The Five Steps Towards Autocracy
How Machiavelli can help us understand Trump.
This article is brought to you by American Purpose, the magazine and community founded by Francis Fukuyama in 2020, which is now proudly part of the Persuasion family.
Trump’s first three weeks have not been crazy and chaotic. They have been a deliberate and coherent application of Machiavelli’s 500-year-old playbook for turning a democracy into an autocracy: form a militia, consolidate power, cow your adversaries, declare a state of emergency, and seize control of the message. Machiavelli’s The Prince has been required reading for every aspiring despot, autocrat, and totalitarian for five centuries, and its influence is evident in virtually every action taken by the new Trump administration.
To understand how the architects of the Trump administration think, what they will do, and how they will do it, that long-dead diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, remains the best teacher. His writings cover everything from how to arm your supporters, disempower rivals, flout the law, purge and weaponize the administrative state, exact vengeance against those who have crossed you, distort reality, confound and convert followers, and ultimately seize the mantle of absolute ruler. The past three weeks have been a master class. Understanding this is the key to stopping it.
I. Form a Private Militia
“A new prince. . .has always armed his subjects, because by arming them, those weapons become yours, those men who were initially distrusted become faithful, and those who were loyal remain so, and they become your ardent partisans.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli.
As he promised, Trump on Day One released all the people arrested for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those who violently assaulted the police, destroyed property, and prowled the halls looking to hang the vice president of the United States. The media struggled to explain why Trump would do this when a majority of Americans opposed it, and even Trump’s ardent supporters drew a line for those convicted of physically attacking police.
This is not a mystery. Machiavelli instructed that any would-be ruler must enlist a militia loyal to him. “The cause of this is that [standing armies and mercenaries] have no love or other motive to keep them in the field beyond a trifling wage, which is not enough to make them ready to die for you.” That advice has been followed by every democratically-elected autocrat—including, in modern times, Mussolini (OVRA), Putin (KGB), the Shah of Iran (SAVAK), and many others. It is being followed by Trump now.
Trump already revealed in his first term that he’s willing to employ similar tactics. His former National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, said Trump admired how authoritarians could personally command the military to do anything they wanted. His Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, reported Trump had been frustrated to learn that he [Trump] couldn’t command U.S. forces to “just shoot [protesters]; just shoot them in the legs or something” in response to quiet peaceful demonstrators condemning the death of George Floyd.
Like most autocrats, Trump sought a fighting force to serve him personally. In 2020, he publicly instructed the Proud Boys, a violent extremist group, to “stand back and stand by,” signaling his default to violence if the election didn’t go his way. When he lost that election, Trump turned to vigilantes loyal to him. He directed them to “fight like hell” and “not show weakness” when they stormed the Capitol. He commended the efforts of the so-called Freedom Corner for supporting those insurrectionists, and Trump promised that he would “absolutely” pardon rioters that were convicted for their violent acts as soon as he took office. So it should not have been a surprise that Trump in fact pardoned all of the 1600 people arrested for engaging in the insurrection, including those convicted of violently attacking law enforcement officers. This is textbook Machiavelli.
Less appreciated than the Proud Boys mob—but possibly even more dangerous—has been the online militia that Trump simultaneously formed in the virtual world. He has built up a sort of SWAT force through his X and Truth Social accounts, as well as through more obscure parts of the web. This online army has trolled, doxxed, and threatened anyone who poses a political risk to Trump, from Stormy Daniels to judges and prosecutors, to members of Congress, public health officials, poll workers, Georgia’s Secretary of State, and their family members. By releasing the January 6 convicts, pardoning those arrested, and firing their prosecutors, Trump sent a clear message to his virtual army: you can attack others in the name of Trump, and Trump will keep you safe.
Judging by the silence among Trump’s opponents, it seems to be working. Stories are already circulating of death threats online, of bloggers surveilling and surreptitiously recording Trump’s enemies, demanding they be fired, ostracized, doxxed, and physically attacked. Trump is deliberately sending a shiver of fear down the spine of America’s body politic by restoring and rearming a personal army.
