Speaking in the Oval Office this week, Donald Trump had something he wanted to clarify.
“I’m not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator,” the president said.
Yet his comments came weeks after he deployed armed soldiers and Humvee-style military vehicles to patrol the streets of Washington, claiming, despite all available evidence, that the use of the national guard was necessary to control crime.
The remarks followed Trump withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars from universities, and after the increasingly politicized FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, a prominent critic of Trump.
Trump has also targeted law firms who have filed lawsuits he opposes, while the Federal Communications Commission, led by a Trump appointee, is investigating every major broadcast network except Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News channel. Trump has personally sued news channels over critical coverage and fired the government’s top labour statistician because she published jobs data that he didn’t like.
He has threatened Democrats with prosecution, and demanded that former president Barack Obama be investigated for treason. Trump has done all this as his family has ostensibly earned millions of dollars from his presidency.
None of these things are typical for a democratic leader. So … is Trump a dictator?
“Yes, of course,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who spent years researching autocracies including Hungary and Russia. Scheppele said she had been wavering on using the term “dictatorship” until recently, but said: “If I was hesitating before, it’s this mobilization of the national guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we’re in it.”
Trump, emboldened by a Republican party that appears willing to let their leader do whatever he wants, is now threatening to send troops to Democratic-run cities including Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York City, prompting outcry and accusations of abuse of power.
Scheppele said: “He’s really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force.”
Most modern dictators try to hide their aspirations. Scheppele said leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have gone to “great lengths” to avoid looking like “20th-century dictators” in the hopes they can avoid the label.
“If you think of dictators as, you know, tanks in the streets and large numbers of military people saluting the leader, and big posters of the leader going up on national buildings, all that stuff does remind everybody of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia and all and Mussolini’s Italy,” she said.
Hence Orbán, Erdoğan and the like attempting to avoid those scenes. But it doesn’t seem to bother Trump.
Just this week, a giant banner was draped over the Department of Labor building, showing Trump glaring out over Washington DC above the slogan “American workers first”. On his birthday, which coincided with the 250th anniversary of the formation of the US army, he held a military parade in the capital, and was reportedly furious that the troops did not look “menacing” enough.
In Trump’s first term, as he railed against political norms, the book How Democracies Die – which examined the unraveling of democracies around the world – became a bestseller. Steven Levitsky, the book’s co-author and a political scientist at Harvard University, said Trump has the mentality of “a classic tin-pot dictator”, but said the president hasn’t managed to become one so far.
“Technically in political science terms, no, he’s not a dictator. The United States, I think, is collapsing into some form of authoritarianism. But it has not consolidated into an outright dictatorship,” Levitsky said.
Trump has said he is not a dictator, but claimed last week: “A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” It’s not clear who he was referring to, but he continued the theme on Tuesday.
“The line is that I’m a dictator. But I stop crime. So a lot of people say: ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator,’” Trump said in a cabinet meeting.
The Guardian asked the White House what data Trump was citing when he claimed Americans want a dictator, but did not receive a response.
Levitsky reiterated that he does not believe Trump is a dictator in the truest sense, but added: “Dictators everywhere, first of all, claim that they’re not dictators. And second of all, somewhat contradictorally, claim that the people want a dictator. Those are classic dictator lines.”
The US has expressed interest in authoritarianism before. At the height of his fame a third of Americans tuned into the radio broadcasts of Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose antisemitic broadcasts praised the likes of Benito Mussolini. Jim Crow laws were allowed to enforce racial segregation into the 1960s, while Senator Joseph McCarthy was allowed to persecute alleged communists during the so-called Red Scare.
“You could always, in many, many periods of US history, find 25, 30% of the US electorate that was authoritarian-leaning, and I think that’s definitely true today,” Levitsky said.
Today, that makes up a “big chunk” of the Republican party, he said, and Trump is leaning into that base.
“There’s a real performative side to this government’s authoritarianism, which suggests that there is a constituency for it, which is very frightening. And I really haven’t seen anything like this sort of performative authoritarianism, honestly, since the 30s in Europe,” he said.
Most 21st-century authoritarian countries are “hybrid regimes”, Levitsky said. He pointed to Venezuela, Hungary, Tunisia and Turkey, where Erdoğan has spent more than two decades in power, cementing his position by cracking down on the country’s media and bringing thousands of criminal cases against people who insult the president.
“They’re authoritarian, in that they’re not fully democratic: there’s widespread abuse of power that tilts the playing field against the opposition. So nobody would look at Turkey and say: ‘That’s a democracy.’ But they’re not what I would call a dictatorship. And that’s what I think the great danger is in the United States.”
There is, Levitsky said, a “non-zero chance” that Trump could use emergency powers – as he has in justifying immigration measures and tariffs – to subvert the constitution, potentially undermining elections.
But, he said: “The more likely outcome is a more mild authoritarianism where opposition exists, opposition is above board, opposition contests for power, competes in elections.
“The government doesn’t win all its battles, but abuse of power – as we’ve seen in the last six, seven months – abuse of power is so widespread, so systematic, and violations of law, violations of rights are so widespread and systematic that the playing field begins to tilt against the opposition.
“And you would not call that a full democracy.”
