Taking Stock of America’s Slide to Autocracy
A year after the 2024 election, things are looking dire.
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It says a lot about how far we have fallen down the mud-slope to autocracy that many of Donald Trump’s serious offenses against democracy are no longer front-page news—or cannot remain so for long because they are so quickly displaced by others.
The most visceral expression of Trump’s contempt for democratic institutions, norms, and procedures—his recent sudden breakneck demolition of the White House East Wing—only captured headlines because of the shock and awe of the destruction. But the teardown, Bloomberg wrote, also “followed none of the precedents or procedures set forth by Congress, oversight agencies and even past White House occupants to safeguard the history of the People’s House.” It was not strictly illegal since the letter of the law requires approval for construction, not destruction. So, Trump “exploited an excavator-sized loophole,” thinking it would leave fussy preservationists no choice but to approve his plan for a gargantuan ballroom to fill the hole he created. (Two months earlier, in a similarly vulgar but less-noticed move, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to create a white stone-cold space whose patio tables and yellow-and-white umbrellas replicate the arid opulence of his Mar-a-Lago resort.)
As Adam Gopnik trenchantly observed in The New Yorker, “The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants.” That thirst for arbitrary power, unmoored from longstanding norms and unchecked by any countervailing institution or force, is steadily implementing the authoritarian playbook that has eviscerated democracy in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary and India. And it is moving with such speed, multiplicity, and vengeance that it is encountering distressingly modest resistance.
Take the recent lightly-reported dismissal of the Inspector General of the Export-Import Bank, Parisa Salehi, a highly respected career official who was fired from her watchdog role after her office submitted two reports to Congress “that did not look good for the agency.” The inspectors general are the front-line officers in the public’s war on government waste, fraud, and abuse. Their offices were established by law in 1978, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, to prevent corruption and fraud in federal government agencies and departments, to audit their operations, to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, and to inform Congress and executive branch actors about the need for corrective actions. “In fiscal year 2024 alone,” the Partnership for Public Service reports, the “inspectors general saved the government over $70 billion.” You can’t be serious about rooting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” while indiscriminately firing these protectors of the public interest.
But since returning to the White House in January, Trump has fired 17 of them—two-thirds of all the presidentially appointed IG’s. With Salehi’s abrupt termination, three-quarters of those positions are now vacant. Trump has also moved to weaken the entire system of federal government oversight by defunding the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, forcing the shutdown of dozens of websites where Inspectors General report their findings to the public. A few Republican members of Congress have recently expressed concern, but none are standing up to what former Interior Department Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, a victim of Trump’s purge, terms the “complete decapitation of the I.G. community.”
Trump’s assaults on democratic norms and restraints are coming so fast and furiously that they are impossible to catalog fully in one article. The most ominous and outrageous depredations include his deployment of the military to establish order in American cities that do not want or need federal forces; his purging of the senior ranks of military officers (particularly women and minorities) who were suspected of not showing sufficiently unconditional loyalty to him; his politically motivated purges of career officials in the Justice Department and other government departments and agencies; his unrelenting pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute his declared enemies, such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, even when his own appointed federal prosecutors advised that there was insufficient evidence to do so; his politically punitive suspensions of funding to universities and his recent demand for some of them to sign a “compact” that would deeply compromise their academic freedom and autonomy; his violation of the law and the Constitution by impounding funds appropriated by Congress and terminating agencies established by Congress; and his eclipse of Congressional authority to set tariffs by claiming that the entire process represents a national emergency that he alone can address.
And these are just the transgressions we know about. Reuters recently revealed the alarming scope of an “Interagency Weaponization Working Group” that, in response to a Trump executive order on inauguration day, has been seeking to identify and retaliate against federal officials in the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the military, and other agencies who had allegedly targeted or resisted Trump for political reasons. The breadth of the Working Group—which includes officials from the White House, the Justice, Defense and Homeland Security Departments, the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and other federal agencies—and the nature and scope of its intended targets, which reportedly include Trump’s former Covid response chief, Anthony Fauci, and former top military commanders who implemented mandatory Covid vaccinations, suggest that “the administration’s push to deploy government power against Trump’s perceived foes is broader and more systematic than previously reported.”
It is now clear that Trump’s earlier persistent vows of revenge against his political enemies were not just campaign bluster but indications of genuine, obsessive intent. On October 21 (the day after the Reuters story broke), a group representing more than 300 former diplomats and intelligence and law enforcement officials called for Congress to investigate the Working Group and assess its possible violations of laws and rules.