II. Consolidate Power
“Anyone who enables another to become powerful brings about his own ruin.”
Trump’s next project is grabbing power from other democratic institutions. Democracies stay democratic by dividing power. This is why every would-be dictator tries to change that system as soon as they gain office. Autocrats eliminate checks by methodically turning every part of modern government—starting with prosecutors, judges, courts, bureaucrats, and legislators—into a tool of their regime. This is done by acting as though they have power they do not, and then holding onto that power.
Shakespeare, having read Machiavelli, wrote that the very first task of a despot is “kill all the lawyers.” This was not because everyone simply hates lawyers. Rather, lawyers are dangerous to autocrats because they are trained to place the rule of law over the rule of any one person. Government lawyers in particular are charged with holding people in power accountable and staying free from political influence.
Trump’s actions to date have taken dead aim (metaphorically) at all the lawyers. During his first term, Trump cycled through an extraordinary number of Attorneys General, FBI Directors, U.S. Attorneys, and other senior Justice Department officials looking for ones that would not act like lawyers. This time he’s going much bigger. In less than a month, he forced out the sitting FBI Director, summarily fired all of the prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases, demanded a list of thousands of employees who worked on investigations relating to the insurrection for review, fired 17 Inspectors General (the lawyers responsible for ensuring agencies follow the law), nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI based on Patel’s many statements that he would gut the FBI, and tried (but failed) to appoint a suspected criminal and disgraced Congressman, Matt Gaetz, as his Attorney General. Justice Department officials have been advised that Trump’s team is just getting started.
Next up are the bureaucrats. Civil servants are selected for expertise rather than political views, and they are required to be non-partisan. That is why the first priority of every autocrat—from Viktor Orbán to Adolf Hitler—is to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists. One of Hitler’s very first moves was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis. Trump actually attempted a similar strategy too late in his first administration. In October 2020 he issued a last-minute executive order that he claimed empowered him to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. Although he was not able to execute the plan then, he’s had four years to develop the idea and its infrastructure. The purge is a central feature of Project 2025, a plan crafted by MAGA Republicans to “dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump’s vision.”
So Trump’s moves should not be a surprise. Upon assuming office, Trump chose agency heads who would not object to having a special governmental unit gut their agencies before they even took office. He “established” a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by a private individual, Elon Musk. DOGE is a roving, unregulated commission with the “power” to ignore worker protections and indiscriminately fire thousands of government employees. DOGE also offered unallocated and unauthorized funds to pay off two million government officials. DOGE’s purpose comes straight from the 1500s. The main impact of this buyout will be to drive away the workers with the greatest expertise, who have the most options to work in the private sector. The only reason to do this is if you care less about government efficiency than about transforming the federal government into an instrument of your will.
Finally, autocrats must strip power from the legislature. Trump has done this in numerous ways in his first few weeks. He forced GOP members to let him select the Speaker of the House rather than perform their role of selecting him or her. He warned Senators that he would make “recess appointments” for his cabinet without their support, if they did not confirm all of his nominees. And since taking office, he simply ignored laws passed by Congress and threatened mutinous members with a primary opponent if they defied him. He suspended congressionally-authorized grants, violating Congress’ appropriations power. He fired civil servants in defiance of laws passed by Congress. He created a “department” with no congressional authorization and let it spend money with no congressional appropriation. He is following Machiavelli’s instruction to fake it until you make it. Trump’s moves were all designed to pretend congressional checks on him did not exist, in the hopes they would let that become true.
III: Exercise “Emergency” Power
“Men are driven by two principles, either fear or love… If you need to choose between them, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”
Autocrats rely on unilateral action, rather than law, to keep people in line and maintain power indefinitely. This is why Machiavelli urged autocrats to never waste a crisis, and to seize power when it is available. Trump, however, proclaimed an emergency on Day One.
Leaders know they possess their maximum power when they face (or at least claim to face) a public emergency. So leaders in a crisis are given leeway without the usual consent of Congress or review by the courts. Autocratic leaders take this to an extreme. Chinese President Xi Jinping—limited to two terms in office—used emergency powers to make himself president for life in China. Ferdinand Marcos did the same thing years earlier in the Philippines. In the United States, however, emergency powers are rarely invoked absent a war, a natural disaster, or some other truly extraordinary circumstance.
