It Is Happening Here

In his first 2 1/2 months in office, President Donald Trump has embraced sweeping arbitrary executive power in a manner not previously seen in American history. He is circumventing Congress, ignoring the courts and using the power of the state to crush any opposition to his agenda. This is a turn away from liberal democracy and toward autocracy.

This is exactly what Trump promised during his bid for a second term. After surviving impeachment and criminal indictments for fomenting an insurrection aimed at overturning a lawful election, he ran on a promise to be a “dictator on day one” so that he could wage a domestic war of “retribution” against what he termed the “enemy within.”

“I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump said at a campaign rally in 2023. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”

This turn toward autocracy is not coming from the point of a gun, as the rise of 20th century dictators would have us believe, but instead through assertions of law.

“A dictatorship [today] doesn’t come with tanks in the streets, it comes with phalanxes of lawyers and compliant courts,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton University sociologist who has long studied the rise of autocracies around the world. “It’s all done legally, and it’s all done bloodlessly.”

Trump’s exertions of executive power masquerade as law through edicts aimed at crushing his political opposition, eliminating opposition in civil society, removing sources of knowledge and learning that contest his power, sidelining Congress and the courts, and centralizing power in his own hands.

What we are seeing at the outset of the second Trump administration is a full-scale attack on democracy, liberal principles, and the rule of law that have been enshrined in legal precedents and the Constitution in order to establish autocratic rule. While there have been significant antidemocratic and authoritarian movements in U.S. history from the Slave Power to Jim Crow to wartime repressions to McCarthyism, a peacetime assault of this scale and national scope directed from the White House has no historical analogue in this country.

“I don’t think there are exact comparisons in the U.S. past,” said Aziz Huq, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the co-author of a book on the failure of constitutional democracies. “I can’t think of a moment when there’s been an effort to set aside the authority of statutes, the authority of Congress, the authority of courts in quite the way that there is now.”

To put it plainly: It is happening here.

The Playbook

What is happening in America today is the same scene that has played out in various countries across the globe in the 21st century.

From Hungary to Turkey to Poland to Russia to India, democracies collapse into autocracy not after a strongman seizes control of the military or through violent coups but through legal machinations that cement their control and neuter their opposition. They don’t necessarily end elections or entirely eliminate their opponents. Instead, they put their thumb on the scale to ensure elections go their way and that their opponents are weak.

Scheppele named this process of seizing power autocratic legalism in a 2018 paper of the same name. Steven Levitsky, the Harvard University political scientist and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” refers to the outcome of this process, which maintains the veneer of democracy, as competitive authoritarianism.

“The government would not descend into fascism or single party dictatorship, but rather weaponize state institutions and deploy them pretty systematically to punish rivals and to protect allies, and to bully and harass much of civil society into silence or onto the political sidelines,” Levitsky said.

This 21st century autocracy uses constitutions and the law against themselves and each other, seeking to eliminate existing liberalism — meaning the enshrining of individual rights in law and protections from arbitrary or unitary rule — in culture and law, and replace it with the illiberal ideas of autocratic governance and mass obedience.

The most commonly cited analogue to Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy in the U.S. is that of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“Orban and his team are all lawyers and their whole democracy into dictatorship plan happened through excruciating legality,” Schepple, who lived in Hungary for years working at the constitutional court and watched Orban’s rise, said.

Orban won power with a resounding electoral victory in 2010 and quickly moved to use the law to keep himself there forever. He gutted the civil service to remove anyone perceived as disloyal, cut funding for newspapers, universities and nonprofits; packed the judiciary with loyalists; gerrymandered legislative districts; seized control of the prosecutor’s office and amended the constitution to centralize all power in his hands. While opposition still exists, his party has not come close to losing power since.

Once securely in power, Orban took his vision and his autocracy playbook international with a bid to build ideological allies — including to the United States.

In 2023, he teamed up with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative nonprofit that led the Project 2025 plan for Trump’s second term, which entered into a working agreement with The Danube Institute, Orban’s chief vehicle to export his illiberal ideology, according to a report by The New Republic. When Orban visited the U.S. in 2024, he spoke to a closed-door group at the Heritage Foundation. The Conservative Political Action Conference has twice hosted its events in Hungary with Orban’s blessing.

Whether or not this partnership directly involved Hungarian input on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, Orban’s influence is all over it.

Project 2025, which has since been put into practice, echoed Orban’s governance style by calling for removing disloyal civil servants, using state funds to bully and defund civil society actors like universities and nonprofits, and centralizing power in the executive at the expense of other branches of government or sources of power.

This relationship likely helped Trump accomplish something Orban and the world’s other autocrats could not: assert this agenda with lightning speed.

It took Orban three years to seize control of the judiciary. Turkish President Recep Erdogan spent years in power before fully consolidating control after the enactment of 2017 constitutional changes by popular referendum. Barely two months into his second term, however, Trump is acting as though he has already secured these protections.

