Donald Trump’s path to authoritarian rule is wide open

Even after eight moderate Senate Democrats cut a deal with Republicans, absent subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, to end the shutdown on Sunday evening, the party’s sweeping victory in the Nov. 4 elections has provided a jolt of energy they hope will carry them through to the 2026 midterms. 

But President Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are far from surrendering. Their defeat at the polls will motivate them to be bolder and more aggressive in their campaign to weaken American democracy. 

Steven Cash knows this firsthand. A former state prosecutor and senior adviser to the undersecretary at the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence & Analysis, he now serves as executive director of The Steady State, a pro-democracy organization of more than 360 former senior U.S. government officials. The collective careers of the group’s members span decades of service across Republican and Democratic administrations in all three branches of government — as senior Defense Department officials, ambassadors, foreign service officers, intelligence officers, policy advisors, oversight officials, congressional staffers and prosecutors.

In a recent conversation, Cash told me that Steady State members are deeply worried about the weakening condition of American democracy — and the findings of the organization’s new report that the U.S. now shares most of the traits of foreign countries that have fallen to autocratic regimes. Their conversations are focused on contingency planning. Trump’s opportunities for mortally wounding American democracy, he said, remain wide open.

Democrats defeated Republicans in a rout on Nov. 4. But this is not a time for them to celebrate too much or relax. Trump and MAGA will strike back — and hard. What do you see?

Some observers have asked whether [the] elections mark the closing of Donald Trump’s “window” to consolidate autocratic power. The answer is no — the window is not closing, nor even narrowing. But the election did reveal something essential: We now know where the window is, and how to close it. The electorate’s resistance and the visible unease among Trump-aligned lawmakers suggest that the balance of fear may be shifting. Trump’s semi-supporters in Congress sense vulnerability — an opening to reclaim institutional integrity if they choose to take it.

Yet this moment of recognition does not mean safety. A backlash is already gathering. Trump and his inner circle understand that their actions may bring criminal liability in any future rule-of-law administration — even a Republican one. As Steve Bannon said bluntly this week, they know what is at stake. That recognition makes Trump more dangerous, not less. Already, we see a new brazenness: The vice president asserting that the administration need not comply with judicial orders, the president calling for the abolition of the filibuster and “election reform” designed to ensure his faction can never lose again.

And all of this is being reinforced by something even more alarming — the increasing domestic use of armed federal forces.

What we are witnessing is not a descent into chaos, but a controlled assertion of hierarchy. One-party rule, courts demoted to advisory status, and the instruments of justice and security re-purposed for political preservation. The window to autocracy remains open, but the election showed that we can see through it, and that clarity is the first step toward closing it. 

What do you tell friends or family who ask for advice or predictions?

I tell them that we face an existential threat, more serious than anything that we have seen in our lifetimes, more serious than anything our parents or grandparents saw here in the United States. I tell them that this is our moment to test ourselves — it really is up to us. I tell them that autocrats and dictators have been stopped, and we can do it here. I tell them, “Hold fast.”

What are private conversations like among your peers who work in civil society, international relations and the larger national security space?

Somber. Candid. Bleak. The consensus is that the guardrails are collapsing. People speak in the language of contingency planning — what do we do “if” and “when” — not “could” this happen. The tone is less theoretical now; it’s survival-minded, institutional triage. These kinds of discussions always existed. But they were always hypothetical, distant and the kind of thing discussed over beers after work. But this is now real and happening around us right now.

Why didn’t the political and media establishment listen to the loud chorus of warnings from experts — including people who lived under Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and other autocrats — about what would almost inevitably happen if Trump became president, never mind twice? No one can reasonably say they were surprised and not told what would happen.

Because the threat did not fit their mental model of America. They assumed our institutions were self-correcting, that “it can’t happen here.” Many still see Trump as a glitch in the system rather than evidence that the system itself is under attack. Denial is a form of comfort — and comfort is addictive. Americans are lucky; we have never really seen anything like this… [We] are ready to assume that rules and laws will be followed. They say things like “The president can’t have a third term — it says so right in the Constitution!” — but we have seen presidents overseas ignore their Constitutions and laws. Of course, it can happen here. It is happening here. And now the political and media establishment is listening, but finding it harder and harder to act, to speak. They fear retribution, and not only political retribution — they fear investigations, prosecutions and even physical violence.

