Dispatches from America, Inc. Issue 2: A 12-step guide to a corporate-style autocracy

Are you driving yourself crazy by trying to make sense of the mind-bending chaos that has infected the politics of the United States?

If yes, you are not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the apparent insanity. Thomas Friedman⁠, opinion writer for the New York Times, recently rendered his view:

If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his…Four years of this will not work, folks.

In an era when each day’s headlines about the Trump 2.0 administration seem more baffling than the last, you may be surprised to learn that patterns are emerging from this chaos. What do these patterns tell us?

These glimmers of pathways foretell the systematic destruction of American democracy and the transformation of the U.S. from a republic to a business state — a mercenary world in which sovereign nations and their citizens are viewed as mere zero-sum commodities.

We are living in a historical period that begs documentation. This cycle of political evolution will either end in the redefinition of life in the United States and its role in the world order or create a backlash that leads to more vibrant and robust democracies worldwide.

Making sense of political chaos

In response to these unsettling times, I have created a real-time playbook for documenting Donald Trump’s attempt to destroy American democracy and create a mercenary autocracy. I call this a Playbook for America, Inc..

This playbook presents a 12-step strategy for the destruction of our democracy and the creation of a business state that profits the ruling elites at the expense of the American people.

This playbook is based on the work of others who have studied the follies of authoritarian governments. Anne Applebaum’s book Autocracy, Inc.⁠ clearly shows a grim future. Other playbooks published by organizations such as Protect Democracy⁠ and the Brookings Institute⁠ seek to preserve democracy. My playbook presented here takes the perspective of an autocrat intent on building a for-profit monarchy.

I am alarmed by Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and Peter Thiel’s anti-democratic beliefs and monolithic philosophies. These individuals align with Trump’s ruling elites. Tech billionaire and PayPal founder Peter Thiel played a major role in J.D. Vance’s election as vice president.

In his 2009 essay, published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Peter Thiel famously declared⁠ that he “no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He attributed this incompatibility to the expansion of welfare beneficiaries and the extension of voting rights to women, which he argued made “capitalist democracy” an oxymoron.

In Playbook for America, Inc., you will see the strategies Donald Trump and his wealthy supporters use to transform America’s liberal democracy into a corporate-style regime governed by self-interest rather than civic values.

This playbook provides more than a glimpse into America’s troubled political landscape. It serves as a guide for understanding how the democracy of any sovereign nation can be diminished to resource commodities, reshaping and transforming the nation into a state corporation focused on profit and power.

My first posting on this topic, American Democracy Has Fallen. Up Next? America, Inc.⁠, presents a foundation for this playbook for autocrats. This posting is the first for my newsletter, Dispatches From America, Inc..

In this second issue, I offer a playbook explaining the 12-step strategies the Trump Troupe is using to destroy America’s liberal democracy and replace it with a kleptocratic business state.

In upcoming issues, I will document the Trump 2.0 administration’s actions as they match these 12-step autocratic strategies. Using this playbook framework, which document real-time actions, you will see that Trump’s apparent flailing and chaotic policies are purposeful, directed, and demonic.

A Playbook for America, Inc.: A 12-step plan

I present this playbook to you in its entirety, even though it is lengthy. My hope is that you will save it in a folder for future reference. As noted, upcoming newsletter issues will feature the 12 steps with actual plays documenting the Trump 2.0 administration’s efforts to undermine America’s democracy.

Step 1. Capture or politicize the legal system

Install loyalists as heads of law enforcement agencies, judges, and legal officials to ensure that the law serves the ruling regime rather than protecting citizens’ rights. This centralization of law enforcement power and judicial review undermines independent oversight and dismantles checks and balances, allowing previously illegal power grabs to acquire a facade of legitimacy.

Courts become little more than rubber stamps for the executive, selectively applying the law to protect loyal business interests and punish dissent. As Anne Applebaum observes, autocrats co-opt judicial systems to “legalize lawlessness,” creating a fearful climate of “lawfare.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025⁠’s strategy of placing ideological allies in key bureaucratic positions reflects this tactic, enabling the autocrat to bypass constitutional constraints, solidify authoritarian overreach, and advance the business state’s transactional priorities at the expense of civil rights.

Tactics:

• Appoint loyalist ideologues to positions of legal authority in justice departments and judgeships
• Intimidate or threaten to remove judges who rule against executive orders 
• Weaponize the law against political opponents
• Grant retro- or prospective legal impunity to loyalists who are convicted of crimes

Step 2. Consolidate power at the executive level

Seize control of every branch of government and suppress dissent at all levels through a calculated campaign of “state capture.” The first step is ensuring that legislators align with the autocrat’s agenda. At the same time, loyal party insiders replace impartial staff on boards and commissions, undermining independent oversight.

Simultaneously, take a chain-saw approach to cutting civil servants without planning to preserve essential services. Slash-and-burn tactics terrorize career bureaucrats who anticipate a long career in government services. Skilled employees are laid off without an income to pay for home mortgages, car loans, and daily expenses.

These strategies weaken regulatory frameworks that protect public interests. Essential government operations are transformed into top-down corporate structures with minimal oversight. Private interests flourish when public services are contracted while public benefits are curtailed.

