When it comes to the rise of autocracy in America, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous pronouncement on pornography might be particularly appropriate at the moment: “I know it when I see it.”
The cult of personality was apparent as Donald Trump’s cabinet convened on Wednesday in a marathon session that could have embarrassed even a seasoned strongman, providing for three hours and 17 minutes of fawning television coverage.
There was Steve Witkoff, the president’s top envoy and negotiator, standing up in the increasingly gilded Cabinet Roomoffering praise that could have made even Vladimir Putin blush. “There’s only one thing I wish for – that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about,” he said to applause from secretaries of state, defense and other top cabinet officials.
Or was it Stephen Miller on Fox News in effect criminalising the opposition to Trump and calling Chicago a “killing field” despite controverting facts. “The Democrat party is not a political party, it is a domestic extremist organisation,” he said in a strident tone, claiming that the party was devoted “exclusively to the defence of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists”.
Was it the president calling, on social media, for the arrest of a wealthy financier and his son for their support for civil society? “George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of Violent Protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Or perhaps it was the revocation of Secret Service protection for his electoral rival Kamala Harris, or the FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, his former national security adviser, who has become an outspoken critic of the president’s national security agenda. Or was it in the commonplace nature of a raid outside an elementary school in Mt Pleasant in Washington DC, where police staked out a school with a large Spanish-speaking population in what became just another immigration raid in America.
Some activists and observers have sounded the alarm: authoritarianism of the kind that Americans are used to condemning abroad has become increasingly normal in the United States.
Don Moynihan, a political scientist and professor at the University of Michigan, wrote this week that “today, America is a competitive authoritarian system, with a rapidly increasing emphasis on the authoritarian part.”
The checklist to consolidate power, he wrote, includes efforts to control the government bureaucracy, the military, internal security, the legal system, civil society, higher education, the media and elections. The pursuit of those aims had been “systematic”, he wrote.
Abdelrahman ElGendy has watched this process with a feeling of grim recognition. ElGendy spent six years in prison in his native Egypt on political charges, but fled to the US in order to work on a memoir he is set to release next year.
In April, however, he packed his things and left the US following the detention of the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. ElGendy’s lawyers warned him that he could face a similar fate after his personal details were posted on a website used to target opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Since then, he has watched from abroad as the situation has worsened.
“I haven’t second-guessed leaving the US. In fact I feel very grateful that I made the choice that I did before things got even worse,” he said. “I left Egypt to escape political persecution … The reason I left the US is because I started to recognize those same patterns forming around me. And since leaving it’s only gone downhill.”
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) began carrying out large-scale raids and he was identified online as a potential target, he said he found himself once again waiting to be taken away at any moment.
“I don’t think political incarceration is the most important characteristic of authoritarianism, it’s more the constant threat of it that matters most,” he said. “What really sustains authoritarianism is that quiet knowledge that the prison door is always within reach … that shadow is what shapes behavior.”
From Russia to Turkey, and Hungary to El Salvador, activists, observers and political scientists have watched the quick consolidation of power by the Trump administration as it has followed a familiar pattern of autocratic rollout.
Washington has found common cause with some of the world’s harshest authoritarian regimes such Russia and El Salvador. This week, the US deported nearly 50 Russians, according to activists, including some who probably requested political asylum in the United States. Hundreds of migrants and even citizens have been deported to prisons in El Salvador.
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“Sometimes I almost feel it’s like ‘I told you so,’” said Noah Bullock, the chief executive of Cristosal, a leading human rights group in El Salvador which was forced to leave the country last month after 25 years of documenting abuses of power.
“With the Ice crackdown and the creation of this massive law enforcement agency that only obeys the president – there are no good historical references where that works out well.”
“One of the things that I see happening that hits me really close is when these security or police forces begin to look at the whole population as enemies,” he added, comparing it to El Salvador where they had been “trained to see the population as a threat”.
The winner-take-all dynamics of the Trump administration, which has claimed a historic mandate despite winning among the thinnest majorities in a generation, have made this a particularly fraught moment. Along with the federal takeover of police forces, the other commonly cited danger is the Republican gerrymandering effort in Texas and resulting fightback in California, as well as other efforts to diminish voter turnout ahead of the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.
Some activists insist it is not too late to turn back. Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, and Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, wrote this week that “We Can Stop the Rise of American Autocracy”.
Citing Hungary and Venezuela as examples, they wrote that “we cannot be lulled into believing that this is like anything we’ve seen before and can therefore be solved by simply waiting for the midterm elections. The antidote to Trump’s American breed of autocracy is understanding the severity of the threat at hand.”
But others see the trend toward authoritarianism as merely an acceleration of the direction of US politics even before Trump.
“That assumes that the United States was a functioning healthy democracy that slipped … and that’s just not the case in my opinion,” said ElGendy.
“When a democracy is designed with this capacity for authoritarianism you’re never more than one election away from its reappearance. That’s not an accident, that’s a design flaw.”
