Examining how the Trump administration fits into a model of authoritarian rule can give people pause to think about how best to counter the country's slide into autocracy.
Demonstrators rally against President Donald Trump during a protest dubbed “Resist the Dictator” to mark President's Day on February 17, 2025 in New York.
(David Di Delgado/AFP via Getty Images))
As Trump 2.0 enters its second year, my column will shift focus. Over the past year, I have written about the corrupt and brutal acts committed by the US government. I will continue to look at these actions, but now I will analyze them through the lens of growing authoritarianism. My column, formerly called “Hidden in Plain Sight,” is now called “Authoritarian Watch.” Each week I will chronicle Trump's attempts to turn the United States into an autocracy. I'll talk and write about the scholars, activists, legal theorists, politicians, election administrators, and others who are plotting—and in many cases resisting—Trump's assault on democracy.
By looking at how the Trump administration's actions fit into the model of authoritarian governance developed by governments around the world over decades of modern history, my goal is to enable readers to think about what this moment means and how best to resist the slide into autocracy.
Trump, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and other horsemen of the authoritarian apocalypse like to portray their political triumph as inevitable. However, there is nothing God-given about this trajectory. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans oppose key elements of their agenda. If Trumpism wins, it won't be because of his enduring popularity; this will happen because the opposition remains fragmented. If, on the contrary, Trumpism as a project is ultimately consigned to the dustbin of history, it will be because in 2026 the opposition gained its footing and successfully pushed aside new authoritarian regimes. I hope that Authoritarian Watch can help shape this conversation.
When a regime embraces the cult of an overbearing leader and the idea that lawlessness is not illegal as long as the ruler commands it, all loyalty must lie with that leader. Under such a regime, all politics is personal in nature, and the public good is inevitably sacrificed for the private benefit of the political and economic elite. When this happens, government becomes nothing more than a mafia state, a place where all concepts of the public good are destroyed and where the power of the state is channeled for the private benefit of its leaders. In 2025, this is what we have witnessed in the United States.
Current number
It is difficult to imagine another year in US history as thoroughly tainted by a sitting president and his cronies as 2025. In the first year of his second presidency, Trump ruled like a mob boss—ordering his subordinates to commit one illegal or immoral act after another, entangling them in a web of activities ranging from corrupt to war criminals that ensured their loyalty to him. Trump demands that his ring be kissed and shows his followers what will happen if they ultimately refuse to kiss him.
With a presidential pardon, Trump can keep his friends out of jail and out of the corridors of power, but he will only do so as long as they pledge allegiance to him. By his willingness to use the full power of government—its regulators, the Justice Department, its security apparatus, its powers of taxation, tariffs and auditing—against his enemies, Trump has demonstrated the enormous costs that people and institutions perceived to cross him can be forced to bear. And in this environment, where noble people have long since headed for the exits, those who remain in Trump's circle are the scum – the opportunists, the feckless, the ones most willing to push morality aside.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, for example, linked his fortunes to Trump's by ordering—and publicly praising—the killing of civilians. Having embraced the sadism of ICE's indiscriminate raids, as well as the illegal deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to the CECOT maximum prison in El Salvador, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has similarly tied her future to Trump's. Attorney General Pam Bondi also sacrificed her integrity at the altar of the MAGA leader, turning the Justice Department into both a presidential revenge machine and a defense agency, using her discretion to divert investigations away from Trump, including by censoring the Epstein files. Tom Homan, the scandal-plagued frontier czar who is reputedly accepted a bag full of money participating in a sting operation shortly before the 2024 election, knows that the moment he crosses Trump's path, he will be vulnerable to prosecution. RFK Jr. has so thoroughly destroyed much of the country's public health infrastructure that if not for Trump's patronage, he would have been run out of town months ago. And this list goes on. At every level, Trump has enlisted government officials, military leaders, cabinet secretaries and intelligence analysts in his dirty and vicious agenda.
