Trump’s Cabinet retreats behind military gates

Cabinet members have traditionally lived in the wealthy enclaves of Washington, D.C., or Northern Virginia. But instead of choosing homes in Georgetown, Kalorama, McLean or Great Falls, some officials in Donald Trump‘s Cabinet and among his White House staff — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem — are living in secure military housing, citing safety concerns. In doing so, they are embracing the literal architecture of authoritarianism.

The security concerns are very real. According to a recent study, violent online rhetoric against prominent public officials in the U.S. increased dramatically between 2021 and 2025. But for most, if not all of American history, senior government officials accepted the personal risk as part of the job. The symbolism of living among their fellow Americans mattered. It is a damning indictment of the Trump administration that its policies are so unpopular and have caused so much pain and anger among the American people that senior officials are hiding from them.

By placing some of his senior officials and staffers in luxury housing on military bases, Trump is rewarding them — but more importantly, he is exerting control by reminding them that all things flow from him. 

“It is something you never see in a democracy,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” told the New York Times. “Government officials live on military bases or other sorts of fortified zones in authoritarian regimes.”

Beyond security concerns, authoritarian leaders often house senior officials on military bases or within walled compounds as a way of minimizing the possibility of a coup. Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and other Kremlin functionaries live in highly-secure estates near the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway west of Moscow, a suburban community dubbed “Moscow Beverly Hills.” Soviet premier Joseph Stalin installed his high-ranking officials in a network of dachas. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein built dozens of palaces for top-level Bath party officials, Republican Guard leadership, and members of his family and inner circle. 

Several senior officials told the Times that they are paying fair-market values for their housing, which range from $4,500 to $6,500 a month. (According to the Washington Post, as of August Noem was living rent-free in a “spacious waterfront residence” that usually houses the Coast Guard’s top admiral. She refuted the claim and said she was paying “personal dollars” in rent.) This may be true, but given Trump and his administration’s pattern of apparently corrupt behavior, self-dealing and other conflicts of interest, even the appearance of impropriety damages the public trust.

Trump rejects the basic concept of public service. He views the presidency as a vehicle for personal enrichment — and he has been extraordinarily successful at monetizing it. Since returning to office, Trump and his family have added an estimated $3.4 billion to their fortune.

This is common among the dictators and autocrats that Trump admires. Putin is believed to be worth upward of $200 billion. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has been described as running a “mafia state” where he, his family and inner circle are collectively worth billions of dollars.

As Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned in August, “billions of dollars in profit is truly staggering, and Trump seems to just be getting started. We cannot get so used to his constant, growing corruption that even profits of this gargantuan scale from the presidency stop seeming outrageous… The dizzying amount of scandals and unethical behavior coming from the second Trump administration can make even a $3.4 billion profit feel like a drop of water in the ocean. But this kind of profiteering is changing the conception of what the office of the presidency even is.”

Authoritarians, though, cannot rule alone. They need assistants — high-level apparatchiks and other agents for the day-to-day work of running the regime. Rubio is managing Trump’s expansive “Donroe Doctrine” and encouraging his militant nationalism; their next target is apparently Cuba. In Iran and in the Caribbean, Hegseth is acting as the president’s de facto war lord. Bondi has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm. Before her firing, Noem ran the administration’s mass deportation machine under the direction of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

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In exchange for their loyalty, authoritarian leaders give the apparatchiks money, access, influence, power and other special privileges. Special housing, whether on a military base, in a palace or sequestered in a guarded compound, is one such reward and inducement.

In any authoritarian regime, there are likely to be some high-ranking members who serve because they sincerely believe they can be a moderating influence. These are the much-discussed “adults in the room” who populated Trump’s first term in office and, in some cases, prevented him from following his worst impulses. Those voices have been purged or otherwise silenced in Trump’s second administration — or corrupted by their leader.

Public opinion polls and other research show that the American people are increasingly distrustful, cynical and hostile toward a government they view as ineffective. Their perceptions are compounded by a government that is less responsive to the policy preferences of average Americans while being hyper-responsive, if not outright obedient, to the demands of the rich and the corporate class.

American democracy is continuing to collapse. The annual report from V-Dem, an institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg, ranks American democracy as the 51st in the world, a precipitous fall from its 2025 ranking of 21st. Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director, told NPR that this collapse is unprecedented. “Under the Trump administration, democracy has been rolled back as much during just one year as it took Modi in India and Erdoğan in Turkey 10 years to accomplish, and Orbán in Hungary four years,” he said.

America’s norms and institutions long ago surrendered to Trump’s MAGA movement, and granting his closest Cabinet officials and staffers military housing is just the latest example of how the president is consolidating power and building a cult of personality. He is also in the process of redesigning the nation’s capital in his own image by bulldozing historic sites, slapping his name on a presidential memorial, erecting new monuments for his own glory and hanging banners bearing his face on government buildings. This comes in addition to his administration’s assault on freedom of speech, thought and the press; civil society; voting rights; and civil and human rights — all in the name of patriotism and destroying the enemy within.

The walled city his most trusted agents live behind is itself a metaphor for Trump’s wider authoritarian project. Just like the president himself, the administration’s ruling class doesn’t believe they have any responsibility to the public. They consider themselves above both the law and democracy, and from the safety of their guarded homes, beyond it.