On Trump, Technology, and Tyranny…
by: Arthur Hoyle
Confronted with radical social upheaval as we now are by the Trump administration, we must try to understand the confluence of social and historical forces that have put our country under the control of a criminal enterprise. Make no mistake, that is what we are dealing with. Trump is a convicted felon, previously under indictment for his attempt to overthrow an election, and since taking office he has issued dozens of illegal executive orders and has pardoned hundreds of convicted criminals like himself. All his actions declare him to be a willful, power-hungry tyrant with no respect for our nation’s laws or their foundation in our Constitution.
The door to tyranny opens when the rule of law is abandoned by those charged with upholding it (SCOTUS, U.S. Congress) and through this door the masses (the mob our founders feared) pour with their grievances, anger, and ignorance. We now experience this as MAGA, a movement led by a privileged buffoon wearing a baseball cap that makes him seem like a regular guy. But in fact he is most irregular, a sociopath whose boundless appetite for power inoculates him against any shred of compassion or empathy for other human beings.
It’s no accident Trump has risen to power on the wings of digital technology, and uses his own digital platform, Truth Social (an Orwellian term if ever there was one) to keep his followers in thrall and in line. Need I mention his chief henchman in control, Elon Musk, the owner of X/Twitter?
What’s radical about digital technology is the extent to which it is being used as an instrument of control over individual lives, which makes it the ideal tool for a man with Trump’s ambitions. Other major technological advances — the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, television — have transformed society, making it more homogenous, more conforming, but have left its individual members relatively untethered. But digital technology, compressed into a pocket-sized device that almost everyone carries with them every waking moment of the day and refers to constantly, has made us slaves, softened up for a make-believe father-figure like Trump.
Tyrants in the past have relied on force to subjugate the populations they rule — think Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin. Tyrannies become terror states, with secret police, constant surveillance, informers, gulags, scapegoating of the vulnerable and weak, and relentless propaganda brainwashing the people. The beauty of digital technology for a tyrant like Trump is that it enables mind control without the use of physical force, though that remains an option, as witness Trump’s takeover of the nation’s security and defense departments. The population elects to be tyrannized. That is what has happened in America.
What will Trump do next? His unabashed unpredictability is another of his control mechanisms. He will do whatever allows him to exercise and expand his power. His arbitrary exercise of power makes his followers feel powerful, hence their indiscriminate approval of his actions. He is their surrogate and savior.
The likelihood is that Trump’s pursuit of power, if left unchecked, will lead to widespread warfare. There is no other endgame for it. It’s up to the people to rein him in at the ballot box while we still have elections. For Trump, constitutionally mandated elections are just another law to be broken as he asserts his unlimited power. Hope to see you at the polls in November 2026.
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
