In Trump's America, Independent Institutions Are Learning What Happens When They Resist.
Part 9 of The Strongman's Playbook: strangle civil society, and the citizens who disagree have no institutions through which to act on that disagreement.
On July 4, 2025, nine people gathered outside an ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. They were protesting. One person fired a weapon — he said he aimed at the ground. Others wrote graffiti on vehicles and set off fireworks. One man, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, was not present at the protest at all, but was convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box of zines.
The sentences handed down by a federal court: 100 years for the shooter. Between 50 and 70 years for those who wrote graffiti and set off fireworks. 30 years for the man who was not there. Total: 450 years in federal prison. The prosecution presented the protesters’ black clothing and use of the Signal messaging app as evidence of antifa tactics and material support for terrorism. As of late July 2026, the sentences stand. Several defendants have appealed to the Fifth Circuit. No court has overturned or modified the convictions.
For comparison: the woman who attempted to assassinate a Supreme Court justice received eight years.
That comparison does not appear in the Justice Department’s press releases. The 450 years, however, was broadcast proudly as evidence of what happens to people who protest against federal immigration enforcement.
This is not primarily about the specific defendants or the specific sentences, though both deserve scrutiny. It is about what the extreme disproportion communicates to everyone watching. If you organize independently of the state, if you show up in public to protest against what the state is doing, if you use encrypted communications to coordinate with others — these things can be framed as terrorism. The charges may not ultimately survive judicial review. But the message lands before the appeal is decided. And the message is: the cost of organized independent action has just become very high.
That message is the technique. It does not require every case to result in conviction. It requires that everyone considering independent action understands what could happen if they try.
This is Part 9 of The Strongman’s Playbook. The technique is strangling civil society.
I have spent my working life in and around the institutions that strongmen most want to weaken.
As a diplomat, I worked for years on implementing the Ottawa Convention on landmines; the 1997 treaty that banned antipersonnel mines. For six years I worked alongside governments, NGOs, think tanks, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Quakers, and dozens of other organizations to make that treaty work in practice: getting mines out of the ground, improving information sharing, pushing for better policies. That work was only possible because of the ecosystem of independent organizations that brought knowledge, credibility, and moral authority that no government alone could provide. Later, working toward Protocol V of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention — the treaty on explosive remnants of war, the bombs that keep killing people long after a war ends — the same ecosystem was essential. Independent research organizations mapped the problems. NGOs documented the casualties. Think tanks developed the policy frameworks. Governments then had something to negotiate toward.
After diplomacy, I spent time as a fellow and policy director at four independent institutions; I’m still officially connected to two of these. Now I am, as an independent publisher and writer, myself a part of the independent civil society I am writing about. I know these organizations from the inside. I know what they do that governments cannot do: they ask questions governments prefer not to ask, they document things governments prefer not to see, they represent voices governments prefer not to hear.
I have also spent a lifetime reading about the 1930s. The question that always fascinated me, when reading about Germany in that decade, was how did the country of Beethoven and Goethe, a functioning democracy with universities, trade unions, a free press, churches, professional associations, and a rich civil society, allow itself to be transformed so completely, so quickly? The answer, when you read the history carefully, is that the transformation did not happen all at once. It happened institution by institution. The unions went first. Then the press. Then the universities. Then the churches that did not comply. Each institution that organized citizens independently of the state was either captured, closed, or intimidated into silence. Once they were gone, there was nothing left between the individual and the state. And that is when the worst became possible.
Augusto Pinochet understood this from the first day of the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s elected government in Chile.
Within hours of seizing power, military officers arrived at universities. Rectors were arrested or removed and replaced by military commanders. Student unions were dissolved. Faculty members known for progressive politics were detained, some at the National Stadium, which had been converted into a detention and torture center. Within weeks, the Chilean academic world had been transformed from a center of debate and dissent into an institution under military supervision.
The unions were next. Pinochet’s government dissolved the Central Única de Trabajadores, Chile’s main trade union federation, within days of the coup. Independent labor organizing was prohibited. The neighborhood associations and community organizations that had been active during the Allende years were dismantled. Political parties were banned.
The Catholic Church presented a more complicated case. The hierarchy was initially cautious — some bishops had been skeptical of Allende — but within months the Church became one of the only institutions with enough moral authority and institutional structure to push back. In 1973, the Vicariate of Solidarity was established, initially under the ecumenical umbrella of the Committee of Cooperation for Peace, with the support of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez. For seventeen years, through the entire duration of the dictatorship, the Vicariate documented human rights violations, provided legal assistance to victims’ families, maintained records of the disappeared, and kept alive the institutional memory of what was being done.
That institutional survival proved decisive. When Pinochet lost the 1988 plebiscite, and Chile began its democratic transition, the Vicariate’s documentation was the foundation on which accountability was built. The National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation — the Rettig Commission — could name names, establish facts, and document the scale of the crimes precisely because the Vicariate had refused to be silenced. Civil society, even when severely constrained, had preserved what the dictatorship tried to erase.