But Congress so far has been missing in action. There has been no presidential transgression on which House or Senate Republicans have been willing to draw the line. House Speaker Mike Johnson has for weeks refused to even call the House back into session in order to avoid swearing in a newly-elected Democratic representative who would add the last signature needed on a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill compelling the release of all government files on the Jeffrey Epstein case. And on the question of whether the president should be compelled to seek Congressional authorization for the use of force against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, as the War Powers Act would seem to require, Senator Rand Paul has been nearly a lone voice of Republican conscience. It seems that Republican senators will say no to Trump only if a Trump nominee admits to having a “Nazi streak” or is credibly accused of having sex with minors.
One way to assess how far we have fallen is to compare Trump’s actions so far to the means that autocrats abroad use to consolidate power. In my 2019 book, Ill Winds, I delineated a “12-step program” that aspiring autocrats pursue in order to dismantle democracy and entrench themselves and their parties in power. Recently, The New York Times has similarly delineated 12 “markers” of descent from democracy into authoritarianism. By either list, Trump’s conduct as president checks every box. Following the recent Times’ list, Trump has taken numerous steps to:
Stifle and intimidate dissent, even when it comes from late-night comedians;
Prosecute his political opponents on flimsy grounds;
Bypass Congress to impose his will;
Deploy the military to achieve domestic political control;
Defy or circumvent the courts;
Invent national emergencies to justify his exercise of expanded powers;
Vilify immigrants and minorities to rally nationalist fervor behind him;
Intimidate and control the news media;
Constrain and dominate universities;
Create a visible and imposing cult of personality; and
Corruptly enrich himself, his family, and his cronies.
In both The Times’ 12-point program and mine, the final step on the pathway to autocracy is to manipulate the electoral rules, districts, and institutions to assure victory indefinitely. This is the most dangerous element of the autocrats’ playbook, because it removes the most effective means of halting a slide into autocracy—the people’s democratic vote. In recent years, countries as diverse as Poland, Brazil, Senegal, and Sri Lanka have stopped or reversed the march to autocracy with opposition victories at the ballot box. With Trump’s poll numbers tanking over his management of the economy, his policy on tariffs, and his use of executive powers, substantial majorities of the public (nearing or exceeding 60 percent) disapprove of the job he is doing as president and believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.
Such numbers, which are steadily worsening for Trump, have historically predicted setbacks for the president’s party in mid-term elections and defeat in the next presidential election. In normal circumstances, the Republicans’ razor-thin majority of just three seats in the House would very likely evaporate in the coming midterms. But this is premised on the coming elections being free and fair. If they are not, Democrats could fail to win control of the House in 2026 even if they win convincing majorities of the popular vote both nationally and in swing states that Republican legislatures have brutally gerrymandered. Such an outcome occurred in North Carolina in 2024, where Democrats “won a majority of the votes for both the state House and Senate,” but “Republicans took roughly 60 percent of the seats in both chambers.”
This is why Trump demanded that Texas Republicans give him five more House seats, which they promptly did through the rare mechanism of a shameless mid-decade redistricting plan; it’s why he is now bullying several more Republican governors and legislatures to deliver further seat bonuses for him through gerrymandering; and it’s why, even as principled Republicans like former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels oppose this plot, others are following through. In Ohio, a Republican-controlled redistricting commission just adopted a redistricting plan for 2026 that would increase the Republicans’ 10-5 seat advantage to a more lopsided 12-3—in a state where the popular vote proportionally would give Democrats six (or in better years, seven) of the 15 seats. In late September, the Missouri governor signed a rushed gerrymandering law likely to increase Republicans’ advantage in Congressional seats from 7-2 to 8-1 (by fragmenting black communities in Kansas City). In late October, North Carolina Republicans carved up the seat of a black Democrat to tilt that state’s Congressional delegation from a 10-4 Republican advantage to 11-3—this in a state where the typical popular vote split would give the Democrats proportionally six seats.
Trump’s brazen campaign to retain control of the House by gerrymandering has unleashed a sickening national race to the bottom. In response to the Texas move, California placed an initiative on the November 4 ballot to temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting and impose a plan that would likely give the state’s Democrats five more seats, neutralizing the Texas power play. The move has been opposed by some good governance advocates. But when Trump’s Republican Party is trying to follow Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in rigging the national contest so as to make it virtually impossible for the opposition to win, and when (as the Princeton Gerrymandering Project shows) most of the country’s egregious gerrymandering is in Republican states, Democrats have no choice but to take steps where they can to try to level the national playing field.
