The Trump administration is descending into authoritarianism

Illustration: Angelica Alzona/The Guardian

Entering the magnificent great hall of the US Department of Justice, Donald Trump stopped for a moment to admire his portrait then took to a specially constructed stage where two art deco statues, depicting the “Spirit of Justice” and “Majesty of Justice”, had been carefully concealed behind a blue velvet curtain.

The president, who since last year is also a convicted criminal, proceeded to air grievances, utter a profanity and accuse the news media of doing “totally illegal” things, without offering evidence. “I just hope you can all watch for it,” he told justice department employees, “but it’s totally illegal.”

Trump’s breach of the justice department’s traditional independence last week was neither shocking nor surprising. His speech quickly faded from the fast and furious news cycle. But future historians may regard it as a milestone on a road leading the world’s oldest continuous democracy to a once unthinkable destination.

Eviscerating the federal government and subjugating Congress; defying court orders and delegitimising judges; deporting immigrants and arresting protesters without due process; chilling free speech at universities and cultural institutions; cowing news outlets with divide-and-rule. Add a rightwing media ecosystem manufacturing consent and obeyance in advance, along with a weak and divided opposition offering feeble resistance. Join all the dots, critics say, and America is sleepwalking into authoritarianism.

“These are flashing red lights here,” Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director turned Trump critic. “We are approaching Defcon 1 for our democracy and a lot of people in the media and the opposition leadership don’t seem to be communicating that to the American people. That is the biggest danger of the moment we’re in now: the normalisation of it.”

Much was said and written by journalists and Democrats during last year’s election campaign arguing that Trump, who instigated a coup against the US government on January 6, 2021, could endanger America’s 240-year experiment with democracy if he returned to power. In a TV interview he had promised to be “dictator” but only on “day one”. Sixty days in, the only question is whether the warnings went far enough.

The 45th and 47th president has wasted no time in launching a concerted effort to consolidate executive power, undermine checks and balances and challenge established legal and institutional norms. And he is making no secret of his strongman ambitions.

Trump, 78, has declared “We are the federal law” and posted a social media image of himself wearing a crown with the words “Long live the king”. He also channeled Napoleon with the words: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And JD Vance has stated that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power”.

Trump quickly pardoned those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, placed loyalists in key positions within the FBI and military and purged the justice department, which also suffered resignations in response to the dismissal of corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams after his cooperation on hardline immigration measures.

The president now has the courts in his sights. Last weekend the White House defied a judge’s verbal order blocking it from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime, to justify the deportation of 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador, where they will be held in a 40,000-person megaprison.

Trump accused James Boasberg, the chief district judge in Washington who made the ruling, of being “crooked”, said he should be “impeached” and labelled him a “radical left lunatic of a judge”. The outburst prompted John Roberts, the chief justice of the supreme court, to deliver a rare rebuke of the president, emphasing that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”.

In an interview on the conservative Fox News network, Trump denied defying a court order and said he would not do so in future. But he added ominously: “We have very bad judges and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed. I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge?”

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W Bush, posted on the X social media platform: “Almost every major Trump action is intentionally illegal. Trump is gambling that the US democratic system is too broken to stop him. He assumes, to borrow a phrase: ‘All we’ve got to do is kick the door in and the whole edifice will come crumbling down.’ Testing hour is here.”

The White House is yet to release the names of the deported Venezuelans or proof that they were indeed criminal gang members. In another recent incident, it sent 40 undocumented immigrants to the notorious detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, only for a judge to intervene and force their return to the mainland.

Some commentators suggest that the Trump administration is exploiting the power of sadistic spectacle. They say it is priming the public for future crackdowns and testing its level of tolerance for a moment when, for example, it might invoke the Insurrection Act to target anti-Trump protesters.

Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “Donald Trump is producing a Washington television show from the Oval Office that’s authoritarian in nature. You go on TikTok and see the deportations scored to songs and videos released by the administration. It’s a theatre of the absurd. It’s a theatre of malice. All of it is desensitising people to the use of authority and power.”

Violations of civil liberties are piling up on an almost daily basis. They include incidents that, if they had happened anywhere else in the world before 2025, the US would have been among the first to condemn them.

Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian entrepreneur and actor in the American Pie movie franchise, was detained for almost two weeks in “inhumane” conditions by US border authorities over an incomplete visa. She wrote in the Guardian: “I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.”

Fabian Schmidt, a German national who is a permanent US resident, was detained and, his mother said, “violently interrogated”, stripped naked and put in a cold shower by US border officials. A French scientist was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to the French government.

Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist who previously worked and lived in Rhode Island, was deported despite having a US visa. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University and citizen of India married to a Palestinian, was detained by immigration agents who told him his visa had been revoked.

Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal US resident with no criminal record, was detained over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and is fighting deportation efforts in federal court. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator, reacted on social media: “In dictatorships, they call this practice ‘being disappeared’. No charges, no claims of criminal behaviour. The White House doesn’t claim he did anything criminal. He’s in jail because of his political speech.”

Another trigger for alarm is Trump’s close relationship with tech oligarchs, many of whom donated to and attended his inauguration. Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) has been taking a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, firing thousands of workers in indiscriminate ways that have been challenged in court.

Musk’s X regularly parrots pro-Trump propaganda. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, recently ordered that the newspaper narrow the topics covered by its opinion section to personal liberties and the free market. Several star reporters and columnists have quit in recent months.