Talk about The Steady State’s new report, “Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline.” What did you find?

We used the same analytical framework applied by intelligence services to assess democratic backsliding abroad [including] tracking changes in rule-of-law, civil-military norms, electoral integrity, media freedom and elite capture. The conclusion was stark: The United States now exhibits all the indicators of late-stage democratic erosion. 

We are no longer describing “risk.” Instead, we are documenting active decline. 

In short, our finding is that the American people are well along the path to living in an authoritarian country. Our analysts looked at the “indicators” we would see, overseas, when an autocrat rises and begins to take power, and what they saw was that those indicators are happening here. 

President Trump and his cronies are doing just what dictators usually do. He is using their playbook. Attack and diminish the elements of civil society. Turn law enforcement and security capabilities into personal tools of retribution and discipline. Strike at the press and academia, muting and silencing them. Denigrate the courts and the rule of law. “Flood the zone” with lies and propaganda. Exhaust everybody, and regularize a climate of fear.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

The Trump administration has recently issued a directive called NSP-7 (“Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”). In combination with threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to create de facto martial law, NSP-7 is important. It’s designed to suppress free speech by labeling the opposition as “extremists” who are a threat to public safety and “the enemy within.” The mainstream news media have mostly avoided discussing it.

These are not bluffs. He and his advisers have mapped the legal terrain for deploying domestic force and capabilities under color of law. What was once hypothetical is now an operational plan. We’ve seen the dry runs. Lafayette Square in the first term, the use of federal officers in Portland, the rhetoric of “enemy combatants” applied to citizens. The deployment of forces to California, Oregon, Illinois and right here in Washington, D.C. 

The vocabulary of war is being repurposed for politics. And [it’s] not just vocabulary. [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], for instance, is now really a paramilitary organization, more like what we see in Russia, than a law enforcement organization.

How would the American media be discussing Trump’s return and the collapse of the country’s democracy if these same events were taking place somewhere else?

They’d call it what it is: An autocratic consolidation. Headlines would read “Strongman moves to seize power as courts weaken and security forces align.” But because it’s America, the story is framed as “polarization” or “controversy.” That linguistic timidity —our inability to name what’s happening — is itself a form of complicity, and the result of a combination of fear and fecklessness.

Why does the narrative that Trump is a “buffoon” or “stupid” continue to persist among the media and political class?” He’s an expert in getting and keeping power. Laugh all you want — it doesn’t change the facts on the ground very much.

Because ridicule is easier than reckoning. The idea that a charismatic authoritarian could hijack a party and weaponize institutions felt unthinkable. So people laughed. But Trump and his circle aren’t amateurs; they’re practitioners of power. The “buffoon” story comforts those who can’t face the professional competence behind the chaos. 

Trump is very dangerous. And, to make it more complex, he is, in fact, buffoonish. It is easy to make fun of him and his comic self-aggrandizement. But there is a method to the madness. His excess is a form of communication — “I am all-powerful” [and] “I can do what I want, and you cannot stop me.”

What comes next? What must the American people prepare for?

We are entering the normalization phase of authoritarianism. This is the period when extraordinary abuses become everyday background noise. The task now is endurance: Organizing, documenting, refusing amnesia. 

Authoritarianism feeds on fatigue; democracy survives on memory. We have to keep the record straight and the lights on. We need to make alliances, including with people and organizations that, in normal times, we would be adversaries on policy issues. It will be a long haul. It is difficult to predict the pace and tempo of the slide towards authoritarianism, and even harder to predict the “if and when” of resistance and reversal of that slide. 

Trump is moving faster than most dictators have; we have fallen far in the months since the inauguration. But there are predictable way-posts. The midterm elections will be a key signal of whether we accelerate or reverse the trends. And, obviously, the 2028 [presidential] election will be critical. In the interim, we need to look for individuals and institutions to get rebalanced and engaged.