has sought access to their accounts—making it all but impossible for them to challenge their validity.
It is the sort of Kafkaesque twilight zone that would have been all too familiar to Eastern Europeans in the decades they spent under the Soviet heel.
For Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director at the ACLU Foundation’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the use of these subpoenas speaks to the increasingly extra-constitutional—or even anti-constitutional—nature of Trump’s second term. “The right to criticize the government and to speak out about government abuses is the core of what is protected by the First Amendment. Government agents abusing these administrative subpoenas to target people for exercising their First Amendment rights is not only outrageous—it’s unconstitutional,” he argues. “Congress has given DHS the power to issue administrative subpoenas in specific kinds of customs and immigration enforcement investigations. But here, the government is violating the law by issuing these subpoenas—which don’t involve approval by a judge—to investigate people for their lawful, protected speech. That’s illegal, and it is a betrayal of our bedrock guarantee that the government can’t punish people because it disagrees with their speech.”
He’s right. Increasingly, on one issue after the next, Trump 2.0 is dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law and reaching toward a Big Brother Is Watching You vision of governance.
Over and over again, the government is making it clear that it regards the First Amendment as an inconvenience to be skirted wherever possible. Witness the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, targeted for writing articles on workers fired during the …
This affects the entire country.
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Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
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Current Issue
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Authoritarian Watch
/ February 6, 2026
Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
Trump is retreating into a fantasy world in which he remains an all-conquering strongman. Yet the American people are rejecting him over and over again.
Sasha Abramsky
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Donald Trump departs following an event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, January 27, 2026.
(Scott Morgan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration was using secretive “administrative subpoenas” to access the phone, e-mail, and social-media communications of US citizens who had criticized the government’s anti-immigrant positions. The content of and rationale for the subpoenas aren’t revealed to the targets. Instead, people are being sent vague legal notices from Google and other tech companies saying that the government has sought access to their accounts—making it all but impossible for them to challenge their validity.
It is the sort of Kafkaesque twilight zone that would have been all too familiar to Eastern Europeans in the decades they spent under the Soviet heel.
For Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director at the ACLU Foundation’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the use of these subpoenas speaks to the increasingly extra-constitutional—or even anti-constitutional—nature of Trump’s second term. “The right to criticize the government and to speak out about government abuses is the core of what is protected by the First Amendment. Government agents abusing these administrative subpoenas to target people for exercising their First Amendment rights is not only outrageous—it’s unconstitutional,” he argues. “Congress has given DHS the power to issue administrative subpoenas in specific kinds of customs and immigration enforcement investigations. But here, the government is violating the law by issuing these subpoenas—which don’t involve approval by a judge—to investigate people for their lawful, protected speech. That’s illegal, and it is a betrayal of our bedrock guarantee that the government can’t punish people because it disagrees with their speech.”
He’s right. Increasingly, on one issue after the next, Trump 2.0 is dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law and reaching toward a Big Brother Is Watching You vision of governance.
Over and over again, the government is making it clear that it regards the First Amendment as an inconvenience to be skirted wherever possible. Witness the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, targeted for writing articles on workers fired during the …
Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
This affects the entire country.
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Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
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Current Issue
Politics
/
Authoritarian Watch
/ February 6, 2026
Trump’s Dictatorial Mania Is Increasing—but So Is the Public’s Fury
Trump is retreating into a fantasy world in which he remains an all-conquering strongman. Yet the American people are rejecting him over and over again.
Sasha Abramsky
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Donald Trump departs following an event in Clive, Iowa, on Tuesday, January 27, 2026.
(Scott Morgan / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
On Tuesday, The Washington Post revealed that the Trump administration was using secretive “administrative subpoenas” to access the phone, e-mail, and social-media communications of US citizens who had criticized the government’s anti-immigrant positions. The content of and rationale for the subpoenas aren’t revealed to the targets. Instead, people are being sent vague legal notices from Google and other tech companies saying that the government has sought access to their accounts—making it all but impossible for them to challenge their validity.
It is the sort of Kafkaesque twilight zone that would have been all too familiar to Eastern Europeans in the decades they spent under the Soviet heel.
For Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director at the ACLU Foundation’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, the use of these subpoenas speaks to the increasingly extra-constitutional—or even anti-constitutional—nature of Trump’s second term. “The right to criticize the government and to speak out about government abuses is the core of what is protected by the First Amendment. Government agents abusing these administrative subpoenas to target people for exercising their First Amendment rights is not only outrageous—it’s unconstitutional,” he argues. “Congress has given DHS the power to issue administrative subpoenas in specific kinds of customs and immigration enforcement investigations. But here, the government is violating the law by issuing these subpoenas—which don’t involve approval by a judge—to investigate people for their lawful, protected speech. That’s illegal, and it is a betrayal of our bedrock guarantee that the government can’t punish people because it disagrees with their speech.”
He’s right. Increasingly, on one issue after the next, Trump 2.0 is dispensing with the niceties of the rule of law and reaching toward a Big Brother Is Watching You vision of governance.
Over and over again, the government is making it clear that it regards the First Amendment as an inconvenience to be skirted wherever possible. Witness the recent FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, targeted for writing articles on workers fired during the …