Tactics:

• Purge and replace bureaucrats who have institutional expertise with unqualified loyalists
• Fire large numbers of civil servants and hire personal loyalists who owe their positions to the autocrat
• Neutralize or defund branches of government that benefit citizens
• Treat government agencies—IRS, FCC, DOJ—as tools to attack enemies and reward friends

Step 3. Suppress competing ideologies through a climate of fear

Create a climate of fear by criminalizing dissent, vilifying minority groups, and intimidating internal critics. These tactics narrow democratic debate and silence opposition.

Citizens self-censor to evade retaliation, while scapegoating tactics further divide civil society. This aligns with Anne Applebaum’s observation that fear “weaponizes” compliance and undermines collective resistance.

This environment allows business interests tied to the autocrat to advance policies with little scrutiny, echoing Curtis Yarvin’s “patchwork” vision where localized fear regimes enforce loyalty. As a result, economic and policy decisions are reduced to transactional, top-down control rather than open, accountable governance.

Tactics:

• Utilize fear as a weapon
• Criminalize or otherwise eliminate speech that contradicts autocratic ideology
• Suppress protests by dissident groups or ban them completely
• Fabricate emergencies and existential threats to suspend human rights
• Characterize dissenters as “unpatriotic” or “undermining freedom”
• Intimidate opposing legislators through public humiliation and threats to sabotage their re-election

Step 4. Discourage learning by degrading public education and inquiry

In an autocratic state, a knowledgeable public is a threat. Knowledgeable people ask questions about bad policies..

By defunding research and channeling resources into ideologically aligned institutions, autocrats sap the intellectual capital needed for informed citizenship, undermining critical thinking and evidence-based policymaking. This shift fosters a culture where knowledge is suppressed or shaped to serve commercial and ideological aims.

Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment⁠” illustrates how rejecting public education reinforces hierarchical control. The outcome is a workforce conditioned for compliance rather than innovation and a business-state structure insulated from meaningful scrutiny.

Tactics:

• Reduce or eliminate federal funding for scientific research
• Prohibit collaboration among public and private research networks
• Promote public funding for private religious schools that align with conservative Christian beliefs in their support of theology over science

Step 5. Encourage private militias to maintain domestic social order

Autocrats support legitimizing paramilitary groups who are loyal to the autocrat. These militias can be merged with local governance, effectively privatizing state security for business interests and suppressing opposition, including organized labor or environmental protests.

Echoing historical fascist regimes, these private armies adopt a loyalty-based system that prioritizes controlling the “workforce” over civil rights. Applebaum notes in Autocracy, Inc. that hyper-masculine rhetoric supports this warrior caste, while Peter Thiel’s vision of “sovereign individuals”⁠ underlies their detachment from democratic accountability.

Tactics:

• Encourage the formation of armed militia groups that espouse extremist ideologies
• Promote recruitment of young men to local militia groups and foster cult-like loyalty
• Elevate small groups of extremists through media channels, praising their “bravery”
• Deploy networks of local militias to create local climates of fear

Step 6. Install a military leadership loyal to the CEO autocrat

By appointing partisans in top military roles, autocrats ensure the armed forces serve executive power rather than constitutional principles. This transforms the military into an extension of the business state, ready to protect or expand domestic and international commercial interests.

With a military loyal to the autocrat rather than a constitution, troops can be deployed to suppress dissent at home or to intimidate foreign nations resisting economic exploitation. Under Project 2025’s plan to vet military leaders for ideological loyalty, the armed forces become a tool for enforcing the autocrat’s agenda, prioritizing business ambitions over constitutional duties.

Tactics:

• Deploy military forces to domestic or international targets in support of the business state
• Foster a culture of hyper-masculinity among the troops
• Utilize a strong military presence to intimidate nations that resist coercion from America, Inc., as a business state

Step 7. Control information and media

Autocratic governments have learned that monopolizing media narratives through disinformation, intimidation, and the shutdown of opposing outlets co-opts or silences an informed public essential to government accountability.

Authoritarian-friendly media outlets gain exclusive access while critics face legal threats, silencing investigative reporting into corporate abuses and aligning public perception with the regime’s business agenda.

As Anne Applebaum notes, state-controlled narratives recast corruption as strength. Project 2025’s advocacy for prosecuting journalists cements an environment where truth is subordinate to power.

Tactics:

• Weaponize disinformation
• Co-opt the media through intimidation and coercion
• Prohibit unfriendly press access to government officials
• Shut down oppositional press companies
• Take legal action against dissenting journalists

Step 8. Cultivate cultural values supporting polarization and cynicism

Cultural values drive popular worldviews. Autocracies thrive when the public adopts worldviews that support their transactional, business state ideology.

Autocratic regimes use numerous influencing factors to promote these values: hyper-masculinity, equating empathy with weakness, and framing all social relationships as zero-sum (win/lose) transactions.

As Applebaum observes, this cultural engineering dissolves communal trust and fragments resistance, while Nick Land’s accelerationist⁠ views affirm capitalism’s drift toward authoritarianism.

