Donald Trump might have been democratically elected in a free and fair election in November of 2024, but his actions since coming into office fit the definition of an authoritarian. 

You may think the title here is being dramatic or hyperbolic. Trump still has a lot of opposition. Over half the country doesn’t approve of what he’s doing. Hell, even the fact that such polls are allowed indicates that we in the U.S. still enjoy freedom of speech and of the press. However, while Trump might not yet possess full and complete power over the United States in the way as someone like Putin or Xi Jinping, I think Ezra Klein summed it up well in his most recent podcast (as of writing this) with Radley Balko:

To paraphrase what Klein said, if someone 50 years in the future was reading a history book about the United States, when they got to the chapter covering what’s happening now, they would clearly see where things are heading. The Immigration Enforcement Agency are being turned into Trump’s personal Stormtroopers. Governors of red states, like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, are acting as his gauleiters, eager to carry out any order to uphold the regime. He even exhibits expansionist territorial ambitions:

I could run down a long list of all the authoritarian actions Trump has taken (just to name a few, his purges in the military in order to install loyalists; the erection of concentration camps on U.S. soil and the deportation of migrants to foreign concentration camps without due process; his chillingly nonchalant proposal to aid and abet (or, perhaps more accurately, intensify) Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza), along with his disregard for the rule of law in favor of rule by decree. For instance, the following chart shows the number of executive orders (E.O.) per year in office for presidents since FDR (the only one who came close to Trump’s current E.O. per year, bur remember that Trump is only about halfway through the first year and FDR presided over the Great Depression and World War 2):

But, to me, two things give away the game here. The first is the use of military forces to enforce order (i.e., obedience) through state sponsored domestic terrorism in U.S. cities where Trump is unpopular (blue cities like LA, DC, and soon to be Chicago). The second is the brazen call to use partisan gerrymandering to gin up more votes for his party in the upcoming midterm elections (as well as his hypocrisy in condemning his opponents for doing the same thing in response).

The first, I would hope (or, one would think, but more on this later) is obvious: he is literally sending jackbooted government thugs to terrorize people into submission. This has the added benefit for the Trump regime that if anyone tries doing anything about this (i.e., defending themselves against state sponsored domestic terrorism), this would supply Trump his casus belli to impose greater repression through a perpetual state of (or, at the very least, the threat of) martial law.

Why the second thing – the directive to gerrymander Texas – also, to me, gives away the game, is that this was not even couched in euphemism or based on one of the lies he often employs to justify other actions (e.g., that deploying the military on U.S. soil is to protect his ICE Stormtroopers from a minuscule threat of retaliation in Los Angeles, or to put down an exaggerated crime emergency in Washington D.C.). Instead, the quiet part was said out loud: it’s for the sole purpose of gaining 5 more seats and thus making it easier for his party to hold onto power in the 2026 midterm elections. 

While all of this is worrying, I think the part of this entire phenomenon that is most frightening is that so many people are fine with (or even enthusiastic about) everything he is doing. An alarming number of people believe his lies or think that what he is doing is not anything to worry about (i.e., if you find Trump’s actions alarming, you must be suffering Trump Derangement Syndrome). But what makes this the most alarming aspect of our descent into authoritarianism is that the usual methods of dialogue will not work to break people out of Trump’s cult of personality.

One popular approach to changing people’s minds in a liberal democracy is to get them to feel guilt or shame about the immorality in their midst that they might not see or understand (e.g., through raising consciousness of the issue). This was, for instance, the strategy that Martin Luther King Jr. employed by using non-violence: if people see the police attacking unarmed, non-violent black people in the streets, this will make large portions of the country feel guilt and shame about the way that black people are being mistreated, thus compelling them to view civil rights for black people as both necessary and urgent. 

But, if people can read about state sponsored domestic terrorism being perpetrated by the Trump regime, or see news of him brazenly directing his Texas gauleiter to conjure Republican seats out of thin air for the sole purpose of maintaining power, and then continue approving of his actions, then these types of appeals to basic human dignity will not work. And since the party loyal are continually demonstrating their eagerness to swallow the lies vomiting from Trump’s puckered lips like a bunch of baby birds, appealing to facts does not work either – if someone doesn’t care that what they’re saying or doing makes them a hypocrite, pointing out their hypocrisy will do nothing (e.g., the “law and order” party’s keenness for breaking laws). In other words, these woke right lickspittles’ feelings do not care about facts. 

Even in libertarian circles, ostensibly the kind of people who should be most alarmed by Trump’s naked power grab, are anywhere between hand-wringing over government overreach but unable to fully condemn it (because Trump gave them their tax breaks for billionaires and vengeance on government bureaucrats, after all) and up to fully justifying it. I went back to one of my old stomping grounds from when I considered myself a libertarian – the blog Reason Magazine – to put my finger to the libertarian winds. The articles are the usual “above the fray” brand of “I hate that Trump is doing this, but I like that he’s doing that” fare that I remember from when I read the blog regularly early in Trump’s first term. The real howlers, as usual, come from the self-appointed libertarian purity testers prowling in the comment sections of posts critical of Trump, where many (though certainly not all) of these self-proclaimed libertarians uncritically regurgitate the lies disgorged by state propaganda and bend over backwards to rationalize Trump’s abuses of power as being in line with libertarian philosophy (though usually in typical comment section profanity-filled screeds rather than anything thoughtful). 

To me, all this is a further demonstration that people do not actually like democracy. Power, people seem to think, can only be abused when wielded by people they hate. When it’s done by “our side” then it is seen as legitimate (e.g., Republicans suddenly liking democracy again once Trump is elected). But it also reveals that democracy runs into the paradox of tolerance: what happens when people in a democracy vote to get rid of democracy? In the United States, it certainly seems that people have done this. Even if the majority of people say they don’t approve, a surprising number are on board with making Trump a dictator.

But who knows. I’ve proven myself to be quite inept at making predictions. Despite my usual hedging, I did predict that the left was more likely to succeed in establishing their brand of authoritarianism (and that Trump was too stupid and incompetent to successfully install himself as dictator). I suppose it’s not impossible that the left could still emerge victorious (or that Trump could otherwise fumble the ball due to his blinding narcissism and jaw-dropping incompetence), especially if the backlash against Trump’s regime of state sponsored domestic terrorism becomes execrable enough. But given my poor track record I’m hesitant to make any firm predictions about how the next three-and-a-half years (or more) will unfold. 

That being said, I can still describe what I’m seeing in the present. And what I’m seeing is that Trump is grabbing power through lies, manipulation, and force, and a large part of the U.S. population is cheering for it. They like that Trump goes after all the people they hate – racial and sexual minorities, government bureaucrats, scientists, scholars, foreigners, women, and so on – and as long as Trump can keep playing those hits, they will keep running their tongues lovingly over his boots.