James C. Scott wrote about a concept of legibility in Seeing Like a State — the idea that centralized power first needs to make populations readable before it can act on them.
There is a specific cycle by which legibility is achieved through voluntary compliance rather than surveillance. The state doesn’t need to find you if it can get you to identify yourself for targeting. Recently the U.S. government suddenly, illogically began requiring gun owners to register gender, under threat of felony charges for refusal.
The outcome of this type of registration pressure is consistent across five centuries: defiance or evasion — the behaviors the system initially punished — become retroactively the safer choice. People were told the rules would protect them, in order to trick them into compliance.
The Trump Trap Cycle
First he requires registration, promising protection. Then he does the opposite, uses the registry for removal. The people who trusted Trump enough to comply with him are the ones most exposed when he turns on them.
US Trans Military Ban
| 1. Register | First-term bans serving trans troops, only allowing them to remain active if they accept an official gender dysphoria diagnosis |
| 2. Comply | Trans service members obtain diagnosis through official military medical channels, building documented records |
| 3. Normalize | Diagnosed troops continue serving, deploy, get promoted; the system appears to be working long enough to increase participation |
| 4. Repurpose | Second-term administration uses the gender dysphoria diagnosis records that it required to identify and forcibly remove troops |
| 5. Punish compliance | Undiagnosed trans troops are harder to identify and remove; the honest and open ones are punished the most. Morale plummets, as troops are incentivized to lie and passively disobey |
Spanish Inquisition
| 1. Register | Jews and Muslims told to convert and register as conversos or moriscos to remain in Spain |
| 2. Comply | Conversos are baptized, registered in parish records, hold public positions |
| 3. Normalize | Conversos integrate into Spanish society, some rise to prominence in church and government |
| 4. Repurpose | Inquisition uses baptismal and parish records to investigate conversos for secret Jewish or Islamic practice |
| 5. Punish compliance | Crypto-Jews who never converted are harder to find than registered conversos under Inquisitorial scrutiny |
Nazi Germany
| 1. Register | 1933 census and civil registry laws require declaration of religion and ancestry; Nazi Nuremberg Laws formalize racial categories |
| 2. Comply | Jewish citizens register with Nazi authorities, carry identification, appear in population databases |
| 3. Normalize | Early restrictions feel manageable; emigration seems like overreaction to many |
| 4. Repurpose | Census and registration data feed deportation logistics; IBM tabulation systems sort populations for ghettoization and mass extermination |
| 5. Punish compliance | Jews who registered are systematically located; those who obtained false papers or fled early survive at higher rates |
Soviet Union
| 1. Register | Internal passport system requires citizens to declare nationality on identity documents |
| 2. Comply | Citizens dutifully file nationality declarations on internal passports |
| 3. Normalize | Registered nationalities live and work normally for years or decades |
| 4. Repurpose | Stalin uses nationality registrations to identify entire ethnic groups — Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans — for mass deportation |
| 5. Punish compliance | Undocumented individuals are invisible to the deportation apparatus |
Every administrative trap degrades the legitimacy of every future administrative process. Census participation drops. Medical disclosure drops. Voluntary compliance with anything drops. The trap is an institutional autoimmune disorder that destroys the state’s ability to govern the next population it needs to make legible. The targeting falls apart, as fighting is turned within, and severe dysfunction takes over.
The trap selects against institutional loyalty, instead demanding Trump loyalty. The people most aligned with necessary institutional values — troops who believed in the Constitution enough to work within it and believe in law and order — are punished the most.
The Trump mechanism is anti-meritocratic as a loyalty test. Those least mentally fit to serve take over, because they’re the most willing to serve Trump.