Trump has escalated attacks on media outlets whose coverage he dislikes, including barring them from workspaces and events. He has filed lawsuits against media outlets and falsely claimed the flagship series 60 Minutes admitted guilt regarding a lawsuit.

His appointee to head the Federal Communications Commission is investigating PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR(National Public Radio). Last weekend the Trump administration put almost the entire staff of Voice of America – which began broadcasting in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda – on leave and ended grants to Radio Free Asia and other media with similar news programming.

Trump’s moves in the foreign policy arena hold up a mirror to his domestic vision. He has rattled longtime allies in Europe over whether the US remains committed to Nato and he has sided with Russia in talks to end the war in Ukraine. He even called the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator” and berated him in the Oval Office.

Trump has long shown an affinity with autocrats such as Putin, Xi Jinping of China and Kim Jong-un of North Korea and his actions have compared to Viktor Orbán’s consolidation of power in Hungary, which includes remaking the judiciary, gaming elections and cracking down on media and civic organisations.

At the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington this week, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, told the Guardian: “If you haven’t already read about Orban in Hungary, go read about what he did steadily, not that slowly, to put the noose around that country. Donald Trump admires Orban and I believe he and his team have learned from that and are replicating that.”

What some find most frightening of all is the relative lack of resistance so far. Trump’s approval rating equals his best ever mark as president at 47%, according to a recent NBC News poll, although a majority – 51% - disapproves of his performance. Some 55% of voters approve of his handling of border security and immigration, while 43% disapprove.

Setmayer, who now leads the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee, commented: “The fact that Donald Trump’s approval rating is still in the mid-40s should scare the hell out of every American who understands the value of our constitutional republic, the freedoms that we enjoy and the rule of law because what he is doing is categorically against everything this country was founded on.”

This is reflected in Congress where the Republican party is more loyal to and unquestioning of Trump than ever. Few members have dared to speak out against the president’s support for Putin, haphazard tariff policy or bullying of neighbour Canada. They know that dissent would likely result in public humiliation on social media and a primary election challenge funded by Musk.

Democrats, for their part, are still struggling to meet the moment as swelling protests across the country hunger for leadership. Last week Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, reversed his position by voting to pass a Republican budget plan that will make cuts to housing, transportation and education while also empowering Trump and Musk to slash more programmes.

Faced with the prospect of a government shutdown, Schumer argued that he was choosing the lesser of two evils but ignited a furious backlash from Democrats in the House of Representatives and grassroots activists. NBC’s poll found that just 27% of voters say they have positive views of the party, its lowest rating since the question was first asked in 1990.

Meagan Hatcher-Mays, a senior adviser for United for Democracy, a coalition of 140 organisations aimed at reforming the courts, said Democrats were wrongfooted by Trump’s narrow victory in the national popular vote last year.

“They took the wrong lesson from the outcome of that election and they think Donald Trump is a lot more popular than he actually is,” she said. “Their baseline is already to be scared but that made them more scared to push back or resist against some of Donald Trump’s worst impulses. What you have now is they’re more comfortable caving and that’s what they have been doing.

“They have not been able to mount a durable opposition to Donald Trump or to congressional Republicans. You can’t just be not Donald Trump. You have to be for something and you have to paint a vision for what you want for the American people. Instead what they’ve decided to do is just say nothing and hope for the best and that is not going to win them any seats in 2026.”

The courts are potentially the last line of defence. Federal judges have blocked dozens of Trump’s initiatives, including attempts to eliminate agencies, end birthright citizenship and freeze federal funding. This week a judge found that Doge likely violated the constitution “in multiple ways” with its dismantling of development agency USAID.

Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, noted that Democrats and their allies have filed more than 125 cases against various attacks on the rule of law and obtained more than 40 temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions.

“We’re in the fight of our lives,” he told the Guardian. “This is not a two week, two month or even two year fight that we’re in. This is going to take us many years to defeat the forces of authoritarian reaction and the Democrats are rising to the occasion.

“If you look at he way democratic societies responded to fascism a century ago, it just takes time for people to realign and refocus and mobilise a concerted and unified response. Are we there yet? No. But are we going to be in a place where we can stand together and defeat authoritarianism in our country? Yes, we are going to get there.”

Norm Eisen, a lawyer and founder of State Democracy Defenders Action, has brought successful cases that stopped Trump targeting thousands of FBI employees and blocked Musk’s access to sensitive data at the treasury department. He said: “Donald Trump is definitely pushing towards authoritarianism. He promised to be a dictator on day one and he hasn’t stopped. That’s the bad news.

“The good news is that he has met vigorous pushback from litigants like myself and many others and from courts at every level. So far, his most outrageous illegal conduct has been countered.”

If the Trump administration ignores such orders, America could face a full-blown constitutional crisis. But Eisen retains measured optimism. “It’s a mistake to count us out. We have so surprised ourselves and the world over and over again in our history and there is cause for hope here when you see the furious legal pushback by lawyers.

“There is reason for hope but nobody knows. Will we go the way of Brazil, Poland, Czech Republic, where I was ambassador, all of which pushed out autocratic regimes in recent years? Or will we go the way of Hungary and Turkey, which failed to oust autocrats? It remains to be seen but I, at least, am hopeful.”