Teaching America’s Authoritarian Rollercoaster In Real Time
My “Trump 2.0.” seminar at the University of Pennsylvania.
This past semester, I taught a seminar titled “Trump 2.0.” to undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania.
I will be honest: it was a deeply unsettling experience.
I’ve never taught a course remotely like this one. I doubt very many people have.
I’m trained as a political theorist. I have an MA in history, focused on European intellectual and cultural history. My second major field when I was studying for my Ph.D. in political science was comparative politics, which means I took courses and passed a comprehensive exam in the comparative study of other countries. My minor field, which required just two graduate-level classes and no comprehensive exam, was American politics. I’ve picked up a lot of additional knowledge of how U.S. government works through my writing as an opinion journalist over the past two decades—so I didn’t feel completely at sea teaching that kind of material in “Trump 2.0.”
But being pushed a bit outside of my comfort zone wasn’t what made this class feel so unnerving. What made it unnerving was the intensive focus on rapidly unfolding current events, many of which seemed unprecedented and almost wholly destructive to liberal-democratic self-governance in the United States.
Early on in the class, I assigned an essay in Foreign Affairs by Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way titled “The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown.” The piece was written before the start of the second Trump administration. Its authors suggested the United States under Trump 2.0 would be heading in the same direction as Turkey, Hungary, India, and other countries that had recently devolved from liberal democracy into “competitive authoritarian” systems.
Halfway through the semester, I’d come to believe the authors had been too sanguine. (Subsequent comments from Levitsky and Way in the media indicate that they agree.) Yes, we were headed toward competitive authoritarianism, but that transformation wasn’t going to happen slowly over the four years of the second Trump administration. It was happening at breakneck speed within the administration’s opening weeks and months.
For over two hours once a week we gathered in a sleekly modern classroom on Penn’s campus for our seminar—with 19 pairs of young eyes facing me, looking for illumination about what was happening to the country in which they’d come to political consciousness within just the past few years.
I often caught myself wondering what that must feel like for them. I’m 55 years old. I have elaborate and extended memories of the Cold War and its anxieties, and then of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first plane to hit the World Trade Center screamed over my head on the way to its target on the morning of September 11, 2001. I lived through and participated in the rancorous arguments surrounding the Iraq War and its aftermath; and observed (while not quite sharing in) the stratospheric hopes wrapped up with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. In light of that litany of experiences, the rise of Donald Trump was a stupefying, almost unthinkable shock.
But my students were just finishing elementary school when Trump first won the presidency—roughly the same age I was when Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt early in his first term. How different must their outlook be from mine—how different their sense of political normality? Politics, for them, has always been a circus shot through with mendacity, hyperbole, and demagogic denunciations.
Yet they didn’t seem complacent. Mostly, they seemed to crave insight and perspective. Is what’s happening bad? And how bad? Those questions seemed to lurk behind their troubled gazes, and it was my role to help answer those questions.
My answer was usually: Pretty darn bad! But how to make the class more than an exercise in transcribing the professor’s weekly improvisational op-eds on the subject?
Here’s how I managed it. Right at the start of the semester, I required each student to pick a department or agency within the executive branch from a list I included on the syllabus. Throughout the semester, this would be their “beat”: They signed up for Google alerts, scanned media outlets, and regularly checked government websites for news about their chosen department or agency. Every week, class began with each student reporting on this news to the class. About half of our time in class was devoted to these updates and related discussions that emerged from them.
As we approached the midpoint of the semester, students began to do academic and journalistic research into their chosen department or agency, learning its history, controversies past and present, and what the Trump administration aimed to do with it. This then led to a series of assignments, with one due every other week or so: an annotated bibliography of sources about the department or agency; a two-page statement of its origin story; an introduction to, and a detailed outline of, a 5,000-word research paper on it; and finally, the completed research paper itself, due on the last day of class.
I also assigned set readings to be discussed in class after we sorted through the news of the week. We began by reading a Nate Cohn essay from The New York Times about how Trump won the 2024 election, along with reading Trump’s second inaugural address. Over the next few weeks, in addition to the Levitisky and Way essay, we read Populism: A Very Short Introduction by Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovire Kaltwasser and After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, plus articles by Francis Fukuyama, Seth Masket, Julia Azari, Noah Millman, myself (on OMB Director Russell Vought), and a series of columns and Substack posts from Goldsmith and Bauer written and published in response to legal events throughout the semester.
So what did it all add up to? I think my students came away from the course with a much broader and deeper understanding of what’s happening right now in the United States. What’s happening is that the elected president and his party are attempting to rule the country in an authoritarian manner. They are also enacting policies I consider foolish, cruel, and likely to do damage to the country in myriad respects.
But my “Trump 2.0” class didn’t devote much time to making that case. It was mainly a course about the administration’s early efforts to rule by presidential decree, its ambition to gut parts of the executive branch, and its open defiance of federal courts. Over and over again, I found myself saying, “We’ll have to see how this gets resolved, and that won’t happen until this case makes it to the Supreme Court.” And over and over, I felt the need to follow up on that statement by adding a caveat about how, ultimately, even more significant would be how the president responds to the Supreme Court’s eventual decision. If the high court says, “You can’t do that,” and the administration accepts it, that would mean the democratic system remains largely intact, with its institutions functioning as they were intended to do. But if the administration either outrightly defies the Supreme Court or (more likely) claims to accept the decision but demonstrates by its actions that it is actually going to do what it wants without regard for what the judiciary says, then we will find ourselves in uncharted territory.
