Critics Have a New Way to Describe the Trump Administration
Our take
In recent discussions surrounding Donald Trump's presidency, a notable shift in terminology has emerged, with critics increasingly referring to his time in office as the "Trump regime." This term carries significant weight, suggesting more than just a standard administration; it implies a departure from traditional democratic norms towards a more authoritarian governance style. As highlighted in The Atlantic’s coverage, the use of the term reflects the growing concern among scholars and political commentators about the implications of Trump's leadership approach, aligning it with historical examples of oppressive regimes, such as those in Chile and Iraq. This change in language is not merely academic; it serves as a rallying cry for those worried about the erosion of democratic institutions and values in the United States.
The phrase "Trump regime" encapsulates a broader narrative about the state of American democracy today. Critics like Robert Reich argue that Trump's actions resemble those of an authoritarian ruler rather than a president operating under a constitutional framework. This characterization raises essential questions about the nature of power and governance in the U.S. Unlike typical administrations that manage the executive branch in accordance with the will of the people, the term "regime" suggests an unsettling personalization of power, where decisions may be swayed by informal influences rather than democratic consensus. This is a critical distinction to make, as it reflects a shift in the political landscape that could have lasting implications for future governance. Moreover, as pointed out in the article, the implications of labeling Trump’s presidency as a regime are profound, hinting at a significant departure from the democratic norms established since the founding of the nation.
While some scholars cautiously endorse the use of the term, arguing that it aptly highlights the challenges facing American democracy, others remain hesitant. They point out that the resilience of the U.S. democratic system should not be underestimated, despite the chaos and upheaval witnessed in recent years. Indeed, as the article notes, there is a possibility that Trump's regime may not dismantle the foundational principles of democracy as thoroughly as some fear. Polls indicating widespread voter disapproval of Trump’s presidency and potential repercussions for his allies in upcoming elections suggest that the system still possesses mechanisms for self-correction. The resilience of democratic institutions may ultimately outlast attempts to undermine them, but the fear remains palpable among those who see Trump's actions as a threat to the very fabric of American governance.
Looking ahead, the evolution of political language will be essential for understanding the ongoing discourse surrounding Trump's legacy and its impact on future administrations. As the midterm elections approach, we will likely see further debates about what constitutes a "regime" in a democratic context, especially as new challenges emerge. For students and young voters, this conversation is particularly vital, as it shapes the political landscape they will inherit. How we define and discuss governance today will influence not only our electoral outcomes but also the broader narrative of democracy's strength in the face of adversity. Will the term "regime" fade away as a mere rhetorical device, or will it cement itself as a lasting descriptor of our current political reality? The answer could have profound implications for the future of American democracy.
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Critics have used many phrases to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, some of them unprintable. Scholars and journalists have debated whether Trump’s approach is “authoritarian,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist.” More recently, however, a growing number of people have begun referring to the “Trump regime.”
“The Trump regime has proven over and over,” The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote, that its morality is “the advantage of the stronger.” A fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute complained that oversight tools “were effectively destroyed by the Trump regime last year.” And a writer for The Nation called for Democrats to “launch a ‘Nuremberg Caucus’ to investigate the crimes of the Trump regime.”
Google Trends shows that although the phrase was occasionally deployed during Trump’s first term, it has become far more common over the past year. These usages are meant to tell us something about the state of contemporary politics in the United States—although exactly what is not always clear.
Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic author of The Devil’s Dictionary, might have observed that a “regime” is any government that one doesn’t like. Those referring to the “Trump regime” this way seem to be implying that the administration is rapacious and authoritarian. But few of them are explicit about that, and their counterparts in the academy indulge in the same vagueness. “Very rarely do regime analysts stop to define what they mean by political regime,” the political scientist Gerardo L. Munck complained in 1996. The word was popularized in American politics as a sort of euphemism: During the George W. Bush presidency, regime change was a bloodless, technocratic term for the bloody, chaotic effort to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democratic system of government in Iraq.
A good working definition, Munck told me in an email, is “the set of rules that regulate how people come to occupy government offices and how government decisions are made.” But even scholars often employ the term as a pejorative, used to describe authoritarian government. These “regimes” tend to have two main characteristics, sometimes overlapping though also in tension: first, the personalization of government around a single individual, and second, a set of informal power structures, such as business oligarchs or a “deep state,” that operate outside of the formal system of government.
One could argue that the U.S. has had the same “regime” since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president. Alternatively, one could look to moments such as the post–Civil War amendments or the New Deal as shifts in the regime. Either way, to state that Trump oversees a regime is to suggest an epochal change.
That’s how Robert Reich sees it. Reich, a commentator and professor who served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, has been one of the most consistent and prominent users of the phrase. “I began referring to the Trump ‘regime’ rather than ‘administration’ because, especially in his second term, Trump has acted more like an authoritarian ruler than a president in a constitutional system of governance,” he wrote to me in an email. “This is no ‘administration’ that manages the executive branch by implementing the will of Congress, as expressed by the citizens of the United States.”
I thought that perhaps scholars of regime systems would push back on using the label for Trump’s government, but the ones I spoke with cautiously endorsed it. “In the past, it was common to refer to the Pinochet regime in Chile or the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq,” Munck said. He told me that the use of Trump regime “is a correct appreciation, that highlights a key weakness in the current state of democracy in the U.S.” And Licia Cianetti, a political scientist who recently co-authored a paper on defining the word, wrote to me that “the personalisation of Trump’s style of rule, and some features like its oligarchization, make the use of ‘regime’ in this pejorative sense expedient to express what seems to be happening to American democracy.”
Without downplaying the dangers that Trump poses to the American way of government (perils that The Atlantic has been aggressive in describing), I am not ready to join the “Trump regime” crew yet. One reason is that regimes can be resilient—a point that, ironically, Trump’s actions have demonstrated. “We have, really, regime change,” Trump said about Iran this week. “This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different.” That’s nonsense. Although American forces have arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and killed several Iranian leaders, removing the dictators has not dislodged the dictatorships in either Caracas or Tehran.
The 250-year-old democracy in Washington might also be stronger than those who wish to undermine it believe. Trump may hope to topple the laws and checks that constrain him, but he has not yet fully succeeded. Polls show widespread voter disapproval of Trump’s presidency and suggest trouble for the president’s allies in the midterm elections. Fair elections in 2026 and 2028 would not undo all of the damage Trump has done, but they would show that some observers have overstated his ability to demolish the constitutional system. Long live the regime!
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Today’s News
- Iran allowed several Pakistan-flagged oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a move President Trump described as a “present” to the U.S. that signals Iran’s openness to negotiations.
- Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, appeared in New York federal court for the first time since their seizure by U.S. authorities in January, as Maduro’s lawyer pushed to dismiss drug-trafficking charges, arguing that U.S. restrictions are preventing them from funding their defense. The couple—who have pleaded not guilty—remain in custody.
- Several Senate Republicans are urging the White House to invoke the National Emergency Act and temporarily pay TSA officers if the Department of Homeland Security funding standoff over immigration enforcement continues, according to people familiar with the matter.
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Evening Read
What Was Clavicular?
By Will Gottsegen
Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.
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- Trump’s ‘Regime Change’ SwerveThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. According to President Trump, Iran has undergone not one, but two regime changes already this year—and the new government is far more “reasonable” than its predecessors. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead,” he told reporters on Air Force One this weekend. “And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.” Trump and his Cabinet have been warming to the phrase regime change since the start of his second term. It’s a marked shift from what he campaigned on. As far back as his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he was calling for the country to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change,” and he reiterated those views in his most recent bid for reelection. Last year, around the time Trump decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, he called those two words “not politically correct,” seeming to understand their rhetorical link to America’s failed “forever wars” during the 2000s and 2010s. Yet in the same Truth Social post, he started coming around to the phrase: “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” In the weeks leading up to last month’s attack on Iran, Trump said that regime change would be “the best thing that could happen” to the country. With his comments this weekend, Trump is casting regime change as a mark of progress in the war. He is signaling—perhaps in the hope of calming down oil markets—that the United States has already achieved an important victory. At the same time, he’s dramatically escalating the conflict in other ways, threatening the complete destruction of some of Iran’s most crucial energy infrastructure as the Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations. But regime change hasn’t actually happened. Although American and Israeli attacks have taken out key Iranian leaders, their replacements are still very much part of the existing system. Iran’s supreme leader is now the cleric Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated late last month. Other officials who have been killed, such as the heads of the Supreme National Security Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been replaced via the typical governmental channels—that is, by the Iranian president and his associates. (Trump has claimed that Mojtaba is seriously wounded, but on Sunday, the Iranian government transmitted a defiant message, purportedly written by him, through state media.) Iran’s government is the same theocracy it has been since the revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the shah. That any of these new appointees have meaningfully different attitudes toward the U.S. than past leaders did is, despite Trump’s assurances, far from certain. People often use regime to refer to the government of a single political leader—particularly one they dislike, or who was not elected democratically—but as my colleague David Graham helpfully explained last week, regime actually refers to a system of governance that doesn’t always change when the head of state does. “One could argue,” he wrote, “that the U.S. has had the same ‘regime’ since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president.” Arash Azizi, a scholar of Iranian history and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told me that “the war and decapitations have affected the internal factional balance, but they haven’t changed the regime. There is arguably even more regime cohesion now than there was before the war.” As for what an actual regime change in Iran might look like, Azizi said that it “would include either an unraveling of the Islamic Republic’s core structures or, at the very least, abandonment of its key policies. I think this is likely in the medium term (and it would have been even without the war)”—the regime’s signature policies are both unpopular in Iran and strategically untenable, Azizi explained—“but nothing of the sort has happened yet.” In other words, Trump is misusing the phrase to project an image of success in this historically unpopular war. The Trump administration has offered an abundance of conflicting explanations for its goals in Iran—10 rationales in the first six days of the war alone, my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have noted. But the president’s recent actions have underscored his rejection of the anti-interventionist values he campaigned on. In addition to escalating the conflict in Iran, he has sought to destabilize other foreign governments over the past few months: After the January capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (and the subsequent installation of a Trump-approved interim leader), the White House established its first effective oil blockade against Cuba since the Cuban missile crisis. Despite slightly softening the blockade in recent days, there’s no indication that Trump has backed down from his stated goal of ousting Cuban leadership and ushering in a more pro-American government. Perhaps Trump really will carry out regime change in Iran. As my colleague Nancy Youssef wrote earlier today, there are still many paths this war could take—and no military strategist would ever advise determining the outcome of a war just a few weeks in. But in the meantime, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about Trump’s assessment of how things are going. 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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
- What Trump Wants From CubaUpdated at 5:34 p.m. ET on April 3, 2026 This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Since January, the Trump administration has effectively blockaded nearly all oil shipments to Cuba, causing conditions on the island to deteriorate dramatically. Electricity is becoming more unreliable, food is spoiling, and a collapsing medical system now risks creating a major health crisis. Some hospitalized Cubans have reportedly already died as a result of the blockade. According to my colleague Vivian Salama, a staff writer who has been reporting on Cuba, it’s all part of the White House’s plan to choke the island, destabilizing Cuba’s top leadership and forcing its government into diplomatic talks with the United States. In today’s Daily, she and I discuss the Trump administration’s possible intentions for the country, and consider who stands to gain from such a sharp escalation. Will Gottsegen: What is the White House’s plan for Cuba right now? Vivian Salama: Late last year, the administration started clamping down on Venezuela economically and militarily with the forward-looking objective of doing the same thing to Cuba. For decades, Cuba has been highly dependent on Venezuela for economic purposes, primarily oil. By cutting off Venezuela’s ability to export oil, the administration was also hoping that it would inflict intense pain on and ultimately spur dramatic change in the Cuban government. What the White House wants to happen remains sort of opaque. It says that Venezuela’s leaders need to go, but it doesn’t explicitly talk about regime change. It’s important to put Venezuela into that context, because even though the administration forcefully removed Nicolás Maduro in January, it did so while still maintaining, for now at least, his regime. Trump is working with Maduro’s vice president in Venezuela, and would potentially do something similar in Cuba. Will we see ground incursions, or a dramatic raid like we saw in Venezuela? That is a big question mark. Will: The Trump administration has indicated that it’s more interested in changing Cuba’s leadership than it is in toppling the current regime. Why might that be the administration’s goal, as opposed to ending communism on the island? Vivian: The goal is to pursue commercial and economic interests for the United States. That is really what President Trump is all about. The ideological element is not a primary factor for him, as it is for many Cuban Americans. Trump will have achieved something historic and significant if he is able to put in place a Cuban government, or a Cuban leader, at least, who is more compliant with the U.S. so that the U.S. can go and invest in Cuba. Anything beyond that is sort of in the weeds for him. Will: Why is Trump choosing this moment to act? Vivian: Every president, Democrat and Republican, has mused over the idea of regime change in Cuba. It has just been a matter of how they would achieve that. This has been one of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s primary objectives since he took public office. He has long called for regime change in Cuba. He has long called for a democratic transition in Venezuela, and he was able to convince Trump that this is tied to two things: his immigration and anti-narcotics crackdown and his broader ambitions for the U.S. to reassert its dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Trump is also very much focused on his legacy. He’s a second-term president, and, barring a dramatic change to the Constitution, he will leave office. He wants to do things that other presidents talked about and didn’t do. The Iran war is among those. And so is a dramatic realignment of the Cuban government. Will: What has the current oil blockade done to Cuba? Vivian: Garbage is accumulating in the streets because there’s no gas for the trucks to go around and pick it up. People are reportedly dying or in very, very bad conditions because hospital generators are now failing. The city of Havana—and the country in general—has plunged into darkness multiple times because its power grid has completely failed. This is exactly the impact that the Trump administration was looking to achieve in order to bring the Cuban regime to its knees. Cubans have gone through periods similar to this in the past. They are used to sort of hunkering down and relying on the bare minimum to function. But in this case, it’s been so bad that it seems the government has at least been forced to start negotiating with Washington. Will: What has Russia’s role been here, as Cuba’s longtime ally? I know the Kremlin has said it’s going to continue sending aid to the island. Vivian: After the blockade started, a Russian oil tanker set sail for Cuba. That was before the United States eased sanctions on Russian oil last month to help mitigate the Iran war’s effects on the global economy. And the tanker didn’t turn around, even when Trump later amended those sanctions to bar Russia from supplying oil to Cuba specifically. Russia’s move was seen as a sign that its relationship with Cuba remains pretty tight, but this wasn’t a purely humanitarian gesture. It was also an attempt to poke at the United States, and there were questions about whether or not there would be a confrontation. Then Trump said on Sunday that he would allow the tanker to reach Cuba, effectively breaking his own blockade. The sense among administration officials that I talked with was that they have inflicted enough pain for the Cuban government to want to talk—they do not want the situation to reach a point where it spurs an exodus of Cubans, or leads to a pandemic of some kind on the island. There are worries that there could be an outbreak of cholera because of conditions there. Russia always looks to benefit when there is geopolitical disarray. With the U.S. so focused on the war in Iran, Russia has stood to benefit both with regard to its own conflict in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. Cuba is a very small example of that. The fear is that if the U.S. continues to grant permissions to Russia, or turn a blind eye to Russia, the country could rebuild, once again, to be the kind of global menace that we saw in the years leading up to its invasion of Ukraine. Related: Trump’s eye is already on Cuba. The Iran war’s next threat is to food and water. 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Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Netflix. Twilight of the ‘Cougar’ By Anna Holmes No label really existed to describe my mother when in 1965, at the age of 27, she met the man who would become my father, a baby-faced guy who had just turned 18. But there were plenty of stereotypes. In The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written of the older woman who pursues “fresh flesh” because young men are the “only ones” she can hope will feel desire for a “maternal mistress.” The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by “the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent.” Ouch. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic An Army shake-up in the middle of a war The AI industry wants to automate itself. Trump’s Stone Age threat will lead to tragedy. The next attorney general has an impossible job. Pam Bondi couldn’t possibly succeed. Don’t mess with the housewives of Ukraine. 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- Airfare Is Just the BeginningThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Walk into any American airport today, and you might end up in a security line that extends past the baggage claim. You might hear a muffled voice announcing over the intercom that your flight has—once again—been delayed. And you might have to pay even more for this experience. Airfare has spiked since the start of the war in Iran, as airlines cope with rising jet-fuel prices and the new risks of flying in and around the Middle East. Business Insider found that the average price of a flight from one end of the United States to the other rose from $167 in February to $414 in mid-March. Outside the country, ticket prices for major routes connecting Europe and Asia have surged, per data from Alton Aviation Consultancy: The Hong Kong–London route is 560 percent more expensive than it was last month, and the Bangkok-Frankfurt route is up 505 percent. (Flights between the two continents would ordinarily pass through the Middle East.) And tickets are likely to stay expensive for some time. Americans are already seeing prices rise at airports and at the pump—the average cost of gas in the U.S. has gone from $2.98 a gallon to $3.98 a gallon over the past month—but the breadth of the war’s economic consequences is just starting to become clear. The energy shock could have broad implications for the prices of all kinds of consumer goods, including clothing, food, and computers (also: party balloons). What’s happening to plane tickets is a preview of what might come next