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Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode | Jonathan Freedland

If this were happening somewhere else – in Latin America, say – how might it be reported? Having secured his grip on the capital, the president is now set to send troops to several rebel-held cities, claiming he is wanted there to restore order. The move follows raids on the homes of leading dissidents and comes as armed men seen as loyal to the president, many of them masked, continue to pluck people off the streets …

Except this is happening in the United States of America and so we don’t quite talk about it that way. That’s not the only reason. It’s also because Donald Trump’s march towards authoritarianism is so steady, taking another step or two every day, that it’s easy to become inured to it: you can’t be in a state of shock permanently. And, besides, sober-minded people are wary of sounding hyperbolic or hysterical: their instinct is to play down rather than scream at the top of their voice.

There’s something else, too. Trump’s dictator-like behaviour is so brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. It’s like being woken in the night by a burglar wearing a striped shirt and carrying a bag marked “Swag”: we would assume it was a joke or a stunt or otherwise unreal, rather than a genuine danger. So it is with Trump. We cannot quite believe what we are seeing.

But here is what we are seeing. Trump has deployed the national guard on the streets of Washington DC, so that there are now 2,000 troops, heavily armed, patrolling the capital. The pretext is fighting crime, but violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low when he made his move. The president has warned that Chicago will be next, perhaps Baltimore too. In June he sent the national guard and the marines into Los Angeles to put down protests against his immigration policies, protests which the administration said amounted to an “insurrection”. Demonstrators were complaining about the masked men of Ice, the immigration agency that, thanks to Trump, now has a budget to match that of the world’s largest armies, snatching people from street corners or hauling them from their cars.

Those cities are all run by Democrats and, not coincidentally, have large Black populations. They are potential centres of opposition to Trump’s rule and he wants them under his control. The constitution’s insistence that states have powers of their own and that the reach of the federal government should be limited – a principle that until recently was sacred to Republicans – can go hang.

Control is the goal, amassing power in the hands of the president and removing or neutering any institution or person that could stand in his way. That is the guiding logic that explains Trump’s every action, large and small, including his wars on the media, the courts, the universities and the civil servants of the federal government. It helps explain why FBI agents last week mounted a 7am raid on the home and office of John Bolton, once Trump’s national security adviser and now one of his most vocal critics. And why the president hinted darkly that the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is in his sights.

Members of the national guard patrol near the White House in Washington DC, 29 August 2025.

It’s why he has broken all convention, and possibly US law, by attempting to remove Lisa Cook as a member of the board of the Federal Reserve on unproven charges of mortgage fraud. Those charges are based on information helpfully supplied by the Trump loyalist installed as federal housing director and who, according to the New York Times, has repeatedly leveraged “the powers of his office … to investigate or attack Mr Trump’s most recognisable political enemies”. The pattern is clear: Trump is using the institutions of government to hound his foes in a manner that recalls the worst of Richard Nixon – though where Nixon skulked in the shadows, Trump’s abuses are in plain sight.

And all in the pursuit of ever more power. Take the firing of Cook. With falling poll numbers, especially on his handling of the economy, he craves the sugar rush of an interest rate cut. The independent central bank won’t give it to him, so he wants to push the Fed out of the way and grab the power to set interest rates himself. Note the justification offered by JD Vance this week, that Trump is “much better able to make those determinations” than “unelected bureaucrats” because he embodies the will of the people. The reasoning is pure authoritarianism, arguing that a core principle of the US constitution, the separation of powers, should be swept aside, because all legitimate authority resides in one man alone.

Of course, the greatest check on Trump would come from the opposition winning power in a democratic election, specifically Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives in November 2026. Trump is working hard to make that impossible: witness this month’s unabashed gerrymander in Texas, where at Trump’s command, Republicans redrew congressional boundaries to give themselves five more safe seats in the House. Trump wants more states to follow Texas’s lead, because a Democratic-controlled House would have powers of scrutiny that he rightly fears.

Meanwhile, apparently prompted by his meeting with Vladimir Putin, he is once again at war against postal voting, baselessly decrying it as fraudulent, while also demanding a new census that would exclude undocumented migrants – moves that will either help Republicans win in 2026 or else enable him to argue that a Democratic victory was illegitimate and should be overturned.

In that same spirit, the Trump White House now argues that, in effect, only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US. How else to read the words of key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who this week told Fox News that “The Democrat party is not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organisation.”

It’s the same picture on every front, whether it’s plans for a new military parade in Trump’s honour or the firing of health officials who insist on putting science ahead of political loyalty. He is bent on amassing power to himself and being seen to amass power to himself, even if that means departing from economic conservative orthodoxy to have the federal government take a stake in hitherto private companies. He wants to rule over every aspect of US life. As Trump himself said this week, “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod is not alone when he says, “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.”

The trouble is, people still don’t talk about it the way they talk about Hungary, not inside the US and not outside it. That’s partly the It Can’t Happen Here mindset, partly a reluctance to accept a reality that would require, of foreign governments especially, a rethink of almost everything. If the US is on its way to autocracy, in a condition scholars might call “unconsolidated authoritarianism”, then that changes Britain’s entire strategic position, its place in the world, which for 80 years has been predicated on the notion of a west led by a stable, democratic US. The same goes for the EU. Far easier to carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not, in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly. But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence indefinitely. To adapt the title of that long-ago novel, it can happen here – and it is.