“This is a much more rapid and thoroughgoing weaponization of the state and deployment against critics, rivals and civil society than we see in most other cases of 21st century elected authoritarianism,” Levitsky said.

The Weaponization Of The State

The turn to autocracy can be seen across the board, as Trump has centralized power in the White House and claimed control over independent agencies.

Trump has asserted direct control over the Department of Justice and all agencies that engage in investigations: In an executive order, he declared that only the president and attorney general may define matters of law within the administration, and that all agencies, including independent agencies, must take orders from the White House.

Meanwhile, an executive order establishing a new form of civil service employment called Schedule Policy/Career (formerly known as Schedule F) would allow Trump to fire vast swathes of the federal civil service and replace them with loyalists. Trump has further asserted the power to fire any official he wants, even when Congress has put restrictions on that power and Supreme Court precedent has upheld those restrictions.

By centralizing power over the agencies and individual employees, Trump can use the government to enact his will. That will is to extort civil society to bend to his designs, and to eliminate opposition from Democrats, law firms, universities or any other institutions inclined to challenge him. To do so, Trump creates legal pretexts ― DEI, illegal immigration, antisemitism ― that can be used as cudgels against his targets by the agencies he controls.

Civil society has already shown signs of folding as law firms and universities have bent the knee to protect themselves, leaving open the possibility of a snowball effect of collapsing opposition.

Three law firms so far have struck deals with the administration to either make an executive order punishing them go away, or to protect themselves ahead of time. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the first firm to reach such a deal, set the precedent when it entered into an agreement to provide $40 million in pro bono services to the administration in exchange for Trump rescinding an order punishing it.

“Once Paul, Weiss folded, now there’s a model for action that can be built upon because every other firm has a signal that if you’re targeted by the administration here are the things you need in order to get out of the crosshairs,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law.

Trump also directed the Department of Justice to seek sanctions and disciplinary action against lawyers who bring “frivolous” litigation, in this case meaning lawsuits against his administration. Most concerning is what that order labels as frivolous: It specifically calls out “the immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices” as engaged in “fraud,” opening up any lawyer or law firm practicing immigration law to legal threats, blackmail and sanctions at the same time that the administration takes a harshly anti-immigrant stance.

“To me that’s the real central lever that that order is using,” Cummings said. “It’s targeting the firms by disabling them from doing work based on the fact that Trump doesn’t want people to represent immigrants to make legally authorized claims to remain in the United States. That’s overruling the rule of law.”

Universities have also acquiesced. Columbia University agreed to essentially hand over control to Trump, particularly on matters of protest policies and oversight of its Middle Eastern studies department, in exchange for him releasing $400 million in federal research grants. Harvard University signaled on Tuesday that it is also looking to make good with the administration over pretextual complaints of antisemitism on campus. The administration has already launched investigations into 60 universities on pretextual claims of antisemitism.

“These acts of taking critical resources hostage and demanding behavior that amounts to a degree of self-silencing and political sidelining, that’s textbook authoritarian behavior,” Levitsky said.

Trump’s efforts to subvert civil society also extends to the political arena, where Democratic Party-affiliated groups, particularly those that might fund or organize his opposition, like the campaign contribution processor ActBlue and donor networks like Arabella Advisors, have come in the crosshairs.

“What we are seeing is an emboldened administration that is launching a coordinated attack going after all of the mechanisms slowing down Trump in his first administration,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a liberal group organizing against Trump’s targeting of civil society and his political opposition.

Trump has worked to undermine institutions, questioning the nonprofit status of the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which played a major role suing his first administration and exposing his self-dealing, while many of the law firms targeted by his executive orders have historically provided the legal muscle in fights for liberal causes.

“It’s calculated and targeted at the pillars of progressive power,” Leiter said.

On the same front, Trump has sought to consolidate control of elections in his hands. He has fired one FEC commissioner and asserted the power to dictate decisions made by the body overseeing campaign financing. He also issued an executive order that purports to change state election laws in manners that would favor the Republican Party, although he has no such power.

And while all of this operates through the law, there is also the threat of extrajudicial power, aimed at individuals.

Last week, Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk was surrounded by plainclothes immigration officers while walking to her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, and whisked off to a detention center in Louisiana for deportation all in under 24 hours, allegedly because she was a threat to U.S. foreign policy. Her apparent crime? She was one of four authors on an op-ed in her student paper calling on the university to back a student resolution to divest from companies with ties to Israel.

Ten days earlier, the administration violated a court order to halt three flights of Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants who were sent directly into a brutal prison known for human rights violations in El Salvador.

The administration claimed these were all gang members, but they were denied due process and officials provided no evidence to back up their allegations. Since then, numerous cases have emerged of likely innocent people and confirmed legal residents being sent to a foreign gulag where no detainee has ever left. The administration claims it has no responsibility to have any of these people released.

While these episodes have so far targeted immigrants through the use and abuse of the legal system, they harbor a warning of violence that barely lurks under all of Trump’s other threats.