And so, the race to the bottom accelerates. Under escalating pressure from Trump, Florida, Louisiana, Indiana, and Kansas are pursuing efforts to squeeze out more Republican Congressional seats. And other Blue states (Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Colorado, and New York) are considering or imagining counter-efforts that would add another Democratic seat in each state. The Democrats’ plight will worsen considerably if, as expected, the Supreme Court overturns Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, as it is expected to do in Louisiana v. Callais by the end of its term in June. Such a decision would open the door to a frenzy of racial gerrymandering in Southern states that could net the Republicans as much as 19 additional House seats by eliminating majority-minority (principally black) districts. This would include the seat of James Clyburn in South Carolina, which would give the state’s Republicans all seven House seats even though Democrats won 40 percent of the Congressional vote in the last election.
Rigging the districts is only one of several tools in the authoritarian arsenal to undermine free and fair elections. Trump is vigorously deploying others as well. On March 25, he issued an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote (even for voters already registered) and forbidding states from counting mail-in ballots received after election day. The provisions, while reasonable in the abstract, are cynically partisan in their intent and likely effect, since the voters affected would be disproportionately Democrats, particularly the estimated 21 million eligible voters who do not have “readily available” proof of citizenship. (However, a federal judge last Friday blocked Trump from enforcing his executive order to require proof of citizenship to vote, ruling it unconstitutional.)
In recent months, Trump has also been placing notorious 2020 election deniers in sensitive federal government jobs. These include appointing Heather Honey, a leader in the national movement to overturn that election, as deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the Department Homeland Security, and Marci McCarthy, a Georgia election denial activist, to a high-level position in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is vital to repelling foreign and domestic attempts to hack our election infrastructure.
Given Trump’s obsession with controlling (and if necessary overturning) state election processes, and his accelerating penchant for deploying military force to Democratic cities and states to suppress imagined emergencies, a growing number of sober observers—former election officials, academic experts, retired generals and national security officials—are increasingly worried about a nightmare scenario (recently detailed by The Atlantic’s David Graham): With control of Congress hanging on the vote count in a handful of closely contested House races, Trump could declare a national emergency to prevent vote fraud, deploy federal military force to seize control of ballot boxes, and declare Republican victories. When protests break out, Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law and suppress demonstrations. The results might later be contested, but a recount would be pointless, Graham warns, if the chain of custody of the ballots and voting machines is broken.
The above is only one pathway (aside from gerrymandering) by which Trump could undermine the integrity of the 2026 midterms. He has directed his attorney general to investigate the Democrats’ premier online fundraising platform, ActBlue. He is preparing to use the IRS to investigate prominent donors to Democratic campaigns and liberal causes, hoping to diminish opposition funding. His Justice Department has demanded that states turn over their detailed voter registration records (including sensitive personal information of voters), and is now suing eight Democratic states that have failed to comply. Ms. Honey suggested in a call with right-wing activists in March that Trump could declare a national emergency in advance of the election to impose new voting rules on states and localities.
In sum, a warning: The threat to free and fair elections—the last line of defense against creeping autocracy—is proceeding more aggressively, and with greater potential of decisive success, than Trump’s campaigns against the freedom and autonomy of the media, universities, associations, and societal expression. Democracy defenders must focus intensely on this most critical of all threats. Resisting the eclipse of democracy will require investment, preparation, and coordination on a level rarely seen in American history, transcending factional divisions. It calls for visionary and courageous preemptive action.
A basic rule is: When you have a power-hungry bully storming around the premises, don’t leave a loaded gun lying around. As the legal experts Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith (who served presidents of different parties) recently wrote, the Insurrection Act is one such loaded gun, with its “extremely broad and vaguely worded” authorizations for the president to use the armed forces domestically. Having failed to persuade Congress to reform it in the Biden years, Bauer and Goldsmith are quite unlikely to get this Republican Congress to do so now (and Trump would veto it anyway).
But there are steps the states can take to diminish risk. One would be for Democratic states with mail-in voting, most of all California, to require that mailed ballots be received by election day, and to invest in technology and personnel to speed up vote counts so that Trump has less opportunity to intervene in close and prolonged election counts. States should also encourage voters to vote in-person, and early. The more quickly votes are counted, the less scope for authoritarian intervention.
It may inconvenience voters to have to vote in person in greater numbers, or to send in their ballots five or more days before the election. But most voters have made up their minds well in advance of election day, and California’s ongoing off-year Proposition 50 redistricting initiative shows that voters can be mobilized in large numbers to adjust their voting practices if they think democracy is on the line.
Just nine months into Trump’s presidency, American democracy is at grave risk. Not just its liberal rule-of-law elements, but its very electoral essence, is hanging in the balance. Only massive, disciplined, and forthright efforts will save it.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.
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All very true, Mr. Diamond. And yes the threat to free and fair elections is of top concern.