The Coup at Home: The Unitary Executive and the Silencing of Dissent

The corporate media has spent decades refining the art of looking the other way, but in the early months of 2026, the machinery of repression is no longer hiding in the shadows of the Global South—it has come home to roost in Washington. The architects of this new order call it "deconstruction," a polite euphemism for a calculated coup against the public interest (Edginton, 2025). We are witnessing the fusion of two dangerous forces: the "Unitary Executive" in the White House and the "Ultimate Media Mogul" in Silicon Valley. Together, they are not building a utopia; they are engineering a prison for the mind, stripping away the last lines of defense between the unbridled will of the elite and the people they intend to rule.

The strategy is straight out of the imperialist playbook. For Steve Bannon and the acolytes of the Unitary Executive Theory, the enemy is the "Administrative State"—the civil servants, scientists, and regulators who act as the last hurdle to absolute power. By crowning the President as the "Chief Executive Officer" of the government, they aim to decapitate the bureaucracy that separates the leader’s impulse from state violence (Edginton, 2025). As Bannon explicitly boasted, the goal is the complete "deconstruction of the administrative state" (Tomain, 2024), utilizing a shock-doctrine strategy he calls "Days of Thunder" to "flood the zone" and overwhelm any remaining democratic resistance (Semafor, 2025).

But a coup requires more than just political muscle; it requires the control of memory and perception. This is where the Media Mogul steps in. Just as the state targets the "Deep State," the corporate masters of the algorithm target the "gatekeeper"—the editors and safety teams they smear as agents of a "woke mind virus." This is the brutal reality of the media as a "political economy," where ownership by powerful conglomerates dictates not just what we see, but what we are allowed to think (Adalid, n.d.).

The result is the collapse of the "Fourth Estate" into the "Second Branch." It is a seamless integration of state and corporate power: the President issues a directive without pushback, and the Mogul amplifies the lie without correction. While their apologists claim this returns power to the "forgotten man," it actually replaces a flawed system of checks and balances with a streamlined system of command and control. This is textbook hegemony: the dominant class establishing a "preferred discourse" to maintain control, manufacturing a "commonsensical worldview" that makes resistance feel futile (Adalid, n.d.).

The weapon of choice is "impoundment," a tool of economic warfare turned inward. Politically, the Unitary Executive threatens to impound appropriated funds, starving any agency that dares to dissent. Trump explicitly campaigned on using the "Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy" and "crush the Deep State" (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 2023). In the digital realm, we see "algorithmic impoundment." This is the "Spiral of Silence" in action, where the algorithm de-boosts opposition until the people suppress their own voices, fearing they are alone in their resistance (Adalid, n.d.). They don't have to burn the books; they just have to make sure no one can find them.

This is the great deception of the Dystopian’s Utopia. The digital airwaves are filled with noise—the "secondary orality" of podcasts and live streams—but it is a hall of mirrors. As critics have long warned, this technology creates a reality "accurate only in the mind" of the creator, completely detached from the material conditions of the poor and working class (Adalid, n.d.). The feedback loop has been severed. The leader speaks, the algorithm amplifies, and the "crowd" appears to roar. Meanwhile, the real mechanisms of accountability—the courts, the independent press, the regulations protecting the vulnerable—are dismantled in broad daylight.

We are left with a terrifying efficiency. When the "Unitary Executive" and the "Media Mogul" fuse, the citizen is left naked before the state. The "Days of Thunder" promised by Bannon (Edginton, 2025) are not a storm clearing the air; they are the sound of the tracks being laid for a train that runs only one way: toward unchecked, absolute power.

References
Adalid, N. G. B. (n.d.). Media and mass culture debates in contemporary times [Course paper].

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. (2023, August 16). Donald Trump's proposal to use impoundment authority. https://www.crfb.org/blogs/donald-trumps-proposal-use-impoundment-authority

Edginton, S. (Interviewer). (2025). ‘A lot of you are going to prison’ | Steve Bannon talks justice, revenge and Trump 2.0 [Video]. GB News. https://youtu.be/g3bS1ekLzCw?si=5yGUG5PJ2RC0vyro

Semafor. (2025, February 8). ‘Almost like surrender’: Steve Bannon on the media in Trump’s ‘Days of Thunder’. https://www.semafor.com/article/02/08/2025/almost-like-surrender-steve-bannon-on-the-media-in-trumps-days-of-thunder

Tomain, J. P. (2024). The twin demons of the Trump-Bannon assault on democracy. University of Cincinnati College of Law. https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/334/