“We are a stone’s throw away from the jailing of citizens, including the jailing of attorneys,” said Nora Ahmed, legal director of ACLU-Louisiana.

The Muscles That Haven’t Been Flexed Yet

Despite Trump’s fast-moving effort to convert the U.S. into an illiberal autocracy, the outcome has not been decided ― yet. There still exists, at least theoretically, a strong and powerful opposition that could stop and reverse this before it takes hold.

“The U.S. differs in that we have a much more muscular opposition than any of the countries that have faced this challenge,” Levitsky said. “We have a well organized, united, well-financed, electorally viable opposition. We have a very big, very wealthy, very diverse private sector. We have a big civil society. We have all of the muscle to resist Trump. That muscle hasn’t been flexed yet. The startling thing is how passive the resistance has been.”

What would be needed is collective action across civil society institutions and the opposition Democrats.

The acquiescence of law firms and universities, and the refusal of Democrats to deploy hardball tactics to slow Trump’s march has fueled the sense that the autocratic turn is inevitable. But resistance has emerged in some pockets, and it’s growing.

“If you look at people who have resisted these autocratic legal developments, there has been a combination of strong collective action ― with strong action by the legal profession and by the judiciary,” Cummings said, pointing to Brazil as an example where an effort to impose autocracy was defeated.

Three law firms targeted by Trump ― Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block ― challenged his orders in court and won temporary restraining orders on all of them. Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber signaled that the university will stand up for itself in an interview with Bloomberg, while the school also readied itself financially by selling $320 million in taxable bonds, which could help it absorb any loss in federal grant funding. Numerous law school deans and professors have put out letters denouncing the administration’s efforts to cow the legal profession. And some congressional Democrats, including Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Ruben Gallego (Ariz.) have begun to put holds on Trump nominees to block or slow their confirmation.

Trump’s popularity, or lack thereof, also presents a weakness for his efforts at autocratic consolidation. Other recent autocrats had huge parliamentary majorities when they first won election, allowing them to consolidate power by passing laws, and amending or rewriting constitutions.

While 2024 was Trump’s strongest showing in three elections, he still only eked out a win through tight margins in crucial states, and his party did not obtain large legislative majorities. It puts his efforts at consolidation in a precarious state: Without the ability to easily push his agenda through the legislature, all of his biggest actions so far have been through executive orders or actions, and they are often clearly illegal.

That has left the administration at the whim of the courts. So far, this has gone extremely poorly for Trump as his orders have been repeatedly struck down in district and appellate courts. These court rulings have pushed Republicans to attack the courts and propose impeachments of judges and laws to curtail judicial power, and the Trump administration to either defy orders or threaten to do so.

But Trump and his team seem to be operating on an assumption that, unlike their foreign counterparts, they’ve already seized control of the Supreme Court. They appear to believe the Supreme Court’s decision in the presidential immunity case that saved Trump from prosecution in 2024 contains a theory of unburdened executive power that would bless all of their actions. But that’s not guaranteed.

“We will soon see if the Supreme Court is totally on board with a Trump dictatorship or whether it still thinks it has a role to play in separation of powers,” Scheppele said.

And internal contradictions within Trump’s policy regime may still crater his popularity or split his MAGA coalition.

The first of these is one unique element of Trump’s autocratic efforts: Elon Musk. There isn’t a real analogue, in any of the other countries that slid into autocracy, to the way the richest man in the world and owner of a massive media platform has gone into government to tear it apart.

“There’s a real contradiction between what Musk is doing and what MAGA purports to do,” Levitsky said. “If you’re going to build a populist coalition among the working class, breaking the state is probably not the way to do that.”

While Musk may ultimately make peace with the nationalist MAGA faction, Trump’s macroeconomic policies pose perhaps a greater contradiction for the party of Make America Wealthy Again. On Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on almost every country in the world. The move is part of a massive macroeconomic restructuring that has left the entire U.S. economy in a paralyzed state of uncertainty, and it’s not clear if it jibes with an effort at autocratic consolidation.

“We haven’t seen anyone try to do both of those at the same time,” Huq said. “It’s not clear how these two projects interact with each other. It’s too early to tell, but if the economic project goes belly up, that has implications for the political project.”

But all that is in the future. The more immediate thing that those who’ve watched and studied the rise of 21st century autocrats want the public to recognize, is simply what is actually happening here.

“Leaders don’t do this and then walk away and say, ‘Now we’re going to have a normal election,’” Cummings said.

Scheppele asks her students what would make them think that Trump had crossed the line into autocracy or dictator behavior. They gave a variety of answers like disobeying the Supreme Court or running for a third term, she says. But those would be too late.

“People are looking for this ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment,” Scheppele said. “When all this stuff happens under legal language, there’s all kinds of ways to disguise what you’re doing. So that leaves people wondering, ‘When would this cross the line from what scholars call constitutional hardball into the ‘oh, my God’ dictator-for-life world?’ And I think we’re already there.”