It’s happening here

In his first 2 and a half years in office, President Donald Trump has adopted a broad arbitrary executive branch in a way not previously seen in the history of the United States. He is avoiding Congress, ignoring the courts and using the power of the State to crush any opposition to his agenda. This is a departure from liberal democracy and towards autocracy.

This is exactly what Trump promised during his offer for a second term. After surviving the accusation and criminal accusations for promoting an insurrection aimed at canceling a legal election, he fulfilled the promise of being a “dictator the first day” to be able to fight a domestic war of “remuneration” against what the “internal enemy” described.

“I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump said in a campaign rally in 2023. “For those who have been harmed and betrayed … I am your compensation.”

This turn towards autocracy does not come from the point of a gun, since the rise of the dictators of the twentieth century would make us believe, but through statements of the law.

“A dictatorship [today] It does not come with tanks in the streets, it comes with Falanges of lawyers and conflict courts, “said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton University who has long studied the emergence of self -critics worldwide.” Everything is legally done, and everything is done without blood. “

Trump’s efforts on the Executive Power strive as the law through edicts destined to crush his political opposition, eliminate opposition in civil society, eliminate sources of knowledge and learn that challenge their power, leaving aside Congress and courts, and centralizing power in their own hands.

Illustration: News; Photo: Japin Botsford/The Washington Post through Getty Images

What we are seeing at the beginning of the second Trump administration is a large -scale attack against democracy, liberal principles and the rule of law that has been consecrated in legal precedents and the Constitution to establish the autocratic government. While there have been important anti -democratic and authoritarian movements in the history of the United States, from the slave power to Jim Crow to Repressions in times of war To McCarthyism, a peacetime The assault of this scale and the national scope directed from the White House does not have a historical analogue in this country.

“I don’t think there are exact comparisons in the American past,” said Aziz Huq, professor of constitutional law at the Law Faculty of the University of Chicago and co -author of a book about the failure of constitutional democracies. “I cannot think at a time when there has been an effort to put aside the authority of the statutes, the authority of the Congress, the authority of the courts in the manner that exists now.”

To put it clearly: it is happening here.

THE PLAY BOOK

What is happening in the United States today is the same scene that has been developed in several countries around the world in the 21st century.

From Hungary to Turkey, Poland, Russia to India, democracies collapse in autocracy, not after a strong man seizes the control of the military or through violent blows, but through legal machinations that consolidate their control and castrate their opposition. They do not necessarily end the elections or completely eliminate their opponents. Instead, they put their thumb on the scale to ensure that the elections follow their way and that their opponents are weak.

Scheppele appointed this conflict process to the autocratic legalism of power in a 2018 article of the same name. Steven Levitsky, the political scientist of Harvard University and co -author of “how democracies die”, refers to the result of this process, which maintains the sheet of democracy, as a competitive authoritarianism.

“The Government would not descend to fascism or the dictatorship of a single party, but rather to arm state institutions and deploy them quite systematically to punish rivals and protect the allies, and to intimidate and harass much of civil society in silence or political margin,” Levitsky said.

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This autocracy of the 21st century uses the constitutions and law against themselves and of themselves, seeking to eliminate existing liberalism, which means the consecration of individual rights in the law and protections of the arbitrary or unitary government, in culture and law, and replace it with the illiberal ideas of autocratic governance and massive obedience.

The most commonly cited analogue with Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy in the United States is that of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“Orban and his team are all lawyers and all their democracy in the dictatorship plan occurred through unbearable legality,” said Schepple, who lived in Hungary for years working in the Constitutional Court and observed the rise of Orban, he said.

Once sure in power, Orban took his vision and his book of international autocracy plays with an attempt to build ideological allies, even to the United States.

In 2023, he associated with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative non -profit organization that led the 2025 project plan for Trump’s second mandate, which held a work agreement with the Danube Institute, Orban’s main vehicle to export its illiberal ideology, according to a report by the new Republic. When Orban visited the United States in 2024, he spoke with a group of closed doors at the Heritage Foundation. The Conservative Political Action Conference has organized its events in Hungary twice with the blessing of Orban.

“This is a much faster and more thorough weapon of the State and the deployment against critics, rivals and civil society of what we see in most other cases of the chosen authoritarianism of the 21st century.”

– Steven Levitsky, Harvard University

Whether or not this association involved Hungarian contributions on the 2025 project plan of the Heritage Foundation project, Orban’s influence is everywhere.

The 2025 project, which has been implemented since then, echoed the style of governance of Orban by requesting the elimination of unfair civil officials, using state funds to intimidate and disburse civil society actors such as universities and non -profit organizations, and centralize power in the executive at the expense of other branches of the government or sources of power.

This relationship probably helped Trump achieve something Orban and the other autocrats in the world could not: affirm this agenda with the speed of the lightning.

He took Orban for three years to take control of the Judiciary. The Turkish president, Recep Erdogan, spent years in power before completely consolidating control after the promulgation of the constitutional changes of 2017 by the popular referendum. However, just two months after his second term, Trump is acting as if he had already secured these protections.

