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.”
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.
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.
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.
Trump is following the playbook of autocrats around the world — and it could change America forever.
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