US ‘on a trajectory’ toward authoritarian rule, ex-officials warn

The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a stark new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.

The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, NSA, state department, and other national-security agencies.

The authors conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated” to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a broader effort by Donald Trump in his second term to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.

To conduct the assessment, the authors applied the same analytic methods used by US intelligence agencies to assess the fragility of democracies abroad but turned them inward for what the group called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis of domestic democratic decline.

“We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home,” the authors said in a statement.

Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.

Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged the former FBI director James Comey, a longtime political adversary. He has also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, and Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal troops there.

While the report mirrors the “finished intelligence” model used by the US intelligence community, the authors emphasize that this analysis was conducted entirely by private citizens and relied only on open-source material such as news reports, public statements and independent watchdog analyses, as opposed to classified intelligence.

Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press, and public trust.

“We judge that the primary driver of the US’s increasing authoritarianism is the increased frequency of Executive Branch overreach,” the assessment states. It also cites a “worrying” shift in public opinion among Americans, pointing to surveys that show a growing share who think “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections” is a “very good or fairly good system”.

The report’s findings are echoed by democracy scholars and other analyses. A September Bright Line Watch survey found that expert and public assessments of US democracy have dropped to their lowest levels since 2017. On a 0–100 scale, the public rated American democracy at just 49; experts rated it 54.

Political scientists and human rights activists have increasingly drawn comparisons between the US and countries like Hungary or Turkey, where elected leaders retained power by weakening institutional checks while preserving a democratic facade.

“Absent organized resistance by institutions, civil society, and the public, the United States is likely to continue along a path of accelerating democratic erosion,” the Steady State report concludes, “risking further consolidation of executive dominance and a loss of credibility as a model of democracy abroad”.