“This is a much faster and more thorough weapon of the State and the deployment against critics, rivals and civil society of what we see in most other cases of the chosen authoritarianism of the 21st century,” Levitsky said.

The State’s weapon

The turn of autocracy can be seen in all areas, since Trump has centralized power in the White House and claimed control over independent agencies.

Trump has affirmed direct control over the Department of Justice and all the agencies that participate in investigations: in an executive order, he declared that only the President and the Attorney General can define law issues within the administration, and that all agencies, including independent agencies, must take orders from the White House.

Meanwhile, an executive order that establishes a new form of use of the civil service called policy/programming career (previously known as Annex f) would allow Trump to fire vast strips of the Federal Civil Service and replace them with loyal. Trump has also affirmed the power to fire any official who wants, even when Congress has put restrictions on that power and the precedent of the Supreme Court has confirmed those restrictions.

When centralizing power over individual agencies and employees, Trump can use the government to promulgate its will. That is to extort civil society to bend to their designs and eliminate the opposition of the Democrats, law firms, universities or any other institution inclined to challenge it. To do so, Trump creates legal pretexts (DEI, illegal immigration, anti -Semitism, which can be used as Cudels against their objectives by the agencies it controls.

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Civil society has already shown signs of folding, since law firms and universities have inclined the knee to protect, leaving open the possibility of a snowball effect of the collapse opposition.

Until now, three law firms have reached the administration agreements so that an executive order that punishes them disappears or to protect themselves in advance. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the first signature to reach this agreement, established the precedent when he signed an agreement to provide $ 40 million in Pro Bono services to the Administration in exchange for Trump to rescue an order that punishes him.

“Once Paul, Weiss folded, now there is a model for the action on which it can be built because any other company has a sign that if the administration is the objective of the administration here are the things it needs to get out of the sight,” said Scott Cumming, a professor of legal ethics at the UCLA Law School.

Trump also ordered the Department of Justice to seek sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers who bring “frivolous” litigation, in this case, which means demands against their administration. The most worrying thing is what this order labels as frivolous: it specifically calls “the immigration bar and the powerful practices pro bono of the great law” in the “fraud”, opening to any lawyer or law firm that practices the immigration law to legal threats, blackmail and sanctions at the same time that the administration adopts an anti-immigrant position.

“For me, that is the true central lever that is using that order,” said Cummings. “He is pointing to companies by disableing them from doing a job based on the fact that Trump does not want people to represent immigrants to legally authorized claims to remain in the United States. That is annulled the rule of law.”

Universities have also accepted. The University of Columbia essentially agreed to deliver control to Trump, particularly in protest policies and the supervision of its Department of Studies of the Middle East, in exchange for releasing $ 400 million in federal research grants. Harvard University pointed out Tuesday that it is also looking to do good with the administration about pretextual complaints of anti -Semitism on campus.. The administration has already launched research at 60 universities on pretextual claims of anti -Semitism.

“These acts of taking critical resources such as hostages and demanding behavior that is equivalent to a certain degree of self-saving and political margin, that is the authoritarian behavior of the textbook,” Levitsky said.

Trump’s efforts to subvert civil society also extend to political arena, where groups affiliated with the Democratic Party, particularly those that could finance or organize their opposition, such as the law of the campaign contribution processor and donor networks such as the advisors of Arabella, have entered the sight.

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“What we are seeing is a emboldened administration that is launching a coordinated attack that goes after all the mechanisms that slow Trump in its first administration,” said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans against the censorship of the Government, a liberal group that is organized against Trump’s orientation of civil society and its political opposition.

Trump has worked to undermine the institutions, questioning the non -profit status of the citizen liberal surveillance group for responsibility and ethics in Washington (CREW), which played an important role demanding demanding its first administration and exposing its self -care, while many of the law firms attacked by their executive orders have historically provided the legal muscle in the struggles for the struggles.

“It is calculated and aimed at the pillars of progressive power,” Leiter said.

On the same front, Trump has tried to consolidate the control of the elections in his hands. He has fired a Fec Commissioner and affirmed the power to issue decisions made by the agency that supervises the financing of the campaign. He also issued an executive order that aims to change state electoral laws in manners that would favor the Republican party, although he has no such power.

And although all this operates through the law, there is also the threat of extrajudicial power, aimed at people.

Last week, the doctoral student at the University of Tufts, Rümeysa Öztürk, was surrounded by civil immigration officers while walking home in Somerville, Massachusetts, and led to a Louisian detention center for deportation of less than 24 hours, supposedly because she was a threat to the policy of us exterior. Your apparent crime? He was one of the four authors in an opinion article in his student article that asked the university to support a resolution of students to uninform from companies with links with Israel.

Ten days before, the Administration violated a court order to stop three flights of Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants who were sent directly to a brutal prison known for human rights violations in El Salvador.

