Conjure up an image of life under authoritarian rule. Perhaps you see tanks and martial law troops in the streets. Legions of baton-wielding riot police terrorising the cowed citizenry. A strongman leader – it does, almost always, seem to be a man – presiding over a vast military parade. Political prisoners packed off to the gulag en masse. But this is not how modern authoritarianism works.
Democracy does not only die in darkness, as the Washington Post proclaimed on its masthead at the start of Donald Trump’s first term in 2017. Democracies also die in broad daylight and on television. In the torrent of executive orders signed by the president in front of the cameras every day. In the lawsuits filed against media organisations and legal firms deemed political enemies. In the footage of masked federal agents snatching university students off the street. In the attacks on academics and bureaucrats, and the capitulation of billionaires. In the hollowing out of the institutions meant to check a tyrannical presidency. Perhaps most of all, democracy dies in the gleeful disregard for due process, such as when the White House boasted that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father they admit to deporting mistakenly to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador, is “never coming back”.
The first 100 days of Trump’s second term will be remembered as a maelstrom of provocation, brazen power grabs and rolling chaos. It has been hard – presumably by design – to know where to focus, or even to recall all the individual outrages from one week to the next. As one news cycle crests and we attempt to parse the president’s threats to annex Canada, or Greenland, or the Panama Canal, or to transform the Gaza Strip into a luxury beachfront resort, or go to war with Iran, a new storm is building. Trump launches a trade war against the US’s closest trading partners, then suspends it, then announces tariffs on almost every country in the world, before postponing them, and imposing eye-watering tariffs on China instead. His officials insist we are witnessing the art of securing magnificent deals, only there are no deals, just rising panic in the world’s financial markets and fraying American alliances. But step back from the day-to-day turmoil and prominent scholars of democratic decline warn that another, more worrying trend is emerging as the US president tests the limits of his power and plunges the country into a form of authoritarianism.
“We’re definitely in a new regime. This is no longer a democracy,” Lucan Way, a professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism, tells me. “We’re in a competitive authoritarian regime right now.”
The term “competitive authoritarianism” was coined by Way and the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky in the early 2000s to describe developing countries where elections were held – as opposed to one-party rule or military dictatorships – but where the ruling party attempted to dismantle the limits on its power. This could mean attacking the independence of government institutions, media outlets, universities and the judiciary, for instance, and replacing bureaucrats with loyalists, as we have seen in recent years in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Turkey. Citizens still vote at regular intervals and power can still change hands, as Poland showed when its illiberal Law and Justice party was voted out in 2023. But incumbents are increasingly stacking the odds in their favour. Way sees Trump trying to implement the same authoritarian tactics from the moment he returned to power.
“In an awful way, it’s kind of impressive,” Way says. “The amount of preparation is really astounding.” Trump seems to be drawing from a “menu of actions”, he explains, although there is also clearly a substantial amount of improvisation. Trump seems to weigh how a given action will play on television – for instance by inviting Elon Musk to answer reporters’ questions in the Oval Office, or hawking Tesla cars on the White House lawn. Still, he has succeeded in dominating the media landscape, and largely subduing his political opponents so far. The “fire-hose quality” of Trump’s first 100 days had created “a sense of disorientation”, Way tells me, with a “deer-in-the-headlights response from the Democratic Party… where they don’t know what to respond to because there’s just so much going on”.
“I think what has really surprised so many Americans, particularly people who have not looked at this process elsewhere before, is how quickly institutions seem to have caved,” says Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar of law and politics at Princeton University and author of the forthcoming book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law. “Our Congress is inert. Our lower courts are holding the line with a huge number of lawsuits. But the Supreme Court is giving really mixed signals about where it stands on the accumulation of executive power. This is a farther, faster fall than I think any of us could have imagined.” Scheppele agrees with Way that the US is now a competitive authoritarian system, with Trump embracing a strategy of “autocratic legalism”.
Under this approach – which has been used by others such as Victor Orbán in Hungary, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador – leaders are freely elected in fair elections before embarking on what Scheppele called a “blitz of legality”. “Trump is coming out with these executive orders and telling everybody he is doing this because of the constitutional theory of executive power, or what is known as the unitary executive power theory,” she explains. Trump’s lawyers are “walking into court and saying, ‘The president can do all this.’ And we have a Supreme Court that has so far gone along with that piece of what he is claiming.” Trump’s approach also involves a “tonne of chaos” that looks very different from Orbán’s methodical authoritarian takeover, Scheppele acknowledges, but she cautions against discounting the “legalistic undertow”, and a “set of legal arguments that are primed at changing the constitution in a year”.