for other industries. “Airfares are certainly the canary in the coal mine,” my colleague Annie Lowrey, who writes about economic policy, told me. “No other major consumer good or service I can think of is as sensitive to energy costs.” Jet fuel makes up roughly 30 percent of the cost of an airline ticket, and much of that increase is getting passed on to customers. When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz earlier this month, it pinched off the world’s oil supply, and prices shot up. The average price of jet fuel spiked more than 58 percent during the first week of the war and has increased more than 10 percent each week since. Airlines began feeling that strain right away, which soon started to bear on tickets—dynamic-pricing systems allowed companies to change what they charge for each seat in real time. Airlines have always had razor-thin margins. Fuel is the industry’s largest operating cost and can represent about 25 percent of a company’s total yearly spending. American Airlines recently said that it will be forced to spend an additional $400 million this quarter. “If oil prices stay where they are today, that’s 11 billion [dollars] of expense for us,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said this week. He also suggested that, for the company to break even, it would need to raise ticket prices another 20 percent. That direct correlation—as fuel prices go up, so does airfare—helps explain why the Iran war’s effects on plane tickets have been so immediate. A similar dynamic is at play in the trucking industry: When the cost of diesel goes up, so do the rates for ground-shipping contracts. The other big-picture issue affecting airfare has to do with flight capacity. More than 52,000 flights to and from the Middle East have been canceled since the start of the war. Flights that haven’t been canceled might have to take longer paths around the Middle East, using up more fuel and putting more pressure on airlines to compensate elsewhere, Martin Dresner, a supply-chain professor at the University of Maryland, told me. The Iran war could also raise the prices of semiconductors (reliant on helium, much of which comes from the Middle East), clothing (many synthetic fibers, including polyester, are made from oil), and aluminum-based products, as well as any consumer goods that travel via air freight. Fuel surcharges account for roughly 19 percent of the cost of a package delivery in the United States, and as shipping and transport costs go up, so could the price of groceries, Annie said. Businesses that sell nonperishable goods such as computers and clothing would likely react by selling off inventory and then, eventually, increasing sticker prices. Many of those effects won’t be felt immediately. Take urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer that’s integral to modern farming. Much of its global supply comes from the Middle East, and urea prices have increased by 50 percent since the war began. Although farmers may take a direct hit on those prices, consumers may not actually experience a price shift for a while, thanks to the nature of the agricultural supply chain. Reduced urea leads to reduced crop yields, which leads to fewer and more expensive food products—a far more indirect relationship than that of jet fuel and airfare. Were the strait to fully open right now, some of those potential issues would never materialize, and the global oil supply would start to recover. But even if the war were to end today, “we’re looking at months ’til production is fully restored, at least,” Jason Miller, a supply-chain professor at Michigan State University, told me. 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The FBI said that hackers targeted Director Kash Patel’s personal email, after an Iranian-government-linked group claimed responsibility and posted alleged stolen materials online. The agency said that most of the data appear to be old and that they do not involve government information, and that it is working to investigate the situation. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. military campaign in Iran is “on or ahead of schedule” and could end in weeks, although he acknowledged that “we have some work to do.” Meanwhile, Israel’s defense minister said that Israeli strikes on Iran will “intensify and expand” because Tehran has ignored warnings “to stop firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population.” Dispatches The Books Briefing: Let a book annoy you, Emma Sarappo writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Getty. The Very Powerful Men Who Think Introspection Is Dumb By Thomas Chatterton Williams America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective. From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power. That thesis received further confirmation earlier this month when the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that he engages in “zero” introspection—or at least “as little as possible.” Andreessen, a billionaire AI evangelist, was speaking to the podcaster David Senra, who enthusiastically approved. Senra explained that he had learned introspection was useless by reading 410 biographies of entrepreneurs. “Sam Walton didn’t wake up thinking about his internal self,” Senra said, referring to the Walmart magnate. “He just woke up like, I like building Walmart; I’m gonna keep building more Walmarts, and just kept doing it over and over again.” Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The worst-case scenario for AI and the news is already here. The shocking speed of China’s scientific rise Galaxy Brain: What is Twitter’s legacy, 20 years later? A day in class with Plato, the Melania Trump–mandated robot teacher The first post-reality political campaign Cuba doesn’t care about Marxism. Culture Break Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Getty. Explore. Most people have a smartphone. But many want to use it less, Julie Beck writes. Watch. Hoppers (out now in theaters) offers a surprising take on the typical talking-animal story, David Sims argues. Play our daily crossword. Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.