The administration said that all these were gang members, but they were denied due process and officials did not provide evidence to support their accusations. Since then, numerous cases of probable innocent people have emerged and confirmed that legal residents were sent to a foreign gulag where no detainee has gone. The administration states that it does not have the responsibility that any of these people free.

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While these episodes so far have attacked immigrants through the use and abuse of the legal system, they house a warning of violence that barely stalks under all other Trump’s threats.

“We are a stone shot from the imprisonment of citizens, including the imprisonment of lawyers,” said Nora Ahmed, Legal Director of Aclu-Louisiana.

The muscles that have not yet been flexed

Despite Trump’s rapid effort to turn the US into an illiberal autocracy, the result has not yet been decided. There is still, at least theoretically, a strong and powerful opposition that could stop this and reverse this before he seizes.

“The United States differs in the sense that we have a much more muscular opposition than any of the countries that have faced this challenge,” Levitsky said. “We have a well -organized, united, well -financed and electoral opposition.

What would be needed is a collective action in civil society institutions and opposition democrats.

The acquiescence of law and universities signatures, and the refusal of the Democrats to display hardball tactics to stop Trump’s march has fed the feeling that the autocratic turn is inevitable. But resistance has emerged in some pockets, and is growing.

“If you observe the people who have resisted these autocratic legal developments, there has been a combination of strong collective action, with a strong action by the legal and judiciary profession,” said Cummings, pointing to Brazil as an example in which an effort to impose autocracy was defeated.

Three law firms attacked by Trump – Perkins Coie, Wilmerha and Jenner & Block – challenged their orders in court and won temporary restriction orders over all of them. The president of Princeton University, Christopher Eistruber, said that the university would defend himself in an interview with Bloomberg, while the school also prepared financially selling $ 320 million in taxable bonds, which could help absorb any loss in federal subsidies funds. Numerous deans and professors of the Law Faculty have brought letters that denounce the efforts of the administration to empty the legal profession. And some Democrats of Congress, including the sens. Adam Schiff (California) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona) have begun to put Trump nominees to block or stop their confirmation.

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Trump’s popularity, or her lack, also presents a weakness for her autocratic consolidation efforts. Other recent autocrats had great parliamentary majorities when they first won the elections, which allowed them to consolidate power by approving laws and modifying or rewriting the constitutions.

Although 2024 was Trump’s strongest performance in three elections, he still won a victory through narrow margins in crucial states, and his party did not obtain great legislative majorities. He puts his consolidation efforts in a precarious state: without the ability to easily boost his agenda through the legislature, all his greatest actions have so far been through orders or executive actions, they are often clearly illegal.

That has left the administration to the whim of the courts. Until now, this has been extremely bad for Trump, since their orders have been repeatedly demolished in the district and appeal courts. These judicial failures have pushed Republicans to attack the courts and propose policies of judges and laws to reduce the Judiciary, and the Trump administration to challenge orders or threaten to do so.

But Trump and his team seem to be operating with the assumption that, unlike their foreign counterparts, they have already taken control of the Supreme Court. They seem to believe that the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of presidential immunity that saved Trump from prosecution in 2024 contains a theory of the Executive Power without a rise that would bless all its actions. But that is not guaranteed.

“We will see soon if the Supreme Court is totally aboard a Trump dictatorship or if you still think you have a role to play in powers,” Scheppele said.

And internal contradictions within Trump’s political regime can still grow their popularity or divide their Maga coalition.

The first of these is a unique element of Trump’s autocratic efforts: Elon Musk. There is no real analogue, in any of the other countries that slid in autocracy, to the way in which the richest man in the world and the owner of a mass media platform has gotten into the government to destroy it.

“There is a real contradiction between what Musk is doing and what Maga intends to do,” said Levitsky. “If you are going to build a populist coalition among the working class, break the state is probably not the way to do it.”

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While Musk can make peace with the Maga nationalist faction, Trump’s macroeconomic policies perhaps pose a greater contradiction for the Make America party again. On Wednesday, Trump announced radical tariffs in almost all countries in the world. The measure is part of a massive macroeconomic restructuring that has left the entire US economy in a paralyzed state of uncertainty, and it is not clear if it meets with an autocratic consolidation effort.

“We have not seen anyone try to do both at the same time,” said Huq. “It is not clear how these two projects interact with each other. It is too early to know, but if the economic project seizes, that has implications for the political project.”

But all that is in the future. The most immediate thing that those who have seen and studied the rise of the autocrats of the 21st century want the public to recognize, it is simply what is really happening here.

“The leaders do not do this and then leave and say: ‘Now we are going to have a normal choice,” said Cumming.

Scheppele asks his students what would make them think that Trump had crossed the line towards the behavior of autocracy or dictator. They gave a variety of answers such as disobeying the Supreme Court or running for a third term, she says. But those would be too late.

“People are looking for this moment to ‘cross the Rubicón,” said Scheppele. “When all this happens under legal language, there are all kinds of ways of disguising what you are doing. Then, that leaves people asking:” When would the line of what scholars call constitutional hardball in the world of the life dictator “oh, my God”? And I think we are there. “