By treating citizens primarily as economic units — valuing them for market utility rather than inherent rights — business state autocrats justify exploitative policies and entrench top-down control.

Tactics:

• Promote traditional nuclear families
• Utilize religion, national pride, and revised history to exemplify the value of favored by business state elites 
• Blame marginalized groups for creating imagined social ills
• Encourage “I-win-you-lose,” zero-sum social relationships
• Associate kindness and empathy with weakness
• Encourage belief in “might makes right” and promote hyper-masculinity
• Disparage liberal values related to equal rights and inclusive social benefits

Step 9. Normalize the CEO autocrat as paternalistic savior

Fabricate emergencies or existential threats — such as “immigrant invasions” or “woke conspiracies” — to keep the public in a continual state of fear.

Autocrats use existential fear to justify expanding executive power, suspending rights, and channeling dependency toward their leadership. Blending strongman rhetoric with religious or nationalist imagery fuels the belief that only the autocrat can defend the nation’s identity, effectively stifling dissent and consolidating control.

Creating cultural myths from artificial crises elevates the autocrat to savior status, a tactic reflected in Project 2025’s combination of Christian nationalism and corporate interests. Under this paternalistic guise, the CEO portrays commercial success as vital for national survival. This repetitive “I am saving America from crisis” rhetoric normalizes policy decisions that bypass democratic checks as a protection against perceived threats.

Tactics:

• Promote the illusion of a strongman rule to solve all problems
• Portray the nation as a corporation, emphasizing transactional efficiency over democratic deliberation
• Hold rallies, media blitzes, and high-visibility appearances to maintain the cult of personality
• Exploit anxieties with the narrative “I alone can fix it.”
• Offer simplistic, business-minded solutions to complicated social problems
• Encourage the idea that the autocrat’s “beneficial” rule can last forever

Step 10. Sabotage cooperative relations with liberal nations and institutions

By withdrawing from international treaties and weakening alliances with democratic nations, autocrats show their contempt for countries that support liberal values such as the rule of law, the defense of constitutions, and the protection of human rights.

A transactional mindset reduces international relations to zero-sum commercial relations: “What can you do for me?”

Viewing international relations solely as commercial transactions reduces human rights and democratic norms to mere “extras.” “What will you pay for my protections?” This approach is reflected in Project 2025, which favors economic coercion over mutual security.

This transactional view of diplomacy — exemplified by punitive tariffs and unilateral agreements — reflects corporate competition and isolates the CEO autocrat from global governance structures that would otherwise impose accountability.

Tactics:

• Withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO)
• Withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
• Support authoritarian parties in democratic nations
• Weaken democratic nations through economic coercion, such as tariffs
• Assess the value of other nations based on business state interests rather than national integrity

Step 11. Create a domestic network of kleptocrats

Allow access of key supporters — such as oligarchs and major donors — to graft, special tax breaks, and favorable regulations. This creates a culture among wealthy elites of loyalty through shared corruption.

This culture supports these ruling circles in forming tight bonds by exploiting shell companies, dark money PACs, real estate loopholes, and offshoring tactics, amassing private fortunes shielded from public oversight.

In turn, the CEO autocrat’s government can count on these entrenched interests to defend its policies and crack down on dissent, effectively converting wealth into political leverage.

This interwoven financial favoritism and legal impunity ensures that both the autocrat and allied elites thrive, while honest governance and public welfare erode under the weight of institutionalized self-dealing.

Tactics:

• Allow key supporters (oligarchs, major donors) to flourish through graft, tax breaks, or favorable regulations
• Encourage ruling elites to create loyalty bonds through shared corruption
• Utilize shell companies, dark money PACs, real estate loopholes, and offshoring tactics to create private wealth

Step 12. Forge alliances with international networks of kleptocrats

Mercenary autocrats work together with other authoritarian regimes to create a global network of strongman states. Anne Applebaum adeptly describes the dynamics of these networking autocrats in her book, Autocracy, Inc.

Like street gangs that decide to pillage together rather than kill off each other, these networks of kleptocrats offer mutual political, financial, and legal support, shielding one another from democratic pressures. These transnational alliances prioritize economic fiefdoms and transactional deals over shared values, fostering an alternative international order where sovereignty is effectively traded as a commodity.

Such partnerships enable resource pooling, coordinated suppression of dissent, and the dismantling of liberal institutions in favor of profit and power — creating a neo-feudal world order that operates beyond the reach of democratic accountability.

Tactics:

• Collaborate with transnational autocratic networks
• Allow unrestricted lobbying of power brokers with domestic legislatures by foreign interests
• Divide the world into economic fiefdoms that are exploited for their commodity value
• Adapt strategies from other successful autocratic regimes, such as in money laundering
• Promote currencies, such as cryptocurrencies, that ensure privacy of commercial transactions

Political playbooks are dynamic

The astute reader will recognize that any political playbook reflects a point-in-time. This Playbook for America, Inc. cites strategies that will evolve as the movement toward autocracy progresses. In coming issues of Dispatches from America, Inc., these twelve strategic steps and their tactics will be updated according to the latest polticial events.