Your coworker says, “I saw the most insane TikTok.” They show it to you. You are pretty sure it is AI. “I’m pretty sure that’s AI,” you say. “Really? How can you tell?” Vibes. A close friend has become very concerned about what they suspect is a child trafficking ring operating in the shadows of your small town. “I’m pretty sure that’s a conspiracy theory,” you say. What tipped you off? Vibes. The odd constellation of bumper stickers on the truck’s back windshield. Vibes. The home-made yard signs, still up from the last election, or the one before, or the one before that. Vibes.
You are also pretty sure this is a nation of laws, the Constitution is unshakeable and power can be held to account using the ballot and the courts. But what do the vibes tell you?
Trump’s September 22, 2025, executive order “designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization” certainly looked official; however, most legal experts agree the order lacks any force of law and is patently unconstitutional. The associated September 25 reorientation of federal priorities to focus on “the left” has more immediate short-term implications, but what will actually happen is opaque at best. As we wait for the dust to settle, it is worth considering what the point of all this may be. Why issue an unenforceable executive order in the first place?
Despite being cheesy millennial slang, the “vibes” concept is unexpectedly useful as a way to describe a possible answer. The “state of exception” is a concept proposed by infamous Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued in the 1920s that, when a nation is confronted with an emergency situation, true power is held by the person who commands it, regardless of what the law says. Postmodernist thinker Giorgio Agamben dissected Schmitt’s theory, arguing that, while incorrect as a matter of statecraft, the “state of exception” is a viable metric for understanding and describing how power operates in societies. At the risk of oversimplification, it comes down to how believable authority looks and feels rather than how legal it is.
It is a fair guess that Donald Trump did not have Karl Schmitt in mind when signing the most recent EO. It is far more likely the people who actually conceived of and drafted it did. Schmitt was enormously influential to the intellectual right wing in the United States. Following up on our theme, Steve Bannon, Peter Theil, Steven Miller, Samual Alito, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas all have strong “I-have-encountered-and-taken-seriously-the-works-of-Karl-Schmitt” vibes. It’s highly likely that Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance, and Brett Kavanaugh have at least listened to podcasts hosted by people who hold Karl Schmitt in high regard. His political concepts are relevant to understanding the executive order because people in power take them seriously, without regard to the public interest.
Consider the “antifa” EO through the lens of a “state of exception.” The EO has no force of law. There is no such thing as a “domestic terrorist organization” — and even if there were, “antifa” is not an organization. The question remains, why issue yet another unlawful EO at all? This order wasn’t issued to respond to anything happening in the present moment. It seems apparent it was drafted to have the appearance of legality, in part to normalize the experience of seeing these types of unilateral executive actions, and in part for its potential use in an eventual “emergency” that they expect will give the president special emergency powers. It also serves to keep progressive movements and nonprofits tied up trying to put out legal fires all over the place. Trump’s recurrent speculation about the use of the Insurrection Act to send federal troops into states against their will is just the most recent example of the willingness of the administration to use false “emergencies” as a pretext for action.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its embrace of Unitary Executive Theory, a proposal for the centralization of power in the hands of the president that squares well with Schmitt’s theories on the power of the sovereign. Honestly, it isn’t much of a mystery — they spelled the whole thing out in Project 2025.
Understanding and digesting the way the administration thinks about power helps reveal one purpose of an executive order that has no legal effect. It is the projection of power where it doesn’t exist, a fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy. This follows a theory that assumes power is held by the person who wields it, and that power is not beholden to rules or law; those exist merely to govern the powerless. It has the dual effect of projecting the appearance of a political strong-man while simultaneously draining the resources of citizen efforts to defend our constitutional rights — by dragging them into frivolous litigaiton to maintain what basic protections still exist, or forcing them to expend money and energy challenging absurd governmental overreach. It is a dark, fundamentally anti-American worldview, but it does explain why a president interested in consolidating power would issue a toothless order. It is only toothless for the moment, until the vibes shift, and people begin to self-censor and retreat from activism.
There is no mass left-wing threat to the fabric of society – that is just vibes. By contrast, the legal system earns its legitimacy not through cultivating an image of power, but by explaining, in detail, the basis for court decisions — which is why recent Supreme Court shadow docket decisions are also deeply troubling.
So, what can be done about this? The chief vulnerability of a vibes-based approach to authoritarianism is that it is far, far more style than substance — a classic propaganda war on the people. If you look at the problems facing people today, they are not reflected in the priorities of the administration. Despite the recent shadowy actions by the Supreme Court, in general courts do use actual evidence, and subject that evidence to scrutiny through cross-examination. Court decisions are (in general) legitimate, because their reasoning and conclusions can be understood, even when we might disagree with the outcome in individual cases.
Institutions like courts and democratic actions like elections may be imperfect, and some of their flaws may have allowed things to get to this dire situation; however, they do still exist and are still the most effective way to confront a government that continuously violates the constitution. One way to look at those longstanding U.S. institutions is a little like a harm reduction strategy. Courts can slow the pace of illegal government action; they can demand explanations, and they can fully stop the government in its tracks when necessary. When courts fail to protect our rights, the Constitution still provides the right to speak, the right to assemble and the right to protest. None of these on their own are enough to restore robust civil liberties protections; however, they open the time and space needed for peoples’ movements to push those efforts forward. And while it is true that the current administration has indicated a willingness to ignore court orders, when that happens, the attorneys involved risk losing their licenses and being publicly chastised by incensed judges.
One point of the projection of power is to make others feel powerless, like it’s hopeless, like the government is too powerful, the institutions too broken to work anymore, like there is no point, like you should just give up and accept your fate. That is the logic of authoritarians, and vibes-based authoritarianism takes a maximalist approach in cultivating this mood. Authoritarian control doesn’t seek merely to determine what people do, it also wants to control how people feel. Not succumbing to the bad vibes is essential in resisting governmental overreach. Exercising your constitutional rights and utilizing the courts to try to slow the authoritarian system down is another. Public participation, activism, speaking out, debating your neighbor, bringing your good and hopeful vibes into the mix are yet more ways to fight authoritarian control.
We are not without tools and we are certainly not without each other. Much can be learned from studying how those in power think about wielding that power, but the principal lesson of authoritarianism is that it requires submission in the mind of the people before it can extract compliance with the regime. Don’t submit. Keep struggling. Keep working. Together we can do more than just elect representatives at intervals and advocate in court — we can change the vibe ourselves.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/18/Is-it-legal-Trump-designate-antifa-as-terorrist-or/
http://pdf-objects.com/files/US-English-PDF-Object.pdf
https://reason.com/2025/09/26/the-american-new-right-looks-like-the-european-old-right/
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unitary_executive_theory_(uet)
https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained
https://hri.global/what-is-harm-reduction/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c740elm70z7o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss
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