The Chilean case contains two lessons that matter for the present moment. The first is that strangling civil society is almost always one of the first acts of authoritarian consolidation, because independent institutions are what make resistance possible. The second is that even severely constrained civil society can survive and preserve what matters, if enough individuals within those institutions choose to keep doing their work.
This is the ninth installment of The Strongman’s Playbook. It is a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
If you subscribe now, you can follow the full series as it unfolds and read the previous series, The Fall, in the archive. Ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story.
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Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega offers the more recent and more complete example of what happens when a government has both the will and the time to finish the job.
Ortega had governed Nicaragua before, leading the Sandinista revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and serving as president through the 1980s. He returned to power democratically in 2006 and governed in complicated partnership with civil society for more than a decade. The rupture came in April 2018, when student protesters took to the streets against social security cuts and were met with lethal government violence. More than 300 people were killed in the crackdown. What followed was the systematic dismantling of every institution that had supported or tolerated the protests.
Between 2018 and 2023, more than 3,500 Nicaraguan NGOs were closed or had their legal status revoked. Organizations working on human rights, environmental protection, women’s rights, journalism, and democratic governance were shut down. Universities that had been centers of the 2018 protest movement lost their autonomy. The Jesuit-run Central American University had its legal status revoked and its campus seized by the government in August 2023.
The Catholic Church, which had served as a mediator between protesters and the government in 2018, became an enemy. Bishop Rolando Álvarez was arrested, held in prison for months, then expelled to Rome. The apostolic nuncio was expelled. The bishops’ conference was stripped of its legal status. Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, one of the most prominent figures in Nicaraguan religious life, was harassed and his pastoral activities restricted.
The independent press was eliminated. Confidencial, one of Nicaragua’s most respected news outlets, had its offices seized. Its journalists continued working from exile. La Prensa, the historic opposition newspaper that had survived the Somoza dictatorship, was raided and shut down.
In February 2023, Ortega stripped 316 political opponents of their citizenship in two sweeping actions carried out over one week. On February 9, 222 political prisoners were released, expelled to the United States, and simultaneously stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality. On February 15, 94 more critics — writers, journalists, academics, clergy, and human rights defenders — lost their citizenship. Many had already been in exile. The citizenship stripping was not a legal necessity. It was a message: you no longer belong to this country.
What Nicaragua now looks like is what the absence of civil society produces. There is no independent press capable of reporting on government corruption. There are no NGOs capable of documenting human rights violations. There are no universities capable of producing independent research that challenges official narratives. There are no churches willing to speak publicly against the government. There is no organized opposition capable of mobilizing. Individual Nicaraguans still have opinions, still talk to each other, still know what is happening. But without the institutions that aggregate and amplify those voices, there is no way to translate private knowledge into public accountability.
The American situation is different in degree, and that difference matters. The institutions under pressure in the United States have more resources, more legal protection, and more history of resistance than their Nicaraguan counterparts had in 2018. Courts have pushed back. Some law firms fought rather than settled. Harvard has resisted rather than fully capitulating. Some universities are holding their ground.
But the direction of pressure is consistent, and the techniques are recognizable.
Law firms that employed lawyers who had investigated Trump were targeted by executive orders revoking security clearances and restricting federal contracts. Some settled — Paul Weiss pledged $40 million in pro bono services to administration causes, Skadden Arps pledged $100 million. Those settlements were not presented as punishments. They were presented as arrangements. But the arrangement was clear: provide service to the administration or face consequences. The American Bar Association called it “a clear and disconcerting pattern.” Trump, asked about the capitulations, said simply: “Where do I sign? Where do I sign? Nobody can believe it. And there’s more coming.”
The $20 billion in EPA green grants was frozen. Three grantee organizations — Climate United Fund, the Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities — were placed under criminal investigation for alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States. Courts have so far declined to support those charges. The investigation has not been withdrawn.
The “nonprofit killer bill” passed the House, which would give the executive branch broad powers to strip 501c3 status from organizations designated as connected to terrorism. NGO workers told the Guardian they are being more careful with language in written communications, avoiding terms like “environmental racism,” ensuring strict adherence to lobbying caps, and reconsidering whether to join lawsuits that might attract federal attention. Some are not willing to be named publicly for fear of ending up on the administration’s radar.
At universities, the language of antisemitism enforcement has provided the justification for funding threats that go well beyond anything antisemitism enforcement has ever previously required. Columbia agreed to changes in protest rules, governance, and curriculum oversight. Harvard is fighting. Sixty institutions are under investigation. Steven Levitsky, whose book How Democracies Die has become the standard reference for this moment, teaches at Harvard and signed the letter calling on his university to resist. “This is what authoritarians do,” he said. “They go after civil society.”
