Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.
He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation. Trump wasn’t canceling elections, he protested, nor was he calling brownshirts into the streets. So how could I call the president authoritarian?
Many highly educated Americans share my friend’s intuition. They believe that if elections are occurring and criticism of the president is not banned outright, then democracy is not under threat. They fail to see the administration’s slow-moving efforts to break down the norms and institutional barriers that otherwise inhibit the ruling party from asphyxiating its opposition. Political scientists who study democracy have a term that clarifies the phenomenon: democratic backsliding. Backslide far enough, and you end up in something called “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections are still held, but the ruling party has commandeered so many institutions in society and has violated so many laws to enhance its own power that the opposition hardly stands a chance. These are dry phrases, but they capture the way in which democracy and authoritarianism are not binary alternatives, but values that lie on a continuum.
I thought back to my friend’s comments yesterday, because in a single day, Trump took or was revealed to have taken six shocking new assaults on liberal democracy. They would have been shocking, anyway, before he spent a decade bludgeoning our civic nerve endings to the point where these things now register as mere routine politics.
Yesterday alone:
1. Trump floated the notion of arresting New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. The president was responding to a question about Mamdani’s promise to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.” But he proceeded to suggest that he was explicitly targeting Mamdani’s political beliefs—“We don’t need a communist in this country”—and publicly entertained the groundless accusation that Mamdani, a U.S. citizen, is “here illegally.”
2. Trump threatened to prosecute CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that allows users to alert one another to ICE activity and on a Defense Intelligence Agency preliminary analysis suggesting that American air strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months. “We’re working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced, referring to the ICE-app story, “because what they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them.” Trump endorsed Noem’s threat, and added, “They may be prosecuted also for giving false reports on the attack on Iran.”
3. The president mused about the prospect of financially punishing Elon Musk for criticizing the Republican megabill. “No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!”
To examples such as these, my friend might reply that Trump doesn’t always deliver on his rhetoric. That is true, but only to a point. Especially in his second term, Trump follows through on quite a lot of his threats. Indeed, yesterday’s litany of authoritarian moves is not limited to words. It includes at least three actions:
4. The New York Times reported that Trump has appointed Jared L. Wise to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group. In 2023, federal prosecutors had charged Wise, a former FBI agent, for participating in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, allegedly egging on fellow rioters to assault police officers with shouts of “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” Like the rest of the January 6 defendants, Wise was pardoned on the first day of Trump’s second term. Now he is working under Ed Martin, a fellow supporter of Trump’s efforts to secure an unelected second term in 2021, and who has tried to intimidate various administration targets with a variety of legal and extralegal punishments.
5. The administration impounded $7 billion of Education Department funding for after-school and summer programs, English learners, teacher training, and other school functions. The funds had been appropriated by Congress, but Trump once again decided to seize the power of the purse from Congress for himself, in violation of the structure laid out by the Constitution.
6. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, settled a groundless nuisance lawsuit Trump had filed against the CBS show 60 Minutes. The suit absurdly claims that Trump suffered mental distress because the show aired an interview with Kamala Harris in 2024 that had been edited for length (which is, in fact, standard practice in television news, as Trump and his lawyers surely know). The only apparent reason Paramount settled was to grease the skids for the Trump administration to approve the company’s bid to buy a Hollywood studio. (The company has denied that this was its motivation.)
None of these moves is a one-off. All follow what has become standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government’s powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends.
This new order, if unchecked, will at some point reach a level at which opposition becomes prohibitively dangerous and the commanding heights of business, media, and academia all submit to Trump’s whims. We might not arrive at that end point. But it is very clearly where Trump is trying to take us.
