Making the World Safe for Criminals
The United States is undergoing repatrimonialization as we speak.
Prior to the 2024 election, there was a debate about whether Donald Trump was a fascist. I thought that was the wrong moniker because fascism has specific associations with genocide and totalitarian power, and we weren’t close be being there yet. Fascism is driven by an ideology, and I don’t think Trump has ever been guided by anything that could be called an idea. I think he can be clearly labeled an authoritarian, as he and his allies like Elon Musk are deliberately dismantling existing checks on executive power in the U.S. constitutional system. He has not once sought to go through the Republican-controlled Congress to enact policies, deliberately preferring to do everything via executive orders like a king.
Yet the simple term “authoritarian” doesn’t quite capture the worldwide phenomenon of which Trump is a part. Steve Hanson and Jeff Kopstein are publishing a companion piece in Persuasion today, expanding on their characterization of Trumpism as “patrimonial.” Jonathan Rauch recently published an article in The Atlantic building on their use of that term. I think it is a better adjective, and puts our current situation in the correct historical framework.
Max Weber used the term “patrimonial” to describe virtually every pre-modern regime once mankind graduated from decentralized tribalism. That is, the government was considered to be an extension of the ruler’s family and household. Such systems evolved out of conquest, in which the chief of a victorious band of raiders distributed land, resources, and women to his fellow warriors, who were then free to hand down those properties to their descendants.
In such a system, there was no distinction between public and private. Everything in theory belonged to the ruler, who could give away a province with all of its inhabitants to a son or daughter as a wedding present. The separation of the ruler’s property from that of the state was first laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries by theorists like Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, who place sovereignty in a broader commonwealth and not in the person of the ruler. This made possible for the first time a phenomenon like corruption, in which an official appropriated public resources for private benefit.
One of the big themes of my two Political Order volumes was the great difficulty of creating an impersonal modern state, in which your status depended on citizenship and not on your personal relationship with the ruler. A modern economy is only possible under these circumstances as well, as the state undertakes to protect property rights and adjudicates transactions without regard to the identity of the rights-holder.
The problem with state modernity is that it is unstable. Human beings are by nature social creatures, but their sociability takes the form in the first instance of favoritism to friends and family. This leads to the phenomenon of “repatrimonialization,” a long word signifying the retreat of a modern impersonal state back into patrimonialism. This is a phenomenon that has plagued many earlier societies, like Tang Dynasty China, or the 17th century Ottoman Empire, or France under the Old Regime. In each case, an emergent modern state was captured by powerful elites close to the ruler. In France, for example, the king sold rent-seeking privileges like tax collection to the highest bidder.
I don’t need to explain that the United States is undergoing repatrimonialization as we speak. What is remarkable about the Trump administration is the degree to which it is open about its own corruption. The administration has fired inspectors general whose job it is to monitor and stop corruption; it has refused to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and it has made decisions favorable to the business interests of colleague-in-crime Elon Musk. Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos came to Trump’s inauguration bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, in hopes that the king would shine favor on them. As Trump imposes tariffs on much of the world, there will be a further flow of supplicants asking for exemptions, which will be facilitated by personal side-payments.
This kind of corruption is characteristic of modern day authoritarianism. For the Bolsheviks, Nazis, or Maoists, their primary objective was not personal enrichment. By contrast, the enemies of liberal democracy today do not for the most part make an ideological case against it, as Marxists once did. Rather, they see legal institutions as obstacles to personal enrichment and attack them out of self-interest. The rulers of Venezuela or Colombia’s FARC may have started out as socialists or Marxists, but they have degenerated into criminal gangs. North Korea is heavily into a host of criminal activities from weapons smuggling and drug running to extortion.
So America is undergoing a process of repatrimonialization, just like many other societies before it. Where once the world was riven by ideologies, today it is divided into what increasingly look like criminal gangs fighting over turf and protection rackets.
Denmark was always a hard place to get to, but now it looks like an impossible dream.
Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Patrimonialism lies on a continuum. At one end, the enlightened patriarch exercises authority as a stabilising force, maintaining order and dispensing favors within a framework that, while personal, still upholds a broader social contract. At the other, the mob boss turns power into pure self-interest, reducing governance to extortion, replacing institutions with loyalty-based patronage, and treating the state—or its fragments—as a fiefdom for personal enrichment.