I've spent the last year documenting this terrible moment. Over the course of these long months, Trump has repeatedly tried to punish his political rivals. He has demanded that the Justice Department bring absurd criminal charges against individuals and imposed financial penalties on cities and states whose leaders do not follow his orders. He has ritualized humiliation as a modus operandi in his wars against immigrants, transgender Americans, diversity advocates, academic and legal organizations deemed insufficient by MAGA, scientists seeking to raise the alarm about climate change, public health officials and labor organizers.
In 2025, Trump overcame a series of anti-corruption barriers set up by Congress over the past century to protect the republic from leaders interested in wielding enormous political power to secure equally enormous private wealth. He stopped enforcing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and began soliciting “gifts” such as Qatar donated a luxury jet serve as the next Air Force One and organize paid dinners where investors in Trump meme coins get private access to the Trumps. No wonder there are now rumors that the general consensus is that donors can pay six-figure sums lobbyists close to Trump, organizations he sympathizes with, and political action committees affiliated with Trump to get the ball rolling. individual presidential pardon.
Trump's actions, to which his cabinet and the GOP leadership in Congress did not object one iota, made previous episodes, such as the 1920s, The scandal with the teapot and the dome— in which presidents and their cabinet secretaries trade political favors and protection for cash in what appear to be 5-cent transactions.
It's tempting to think of Trump's second term as simply an endless stream of crude statements, cruel actions, acts of corruption, denigration of other democracies that have historically been close allies of America, and support for the wackiest conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet. Sometimes this can seem like nothing more than a malignant form of chaos.
All this is true, but above all, what we saw in 2025 was an extraordinary power grab by an oligarchic group centered around a leader with no respect for the Constitution. To dismiss his administration as little more than constant Trump-inspired chaos is to misunderstand the underlying authoritarian impulses and ambitions of politicians like Miller and Bannon, the architects of Project 2025, as well as the increasingly authoritarian elite of tech brethren centered around figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
From this perspective, various acts of cruelty and brutality, violations of political norms and institutions, attacks on the media and academic institutions, and attacks on judicial officials who dare to try to slow down Trump's actions are part of a larger and more dangerous political project. Trump and his cronies are destroying the culture of democracy on which this country's political processes have long been based.
In the past, of course, the United States has had political leaders who exhibited authoritarian instincts. Just think List of Richard Nixon's enemiesthe Red Scare policies of Senator Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover's willingness to use the FBI as a political police force against perceived enemies of the state such as Martin Luther King or the Black Panthers. However, Trump is qualitatively different: alliance with European fascist parties In his “resistance” to democratic governments that do not share their vision of endless clashes of civilizations and culture wars, fueled by racial and religious strife, and by declaring war on American immigrants, the President is leading the country down an increasingly dark, dystopian path.
In recent months, in preparation for launching this column, I have spoken with many of the world's leading experts on authoritarianism. They differ in their analysis of the Trump moment. Some people are comfortable using the word “fascist” to describe this phenomenon; others reject these formulations and speak instead of a “new authoritarianism.” Some believe that the fences protecting democracy are holding, albeit with difficulty; others think they have already failed. But what they all agree on is the dangers to the American democratic experiment posed by Trump's leadership and the growing normalization of what in the recent past would have been considered outrageous examples of extremism, crude language and political violence.
It is to these dangers that my attention is now directed in The Authoritarian Watch. I hope that in the coming years this column will become a resource for anyone concerned about Trump's extraordinary power grabs and looking for ways to fight back.
Other works by Sasha Abramsky
Every day, Trump says and does things that would get most elementary school students suspended.
And yet, the Supreme Court appears poised to do just that.
In no other U.S. city has the religious community mobilized on such a large scale to protect immigrants from the federal government.
Trump was furious that reporters had the audacity to question his wealthy “guest” with a bottomless wallet.
Systems created over the last 120 years are being destroyed or dismantled at an incredible rate, with the implicit blessing of the US Supreme Court.
The Republican Party has deliberately attempted to make health care unaffordable and prevent families from being able to feed themselves.