I will admit that such thoughts still—nearly ten years into the Trump era—inspire disbelief. Not because I persist in believing “it can’t happen here,” but because they suggest we reside on one side of a bright, flashing line and that some event will take place in the not-too-distant future during which we step confidently and unambiguously over to the other side: One day the United States will be a liberal democracy and the next an authoritarian dictatorship.
That isn’t how it’s likely to work, I’m afraid—though it’s also true that I keep being tempted by that fantasy of clarity. I’ve felt it a few times over the past week, in fact. It hit me hard last Friday, when I saw a story about how the administration is “working on [a] plan” to “move” around a million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya, a country with two governments and an active slave trade. If this “plan” comes to fruition, it would make the United States an active facilitator of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale—no doubt as a prelude to the opening of tacky Trump-branded beach and golfing resorts where the Palestinians used to live.
It happened again a few days ago, when Trump hosted President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in the Oval Office and subjected him to an ignorant, belligerent lecture about a non-existent genocide against white Afrikaner farmers, backing himself up with a deceptive video and a photograph of an unrelated event in a different African country. Watching this display, it was impossible not to think of the dressing down Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was forced to endure in late February—and to face the ugly fact that the U.S. president now makes a habit of inviting foreign heads of state to the Oval Office to be attacked and humiliated.
After seeing both stories, I felt as if we were on the verge of witnessing a dam burst, after which it would be undeniably the case that we resided in a different reality. But that’s just another version of what I described above as crossing over a bright, flashing line. Both metaphors are wrong. The transformation is definitely happening, but it’s happening in relative slow motion, with aspects of the old normal (with its expectations and assumptions) persisting among some people in some places, while the new normal of outright corruption, mob-boss thuggishness, and disregard for constraints on the exercise of executive power settles in a little at a time.
It happens gradually, in fits and starts, with occasional setbacks and temporary reversals for the forces of change, but the overall direction plain when viewed from the perspective of years and decades.
Trump spent most of his first year as president, in 2017, languishing at around 38 percent approval. He had dragged himself up to the low-to-mid 40s by the time of the 2020 election. He won in 2024 with nearly 50 percent of the vote, and his approval now sits in the 46-47 percent range, even as he’s blowing up international trade, overseeing massive cuts in funding for Medicaid and Medicare, openly defying the courts, gutting medical and scientific research, deporting people to foreign torture-prisons without due process, going to war with universities, and ambushing foreign leaders in public meetings.
We are at once still partially a liberal democracy, well underway to becoming a competitive authoritarian state, nominally following the rules laid out in the Constitution, and slouching toward a new order in which Congress does little more than sign off on executive decrees while the judiciary issues stern warnings that the president abides only when it suits him. This was less true a few years ago, and it will be more true a few years from now. The direction of change is clear; only its speed is variable.
That’s how the political situation looks to me after teaching “Trump 2.0.” Can something be done to slow or reverse where we’re clearly going? I’m sure there is. I just don’t know what it is and have nowhere near the following or influence to make a measurable difference to bringing it about even if I did. I wish all the luck in the world to anyone doing that practical work. I’d even consider contributing to it. But I won’t be leading it.
I haven’t received my student evaluations from the spring semester yet, but I got the feeling my students appreciated the class and felt like they learned a lot from it, even if it was often a bit of a downer (or more than a bit). I hope anyone who reads this essay feels the same way. I’m doing the best I can, which is all any of us can ever do.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
A version of this piece originally appeared in Notes from the Middleground.
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As an independent who did not vote for Trump in 2016 but did in 2024, I find this so out of touch. For me the big authoritarian shock came during covid. I get it that early on, no one knew what was going on. But very quickly high level epidemiologists like Bhattacharya and Ionnides ( most cited researcher in his field) were saying: Don't lockdown. This disease is highly dangerous only for the very old... Instead we had TWO YEARS of school closures in dem states, while Europe had like 3 months! We had vaccine mandates - even after it was crystal clear that the vaccine did NOT prevent transmission.
What can be more authoritarian that depriving people of social contact, church, school? What can be more authoritarian than mandating a brand new, emergency use authorization, lipid nanoparticle mRNA shot for young people to stay in college, for pregnant women to keep their jobs?
NY State health department established rules to create quarantine camps for any infectious disease ( with no threshold for infection fatality rate) . Never actually built and used, but they could be. This regulation was challenged in court but they appealed and won.
The Biden admin pressured Meta and other platforms( who had big monopoly cases with the DOJ) to censor scientists like Bhattacharya and others, to de platform etc. Amazon has huge contracts with DOD for cloud services, Senators like Warren told them they should remove books that were questioning covid or the covid vax!
So I just do not get it, the whining about authoritarianism. I dont like what Trump is doing deporting protestors. But if you refuse to address the massive covid authoritarianism,- you will never win back people like me.
I don't disagree about the direction, but wonder where you were during the Obama and Biden administrations when the authoritarian court and congress-defying precedents were being set.