The Prairieland sentences are the sharpest edge of the same instrument. Fireworks charged as explosives. Black clothing as evidence of ideology. Moving a box of zines as conspiracy. 450 years total. The charges may not survive appeal. But they are serving their purpose now, before the appeal is decided. Every organizer, every protester, every person considering independent action is doing a calculation. The Prairieland verdict is part of that calculation.
The historical lesson from Chile and Nicaragua is not simply that these techniques are dangerous. It is that they work faster than anyone expects, and that the damage they do to the institutional fabric of society outlasts the governments that inflict it.
Chile’s democratic transition after 1990 was, by comparative standards, one of the most successful in Latin American history. But it took decades to fully rebuild the culture of independent academic inquiry, free labor organizing, and open civil society that Pinochet had suppressed. Some of what was lost in the first years of the dictatorship was never fully recovered.
Nicaragua’s civil society, stripped of its organizations over five years, will take a generation to rebuild when Ortega eventually falls; and he will eventually fall. The institutional knowledge held by those 3,500 closed NGOs, the investigative capacity of the shuttered newsrooms, the moral authority of the churches that were silenced — these things do not reconstitute themselves the moment a new government takes power. They require people, time, trust, and the slow accumulation of credibility.
In the United States, the institutions under pressure have not been destroyed. The question is whether, in the years this administration continues, enough of them will be captured, intimidated, defunded, or exhausted into compliance that rebuilding becomes necessary rather than optional.
Timothy Naftali, the presidential historian at Columbia, put it plainly: “Institutions can be rebuilt, but political culture can be poisoned for a generation.”
A healthy society needs its independent institutions not only for the dramatic moments, such as the resistance to dictatorship, the documentation of atrocities, and the negotiation of arms control treaties. It needs them for the ordinary work of a functioning democracy: the food safety organizations, the environmental monitors, the university researchers, the neighborhood associations, the union negotiators, the legal aid clinics, the journalists who cover city council meetings. All of it. The sum of those institutions is what makes it possible for citizens to organize, to know what is happening, and to hold power accountable.
When those institutions go quiet, or are made to go quiet, the citizens who depend on them do not stop having interests and needs. They simply lose the means to express and pursue those interests collectively. They become, in political science vocabulary, atomized; isolated individuals without the organizational structures that allow them to be heard.
That is what the strongman’s playbook is designed to produce. Not a country in which citizens agree with the leader. A country in which citizens who disagree have no institutions through which to act on that disagreement.
Part 10 is next and last. We move to making leaving impossible.
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Stay inspired,
Alexander
This is the ninth installment of The Strongman’s Playbook — a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
If you missed the previous series, The Fall, it is all in the archive: ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story — how power is seized, and how it is eventually lost.
If you know an American who is watching the news and wondering how this is supposed to end, send them Part 1. The courts are where the story begins.
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More from Alexander Verbeek:
If you missed part 8 of The Strongman’s Playbook:
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Notes and sources
Prairieland protest sentences and appeal status: KERA News, June and July 2026 — https://www.keranews.org/criminal-justice/2026-06-30/prairieland-ice-detention-center-shooting-trial-defendants-file-notices-of-appeal-fifth-circuit
McCarthyism comparison, NGO targeting, antifa designation: The Guardian, Judith Levine, July 31, 2026 — https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/31/mccarthyism-trump-surveillance-red-scare
Trump targeting civil society institutions, law firms, universities: The Guardian, April 2025 — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/10/trump-administration-authoritarian
Law firm capitulations, university funding threats, power of government used against opponents: CNN, March 2025 — https://ktvz.com/politics/cnn-us-politics/2025/03/30/trump-is-using-the-power-of-government-to-punish-opponents-theyre-struggling-to-respond/
Seven authoritarian moves, Trump second term: CNN, August 2025 — https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/13/politics/authoritarian-moves-trump-analysis
EPA green grants frozen, criminal investigation of grantees: The Guardian, April 2025 — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/10/trump-administration-authoritarian
Nicaragua 222 citizens stripped of nationality, February 9, 2023: AP News — https://apnews.com/article/6e407b6d8c1c278a022d40328aa4a828
Nicaragua 94 more citizens stripped, February 15, 2023: AP News — https://apnews.com/article/4907d12691ef14a243adffb5fb34ce82
Nicaragua civil society dismantling, 3,500 NGOs closed: US State Department Human Rights Report 2023, Nicaragua — https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/nicaragua
Pinochet coup, university purges, Vicariate of Solidarity: Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File, New Press — https://thenewpress.com/books/pinochet-file
Rettig Commission and civil society documentation: Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation report — https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/collections/truth_commissions/Chile90-Report/Chile90-Report.pdf
"That is what the strongman’s playbook is designed to produce. Not a country in which citizens agree with the leader. A country in which citizens who disagree have no institutions through which to act on that disagreement."
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The Trump regime is a faux administration with no semblance to actual government. It has turned the United States into a third world country and has no relationship to America.
This is what Donald Trump has done to a once great country who celebrated independence, freedom and justice for all.
We weep for America.
A brilliant analysis on authoritarianism.