These are not isolated views. A survey of more than 500 US-based political scientists conducted in February by Bright Line Watch, an organisation that tracks American democracy, found that the overwhelming majority were concerned that the US under Trump is careening towards authoritarianism. Asked to rank the health of American democracy on a scale of zero to 100 – from total dictatorship to perfect democracy – the survey recorded a steep decline, from 67 in the aftermath of the 2024 election to 55 by February. The scholars predicted a further fall to 47 by 2027, bringing the US in line with the Philippines (whose former leader, Rodrigo Duterte, sent to The Hague in March to stand trial on charges of crimes against humanity) and Brazil (where the former president Jair Bolsonaro could face a lengthy prison sentence for allegedly attempting to stage a coup in 2022).
This does not mean that Trump is invincible. While he has presented his 2024 election victory, and the fact that he won the popular vote for the first time, as an incontrovertible personal mandate, his everything-everywhere-all-at-once approach to the presidency may well backfire. “The downside of this fire-hose approach is that it creates a lot of enemies at once,” says Way. “It creates what political scientists call a negative coalition, where people might not share other things in common, but they all share a hatred of what has been going on, from the businesses suffering from tariffs to the vast number of veterans who have been fired, and the [attacks on] universities. You have the basis for a broad anti-Trump coalition that wouldn’t necessarily have been the case if he had gone more methodically and slowly picked off one enemy at a time.”
Trump also lacks the popularity enjoyed by other contemporary autocrats such as Vladimir Putin or Nayib Bukele in El Salvador – the latter calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator” – both of whom claim approval ratings above 80 per cent. By contrast, Trump’s current approval rating is 42 per cent, a historic low for a US president in recent times during the first 100 days, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted 21-24 April. And that was before the rising prices and shortages of consumer goods forecast to hit US stores due to Trump’s tariffs in the coming months.
Yet these figures conceal a stark partisan divide. While Trump’s headline rating is dismal, a resounding 86 per cent of Republicans say they approve of his handling of the presidency. Just 6 per cent of Democrats say the same. “Trump has a very solid base that is not going anywhere,” Scheppele warns, noting in particular the growing threat of political violence. “One of Trump’s first acts was to pardon all the people who were involved in the 6 January assaults [on the US Capitol]. He has given the signal that even if you kill somebody, if you do it for [him], you will get a pardon. Trump is the bully-in-chief,” Scheppele says. “But there is this whole bullying underclass that may hold him in power longer than his popularity lasts.”
It is possible to argue that Trump has already blown it – that his presidency is cracking under the weight of his reckless approach to the economy and democratic norms. In this scenario, the Republicans face annihilation in next year’s midterm elections, losing their slim majority in the House – and perhaps even in Democrats’ wildest dreams, the Senate – and leaving Trump to spend his last two years in office fighting off congressional investigations and another impeachment. America’s authoritarian trajectory could yet be reversed.
Then again, every previous prediction that the Trumpian fever gripping the Republican Party was finally about to break has proved wrong. It would be naive to assume that Trump’s supporters, who have stuck with him through his myriad past scandals, will decide to abandon him now. On the current trajectory, perhaps it is even premature to assume that there will be truly free and fair elections in 2026, let alone a peaceful transfer of power in 2028. Trump’s defenders insist that his repeated talk about running for a third term is solely a ploy to provoke hysteria among Democrats and “own the libs”. But both Way and Scheppele caution against a failure of imagination
in assuming that Trump will not try to hold on to power.
“I think it’s pretty unlikely that he will rule for a third term,” Way says. “But in contrast to what I would have thought six months ago, I wouldn’t completely discount that.” One path, he muses, would be for the Republican Party to nominate him and try to put him on the ballot regardless of the clear constitutional bar on him running again. “Are the courts really going to stand up and stop him from doing that?” This is by no means the most likely scenario, Way stresses, “but I think we’re in an area where profound constitutional change is at least possible in a way that I wouldn’t have previously thought”.
Around an hour after my conversation with Lucan Way and Kim Lane Scheppele ended, Trump’s official store began selling a new line of bright red baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan: “TRUMP 2028”.
[See also: Trump’s plan for chaos]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall