Just Words: Administration or Regime?

Some people say “Trump regime”; most say “Trump administration”. Which is more accurate?

Back in July 2017, Emory University Professor Carol Anderson argued for “regime”, noting that Trump “has no desire or intention to govern. He wants to rule. Where his word is our command.”

For Henry Reichman, professor emeritus of history at California State University–East Bay, no argument was necessary. Early in 2018, he wrote an article titled “Facing the Reality of the Trump Regime”. His subtitle: “We don’t have the luxury of looking away.”

Numerous observers have commented on the differences between the first and second Trump presidencies. During his first stay in the White House, Trump surrounded himself with many politically experienced people who were more or less expecting to govern according to the democratic principles and norms established during the nation’s first two centuries. While Trump often expressed his dictatorial inclinations, it seemed his worst tendencies were mostly held in check by those people.

More recently, as reported by David A. Graham in The Atlantic, writers for the left-leaning New Republic and The Nation, as well as a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, are all referring to the “Trump regime”. Graham says that even the scholars he approached “cautiously endorsed” applying “regime” to the Trump government. He further cites a Google Trends report that shows use of the term has jumped since Trump took office last year.

In his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists. Several were architects of Project 2025, the public blueprint for a Trump presidency built around the concept of a unitary executive rather than the checks and balances long accepted as the great achievement of the Constitution.

As he becomes more openly oppressive and authoritarian – often ignoring the Constitution and rule of law, deploying ICE as if it were his national police force, and bending the law to suppress the vote in order to stay in power – many observers, including those in the news media, continue to refer to Trump and his cabinet as the “Trump administration”, as if the country is still operating within the democratic norms that mostly held the nation together for the last 160 years.

As Reichman’s article pointed out in 2018, we don’t have the luxury of looking away. And yet, David Graham concludes that, despite the growing support for using “regime”, he’s going to stick with “administration”. He does so, he says, “without downplaying the dangers that Trump poses to the American way of government”. Yet, that’s exactly what the word “administration” does – it downplays the dangers.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary associates “administration” with positively-perceived ideas, offering examples such as “administration of justice” and “administration of medicine”. It also says “administration” refers to “a body of persons who administer”, as in the people who constitute a president’s administration. I would add that the term also supports the sense that nothing has changed – our government continues to operate within the norms of our democracy.

As Robert Reich, an outspoken critic of Trump and former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, wrote to Graham, “This is no ‘administration’ that manages the executive branch by implementing the will of Congress, as expressed by the citizens of the United States.”

Judging by the number of lawsuits brought against the executive branch in just the first year of Trump’s second term, and the rulings thus far, it’s fair to conclude that Reich is right – the people assembled to execute Trump’s policies are not administering the laws of the land. Rather, they are circumventing them.

In defining “regime”, Merriam-Webster references negatively-perceived concepts in its usage examples: “a socialist regime”, “the new military regime”, “the dictator’s regime”. Regimes do what the leader dictates, whether or not it is in the interest of the people he was elected to serve.

Words matter, especially during periods of political transition, when the people in our democracy depend on trusted sources to accurately portray the changes happening in the world. Rather than continuing to use the term “administration” out of habit, we need to adapt our language to more accurately describe what we are witnessing.

In our view, it is both inaccurate and dangerous to call the second Trump government the “Trump administration”. For this reason, The American Leader uses the term the “Trump regime” to more accurately reflect his disregard for the principles that made this a great nation.

Journalism has been the primary source for news about the world for at least the last two centuries. It has been our window on the world. But journalists and other media producers have often failed to keep up with social changes happening in the world, whether they are brought on by technology or politics. We see it especially in the use of words that no longer describe what they are intended to describe. Our “Just Words” is an intermittent series exploring how that can impact what people see through the window we provide.