Trump took Machiavelli’s approach of ruling with fear. He issued an executive order as soon as he took office claiming that the United States is in the midst of a hostile invasion from both its northern and southern borders. Trump had already set the stage for this during his campaign by asserting that America was under a full-scale “invasion” by undocumented migrants. For months, he proclaimed that undocumented migrants in record numbers were pouring across the border to “poison the blood” of our people, including hordes of murderers and rapists and drug smugglers seeking to wreak economic destruction, cast fraudulent votes, and even eat our pets.
The purpose of this declaration is belied by the fact that—objectively—there is no new “emergency.” The southern border currently has fewer crossings than when President Trump left office the first time, and there has been no evidence of a recent increase in crime, fraudulent voting, or pet-eating associated with undocumented migrants. The emergency on the northern border is even harder to justify; there has not been any evidence of dangerous migrants illegally entering from Canada, and drugs arriving from Canada account for less than 1% of opioid imports (and those are shipped, rather than carried by migrants). This shows that the justification is beside the point. Donald Trump has established a basis for an ongoing state of emergency for the remaining four years of his presidency, and all the emergency powers that come with it.
The declaration serves a quintessentially Machiavellian purpose—to seize the broadest power possible. By issuing the declaration, Trump could impose tariffs without Congress’ approval. It will also allow him to deploy law enforcement in the mass deportation roundups he has promised. And he will no doubt use it to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush anticipated civilian protests against these round-ups. Both the tactic and the effects are the same. Autocrats for hundreds of years have used the threat of invasion to justify unilateral action, by force if necessary. We have seen this movie before. Now we are seeing it in English.
IV: Intimidate and Cow The Opposition
“Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries—for heavy ones they cannot.”
No autocracy is complete unless it suppresses political opposition and thereby expands the ruler’s power. This is much easier now, after Trump lost power in 2020, than it would have been the first time he became president. As Machiavelli wrote in 1513 “[i]t is very true that, after acquiring rebellious provinces a second time, they are not so lightly lost afterwards; because the prince, with little reluctance, takes the opportunity of the rebellion to punish the delinquents, to clear out the suspects, and to strengthen himself in the weakest places.” So, while no one seriously thought Trump would follow through on a promise to “lock up” Hillary Clinton, it’s different this time. President Biden was so sure that Trump would make good on his threats that Biden spent his final days issuing preemptive pardons to Trump’s enemies.
As Machiavelli instructed, Trump is now using his return to office to punish the rebellious, remove the disloyal, and scare off others who might consider challenging him. These punishments already include endangering their lives, prosecuting them without investigation, summarily firing them, and serving them up for mob attacks on social media.
Stunningly, some of Trump’s first punishments actually put adversaries’ lives at risk. He summarily stripped the personal protection details from former CDC Director Anthony Fauci, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and several other former officials, despite knowing they received protection because of active, credible death threats against them. What is more, Trump disclosed this action publicly—ensuring assassins would know these people were no longer protected.
For others, Trump demonstrated he would use the government to punish them without investigation. He immediately initiated demotion proceedings against General Milley. He fired senior members of the DOJ simply for having been staffed on certain cases. And he nominated for FBI Director a man who not only had promised to use the DOJ to investigate, fire, and prosecute enemies of Donald Trump, but had even drafted up a list of those enemies.
Finally, Trump has sent tweets over the past year identifying various officials as “Marxists” or “radical left thugs that live like vermin.” The message is that online armies of Trump know their names, and know that the president will not protect them. This is the same language used by “strongmen” presidents like Vladimir Putin (Russia), Viktor Yanukovych (Ukraine), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), and Hugo Chávez (Venezuela). It’s the language of dehumanization they use before jailing or siccing their adversaries.
