For years, many democracy experts have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing the country toward authoritarianism. During his first term, they raised alarm bells as Trump repeatedly tested democratic guardrails with unprecedented and, at times, incendiary actions—particularly his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.
When Trump was reelected last year, many of the same experts predicted that the U.S. political system—weakened by his first term—would face even more existential challenges during his second round in the White House. Some of the nation’s top experts on democracy, fascism, and related topics have even taken steps to leave the country during Trump 2.0.
For years, many democracy experts have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing the country toward authoritarianism. During his first term, they raised alarm bells as Trump repeatedly tested democratic guardrails with unprecedented and, at times, incendiary actions—particularly his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election.
When Trump was reelected last year, many of the same experts predicted that the U.S. political system—weakened by his first term—would face even more existential challenges during his second round in the White House. Some of the nation’s top experts on democracy, fascism, and related topics have even taken steps to leave the country during Trump 2.0.
Nicholas Grossman, an international relations professor at the University of Illinois, is among the political scientists who’ve raised grave concerns about Trump and his impact on the United States. Nearly nine months into Trump’s second term—and in the wake of several controversial moves that the Trump administration has made, including deploying National Guard troops to U.S. cities—Foreign Policy spoke to Grossman to get his take on whether the country has moved closer toward authoritarianism, and if so, whether that can be stopped or reversed.
Grossman said he’s very much in the “it can happen here” camp in terms of the capacity for authoritarianism to take hold in the United States. Those who believe “it can’t happen here” have “always been wrong—and they’re clearly wrong now,” he said.
But Grossman also contends that the system is not beyond redemption, even if it’s fair to say that it’s already somewhat broken—and in a way that will not be easy to snap back from.
There are plenty of examples of 21st century democratic backsliding across the globe, Grossman said, pointing to Hungary, Russia, India, Peru, Israel, and Venezuela. These countries are prime examples of places where somebody got into power legally and then abused that office to dismantle checks and balances to give themselves unfair advantages, he said.
In those places, the systems might now be characterized as “competitive authoritarianism, or some may be sometimes classified as illiberal democracy,” Grossman said, adding that political scientists also might put some in an “in-between category, and that’s where I think we are” in the United States.
The Trump administration’s desire for authoritarianism “appears bottomless,” Grossman said, but its “capacity” to achieve it is still limited. If one were to assess the United States solely in terms of how well it’s doing as a constitutional democracy, then “things are really bad,” Grossman said.
But it is still far from the type of consolidated authoritarian system that one might encounter in a country such as Russia, where people are routinely disappeared simply for disagreeing with the government. The United States is also not seeing the type of 20th century authoritarianism in which tens of thousands of shock troops are deployed to establish martial law and lay the groundwork for a long-term political takeover or dictatorship.
“We’ve seen a lot of civil society pushback” to the agenda of the second Trump administration, Grossman said, pointing to what recently happened with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel seeing his show’s suspension lifted following public outcry as just one small example.
After Kimmel made comments on his show Jimmy Kimmel Live! suggesting that the alleged killer of far-right activist Charlie Kirk was a Trump supporter, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair publicly threatened to take action against the show’s broadcaster, ABC, and parent company Disney. ABC then pulled Kimmel’s show off the air before ultimately changing course after the suspension prompted a public backlash. (The precise motive of Kirk’s alleged killer is still unclear, but his mother reportedly told prosecutors that his political views had moved to the left recently.)
By comparison, in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, even satirical puppet shows haven’t survived state censorship during his more than two decades in power. By that standard, Grossman said that pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian forces in the United States are “in decent shape” but “certainly not great,” and he expects things are “going to get worse.”
Grossman said that the United States is in the midst of a “particularly authoritarian” moment as Trump deploys or attempts to deploy National Guard troops in cities around the country—generally against the will of local leaders—as part of what the president has called a “war from within.”
Federalizing the National Guard is only supposed to be done in “extraordinary circumstances,” Grossman said while emphasizing that Trump is “lying” to justify the deployments with baseless claims of rebellion and out-of-control crime. This an “especially authoritarian aspect” of Trump 2.0, he said, and something that is “classically fascist.”
The activities of the troops involved “are not focused on dealing with crime,” Grossman said, also adding that combating criminals is a job for the police, not the military. To this point, National Guard troops deployed to Washington have been seen performing landscaping duties.
The deployments have faced a number of legal challenges, and judges in lower courts have seemingly been unimpressed by the administration’s general reasoning for the moves. California-based U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, for example, said in a September ruling that Trump had deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles “ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.” But, Breyer said, “there was no rebellion.”
The refusal of the courts to side with Trump on this matter is a sign of the systems of checks and balances holding up—to an extent, at least. But a larger question is whether the Supreme Court, which has delivered the administration a number of victories, will draw similar conclusions to those made by judges such as Breyer if the various legal challenges to the deployments reach that level.
“If the Supreme Court majority decides to actually stand up for the Constitution, that would be great,” Grossman said while emphasizing that he’s “cynical” about the prospects of this—especially given that the conservative justices ruled in Trump’s favor last year in a controversial, landmark case over presidential immunity. That was a “horrifically un-American” decision, Grossman said.
Grossman also underscored that the Trump administration’s recent and controversial military strikes on boats in the Caribbean that it alleges belong to “narco-terrorists” should be viewed through a similar lens to the National Guard deployments. Critics have argued that these actions, which have occurred without congressional approval, violate domestic and international law. The Trump administration has unilaterally decided to treat alleged drug traffickers as enemy combatants and is using lethal force against them. Along these lines, opponents say that these strikes are effectively extrajudicial killings.
Trump’s “approach to the U.S. military in his second term is basically as a private army whose job is to enforce his personal power and to hurt his domestic enemies, or foreign enemies for that matter, no matter what any law or principle or norm says,” Grossman said.
Congress has been unable to block Trump from continuing these strikes in the Caribbean, in one of many signs that his broad interpretation of presidential authority is stretching the limits of the political system.
Grossman said that this is just one example of the myriad ways in which the Trump administration is “moving the line” and “getting Americans more acclimated to all sorts of undemocratic, illegal, [and] authoritarian things,” underscoring that he finds it “very hard to predict what is going to happen next.”