The distinction matters. Trump isn’t just a patrimonial leader. He’s a Don.
A Don shares no power. Rival centers—agencies, courts, entire nations—must be bent or crushed. Survival demands constant maneuvering, cutting deals one moment, burning bridges the next. Territory isn’t just borders—it’s control. Loyalty is extracted, tested, and enforced. Trump’s circle isn’t competent; it’s packed with lickspittle toadies. And at the end? There’s legacy—his name, his dynasty, his myth.
Trump wasn’t shaped in Ivy League law firms. He came up in 1970s–80s New York real estate, where money wasn’t enough—access was everything. And access meant playing by the rules of the Concrete Club, a cartel run by the Genovese and Gambino families. They decided which projects moved forward and which ones mysteriously stalled. Cross them, and concrete dried up, equipment got vandalised, loans disappeared.
Unions? Also mob-controlled. Foremen weren’t appointed—they were anointed. Kickbacks weren’t a risk; they were the cost of doing business. Job sites that resisted got hit with a wave of “accidents.”
Trump didn’t stumble into this world—he was trained for it. Fred Trump, a hardened landlord, taught him early: There are killers, and there are losers. Killers take. Losers get stepped on. Trust is for suckers. Compassion is weakness. The law? Just another tool for those with the leverage to ignore it.
This is the playbook Trump brought to Washington. Inspectors General? Purged like snitches. Agencies? Gutted and repurposed as enforcers. Foreign policy? A shakedown. NATO? Not an alliance, but weak families failing to pay tribute. Ukraine? Just another protection racket, but one where he has pinned his ego to a peace deal, unfortunately.
Patrimonialism explains why Trump treats the state as personal property. But to understand how he operates—why he rules through muscle and leverage—stop thinking about presidents.
Think like a Don.
The Don Framework
https://open.substack.com/pub/johnbaker768156/p/the-don-framework?r=294g0v&utm_medium=ios
This candid discussion of patrimonialism is excellent and helpful. But in the three articles I've read (Rauch, Hanson & Kopstein and now this) there is little if any discussion of the Constitutional answer to the particular problem of Trump's exhibitionism: the checks and balances of our system.
Trump is being allowed to do what he is doing mostly because of the failure of Congress. This is, of course, a problem of politics -- the Republicans in Congress are afraid of what they still view as the power of MAGA. That is a judgment they must make, since they are representatives of the People. They are the judges of the politics of their constituencies, and are rolling the dice betting that Trump's charisma still has its force with local majorities, and will continue to.
The Senate Republicans have almost completely bent to Trump's will, consenting to a cabinet that is proving to be Trump-loyal to a fault. The Senate GOP has put all of its eggs in Trump's basket, and allowed him and his administration to break the laws they, themselves made The Law.
Patrimonialism in a democratically elected President is only allowed if and when Congress decides to ignore or sidestep its obvious and historic failures. We'll see how that works out in a couple of years. Maybe the GOP is right and the voters will accept that the President can have his own way with what is now just nominally The Law. But I suspect Trump will wear out his welcome even in the two years leading to 2026; by 2028 it'll be someone else's to deal with. For better or worse, that is the politics that the Constitution allows and demands.
In addition, though, some of Trump's lawless actions very clearly seem to be unconstitutional, and the checks and balances the Supreme Court is charged with effectuating will also be put to the test. We won't have an actual constitutional crisis unless and until Trump suffers a high court loss he will not abide by. That is when the politics of our people, and the endurance of our traditional understanding of our country will have their day.
I expect some Supreme Court decisions will uphold some of Trump's actions, but not all of them. And while Trump will continue, always, to have his supporters, I think the circumstances of whatever he chooses to defy will get him much less adoration and support than he is used to.
This is all how our system is supposed to work, politics and all. Patrimonialism is being given a pass now, and on such a scale, for the very first time, and we'll see how it plays in Peoria, as they used to say. But honestly, I'm having a hard time seeing anyone after Trump with the dynamics he's been able to take advantage of, who would want to try this gambit after him.