This time, Trump has tools he did not have previously. The U.S. Supreme Court (now with a supermajority established by Trump) gave him an extraordinary gift in his effort to target and prosecute rivals, critics, and perceived enemies. In Trump v. United States the Supreme Court held last year that the president could not be prosecuted for any actions taken within the course and scope of his duties. This includes directing the Attorney General to prosecute people for unlawful reasons or in unlawful ways. The first few weeks demonstrate that Trump will have no hesitation using this newfound freedom to attack any and all rivals.
V. Undermine the Free Press
“It is necessary to know well how to…be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived…”
Finally, Trump has, in the words of his former campaign manager Steve Bannon, delivered all of this with overwhelming “muzzle speed”—launching too many stories at once for mainstream media to even cover, let alone fact check and investigate. As Machiavelli writes: “In seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke.” Psychologically it is stunning and overwhelming, and when news returns to normal, it is put in the past and forgotten.
Democracies depend upon citizens knowing facts so that they can determine what they want and then elect people who they trust to accomplish those things. A leader who is able to confuse the public regarding what is and is not true, and who they can and cannot trust to provide accurate information, ultimately has complete control over a democracy. Machiavelli saw this used effectively 500 years ago: “One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.”
For this reason, any would-be autocrat finds ways to control the flow of information to maintain power. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have mastered propaganda and information control, as has every other successful autocrat. Trump understands well how this is done, and has been doing it at a furious pace.
First, he has relentlessly attacked traditional, independent media. He has already devoted the past decade to condemning the “lamestream” media as “biased,” “crooked,” “terribly unfair,” and “lying.” But now he is using lawsuits to assert his dominance over them. It is virtually impossible for the media to sustain litigation against a president who is willing to use the instruments of government against them. In the weeks since his election, ABC settled with Trump for $15 million, Meta settled with him for $25 million, CBS is in settlement discussions regarding another suit, and the president’s FCC Chief has already launched an investigation of NPR and PBS. Trump has made good on his promise to punish news outlets for coverage he dislikes. Ironically, even when his lies were exposed, it has helped undermine the media. His false conspiracy theories about voting machines eventually cost Fox News millions of dollars for knowingly promoting them. This too reduced confidence in “traditional” media. Altogether, Trump deserves credit for helping push public trust in the media to an historic low. But it seems poised to go lower, if his FBI nominee is confirmed and fulfills his promise to target journalists and “prosecute them for crimes.”
Second, Trump has now built up omnipresent news channels to deliver his “alternative facts.” Trump’s Truth Social already allowed him to use his personal media to bypass any norm of journalistic integrity—facts, documentation, reliable sources, etc.—while also increasing his personal wealth. That was only the beginning. Now, by hiring as his head of government efficiency the owner of X, the world’s dominant social media platform, he is at a whole new level. X’s algorithms consistently promote and prioritize Trump’s posts as well as those of his supporters. That includes the person with the largest following of all on X—Elon Musk. The effect: Americans no longer learn the news from media outlets whose reporters apply journalistic analysis and commentary. They receive Trump’s messages directly from Trump’s “@RealDonaldTrump” account. That’s something Machiavellian princes of the past could only dream of doing.
This is the playbook. Flooding the zone and releasing a flow of false claims is destined to confuse and overwhelm people and sweep away traditional journalism; it intentionally trains people to question the very existence of facts themselves. Without a common language of facts (did it rain at the inauguration or didn’t it? Is the crowd bigger or smaller?) the public cannot operate as a democracy. Every autocrat knows this. When people don’t know what to believe, they either default to their biases, believe nothing at all, or just accept whatever their ruler tells them.
Either way, the autocrats win. Public inaction or inattention is how every autocracy in history has successfully ended democracy. Once lost, democracies can rarely be won back except through bloody conflict or collapse. And every time, they fail for the same reason: the people let them.
Conclusion: What This Means For You (and America)
Machiavelli knew that knowledge is power. That is why he wrote The Prince.
Knowing the playbook, we should not be lulled into believing that Trump’s actions are random and impulsive. They are not. But because we know why he takes these actions, we can see which acts truly matter, and martial the powers needed to protect democracy.
Trump’s administration seems chaotic and crazy now only if you think he is trying to execute policies to eliminate waste, or remove underperforming workers, or address corruption. In that light, he has picked the most chaotic and ineffective ways of achieving these objectives. His actions, though, make perfect sense if you realize they weren’t intended to accomplish those policy goals, but are instead a means of acquiring more power. He freezes all grants not because he is concerned about what those grants are for or who receives them (he doesn’t know)—it is because he wants to create the belief that he has powers over grants that he doesn’t have, and he wants to test whether Congress will object or the courts will stop him. The same is true of mass firings, or seeking to rewrite the Constitution with an executive order, or asserting ownership of Gaza. In each case, he simply is asserting powers he doesn’t have to see what happens. The organizing principle of the Trump administration is not policy; it’s power. But, unless we give up, that power is still ours.
Machiavelli’s instructions to autocrats are clarifying as to why Trump does not have the upper hand. He advised that ultimately the forces of democracy are great, and autocrats are vulnerable. He warned autocrats that “[t]here is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than…the introduction of a new order of things.” This is because even an autocrat cannot overcome the will of the people once they are on to him.
Given the frenzy of the past three weeks, Americans need to remember that Trump does not have the power to do the things he is trying to do. He does not have legal authority to rewrite the constitution’s birthright citizenship provision; a court has told him this. He and Elon Musk do not have the power to ignore laws duly passed by Congress, create their own agencies, eliminate other agencies, or fire the civil service; a court will show them that, too. Courts will also tell him that he can’t spend money that Congress has not authorized, he can’t impound money that it has authorized, and he can’t shut down USAID without Congress’ consent. He cannot simply appoint whoever he wants to lead his cabinet even with a docile Senate—Matt Gaetz proved that, and perhaps Kash Patel will prove that, too. And, finally, he can’t change people’s memories or their knowledge of the truth.
He has slim majorities in both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court, while formidable, hears only 100 to 150 cases a year and most of those do not concern presidential powers. Instead, virtually all matters of law are decided by state courts or lower federal courts. Even if Donald Trump fills every federal judicial vacancy in the next four years, there will still be more judges on the federal bench appointed by Obama and Biden than by Trump. And he is old, he is impulsive, and he is human. The only thing that can make the actions he’s trying to take permanent is if everyone acquiesces. The only power he can acquire is the power that others choose to give him.
Understanding this is the key to ensuring that our leaders focus on the right issues. Whatever he does in office must be done with the powers he actually possesses as president—and no more.
As with so many other things, Machiavelli predicted how this would turn out. Reviewing leaders, Machiavelli recognized the qualities of those who were able to take over a republic and those who were not. Trump falls squarely into the latter category. To be successful, the ruler needs to care about serving the state and its citizens first and foremost. He must be able to hide his deceits and conceits, and act in ways that suggest respect for the law and for others.
That is not who Donald Trump is. He will push, and be pushed back, and push harder, and be pushed back harder, and eventually he will push too far (as he did with family separations, and the January 6 insurrection). Machiavelli observed “if you become hated by the people, no fortress will save you.” Trump is a limited leader in Machiavelli’s estimation. “A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.”
As president, there are no doubt many policy decisions that he will make that people will view as wrong and not in America’s best interest. That is what happens after a president wins an election. The president makes decisions that please some and offend others. As long as Trump acts with powers allocated to him under the Constitution, he has the right to make those choices. And, so long as the Constitution remains intact, future leaders and citizens can reconsider and potentially change those choices. That is the one thing we must defend at all costs.
I think we will.
Machiavelli did too. He wrote: “he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, [for] whatever you may do or prepare against, they never forget . . . their privileges, [and their] vitality, hatred, and desire for vengeance, will never permit them to allow the memory of their former liberty to rest; so that the safest way is to destroy them.”
That choice, and that power, is ours.
Ambassador (ret.) Jeff Bleich served as the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, Special Counsel to the President of the United States, and Chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He is currently Chair of the Centre on Democracy and Disruptive Technologies at Flinders University, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
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Are we STILL doing this? No, Donald Trump is not a wannabe autocrat. Please breathe in a paper bag for a few minutes.