How to Undo Trump’s Growing Dictatorship and the Damage it Is Inflicting
Not giving in to tyrants who count on obedience in advance is the key to defeating them
Since my last essay on the crisis of democracy, the assaults on democratic checks and balances have escalated. Without agreement from Congress, Trump’s DOGE shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development with stunning speed. Although a federal court blocked further implementation, ruling that the action “likely violated the Constitution,” by then the agency had already been gutted and largely dismantled along with many other agenices. Then, in an alarming politicization of the military high command, Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, and the judge advocates general (the highest-ranking legal authorities) for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Pressing his claim to imperial power, Trump has moved to assert absolute control over all federal regulatory bodies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission. This not only hobbles their capacity to act independently in the public interest but opens the door to massive corruption. As DOGE seizes control of more and more of the government’s most sensitive and highly centralized stores of data, the conflicts of interest proliferate for its chief “overseer,” Elon Musk, who over the years has received “at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits.” And Just Security has documented an “alarming” pattern of “politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice” since Trump has retaken office.
Democracy in Danger
The United States now faces the grave and imminent danger of its democracy decaying into a “competitive authoritarianism” in which multiparty elections still hold but are no longer free and fair. Under such a system, here’s what we can expect to follow:
The opposition wins seats in Congress and some city and state governments—but at the national level, a domineering leader and ruling party assert monolithic control over government, in a grip that cannot be broken by any normal means.
Regulatory agencies are stripped of their independence.
The legislative branch becomes a rubber stamp.
The courts are pressured, defied, and eventually brought to heel.
The civil service and the military are purged of non-loyalists and converted into instruments of the “elected” leader and his party.
The media are pressured and sued into passivity and subservience.
Business is lured into backing the authoritarian project with the promise of huge financial windfalls (and crippling punishment for defection).
Universities are threatened with financial ruin if they resist or protest.
Think tanks and philanthropies are threatened with loss of their tax-exempt status and even prosecution if they speak up.
Prominent critics and opposition voices, including former officeholders, fall silent for fear of retribution.
Democracy dies, to use T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase from The Hollow Men, “not with a bang but with a whimper.”
This is the pathway by which democracy has died, at varying speeds, in Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, Serbia, and several other countries. It is the trajectory that India has been on under Narendra Modi, Slovakia under Robert Fico, and Poland under the Law and Justice Party, until it was defeated in national elections in October 2023. If this slide away from democracy is to be averted, we must learn the lessons of other countries.
The first lesson, as a prominent Ukrainian democrat said to me, is, “The path from democracy is much shorter than the path to it.” Assaults on democracy often gain momentum more rapidly than supporters of democracy can imagine in their glib self-confidence that “it can’t happen here.” Thus, early action is crucial. The earlier that countervailing pressure is mobilized, the more likely it is to succeed. Second, principled resistance must be mounted within the executive branch to defend constitutional norms and the rule of law. Third, checks and balances must be activated early on by Congress, the judiciary, and regulatory institutions to counter creeping authoritarianism and defend constitutional guardrails. Fourth, a smart political strategy, with effective messaging and a broad coalition, is needed to oppose authoritarian drift and ultimately to effect the surest means of halting authoritarian creep—defeating it at the polls. Finally, ordinary citizens must push back through mass mobilization and courageous individual action.
Resisting Rising Authoritarianism
An effective resistance agenda is necessarily selective—if democracy defenders scream at equal volume over every harmful presidential move, without distinguishing between their varying levels of illegality, unconstitutionality, irrationality, and cruelty, people will stop listening. We need a strategy to prioritize the most serious assaults on democracy, presidential accountability, and our laws and norms. However, there is no room for passivity or patience in the face of creeping authoritarianism. Early action is critical to frustrating authoritarian ambitions, and it must match escalating assaults with escalating mobilization.
Every actor inside and outside of government has a role to play in the defense of democracy. Let’s begin inside the belly of the beast: the executive branch. The career civil service is a crucial actor in serving the American public interest while observing merit-based principles of excellence, professionalism, and political neutrality. Career civil servants should be encouraged to hang on in the service of these principles as long as possible and to decline to comply with orders that violate laws or regulations. Trump derisively refers to this workforce as “the deep state,” but societies prosper when they have states with the depth of expertise, training, commitment, and autonomy to guard public health, provide veterans benefits, ensure water quality, develop rural communities, maintain national parks, and expose corruption and fraud. These essential functions of government are now under assault as the DOGE chainsaw hacks away indiscriminately at the federal workforce. Fortunately, most federal workers declined Elon Musk’s legally dubious order to report their work to him or resign. But the Trump White House wants to purge the career civil service of anyone who hints at independence.
No federal worker should go quietly. Every act of principled resistance, even if it comes at the price of termination for following the law, puts an obstacle on the authoritarian pathway. Recently, a former federal prosecutor, Brendan Ballou, described how Trump’s Muslim travel ban early in his first term was slowed and narrowed by low- and mid-level Justice Department officials who forthrightly “explained to those far above them why the ban was legally and operationally disastrous.”
The combination of internal resistance and public pressure proved particularly potent then. So can the combination of internal resistance and judicial action. In late January, Trump reached beyond his authority to fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, without cause. She was the first member of the NLRB removed by a U.S. president since its inception in 1935. But she did not go quietly; she filed a lawsuit. In doing so, she defended not only her right but that of all members of federal boards and commissions to serve out their fixed terms. On March 6, a federal judge, Beryl A. Howell, ruled that Wilcox’s firing was “a blatant violation of the law” and ordered her reinstated, adding: “A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator’ … fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution.”
Wilcox has not been alone in standing up. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union representing more than 800,000 federal and D.C. government workers, has filed numerous lawsuits against DOGE’s illegal firings of and ultimatums to federal workers, and is challenging its mode of operation and its sweeping access to government data. Civil servants have also self-organized to secure their communications and protect their rights.
The Centrality of the Courts
Ultimately the NLRB court case, and many others opposing presidential power grabs, will be decided by the Supreme Court. In the United States—and in other countries in which overbearing executives have sought to aggrandize their power undemocratically—the judiciary is vital to the defense of democratic guardrails. It is where people turn for relief when their rights are violated. It is where organizations go to defend themselves when an autocratic Trump administration abuses its power by freezing their bank accounts and suggesting criminal fraud because of their receipt of environmental grants under the previous administration.
Since Jan. 20, independent civil society organizations with legal expertise, such as Democracy Forward, Protect Democracy, Public Citizen, and the Brennan Center, have filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s overreach. By the count of The New York Times, “As of March 11, at least 44 [court] rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the president’s initiatives.” Among other things, these temporary orders have suspended the firing of some civil servants, the termination of birthright citizenship, the gutting of USAID, the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “the freezing of up to $3 trillion in federal funding to the states,” and immigration raids in houses of worships. Other cases are challenging numerous aspects of the Trump administration’s unremitting pursuit of the “unitary executive.”
Some courts have only been able to enforce limited halts in their geographic areas of jurisdiction. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide much of this. It might reverse many lower-court restraints on Trump’s imperial actions. But that is not a given. On March 5, the Supreme Court ruled against the administration’s freezing of billions of dollars in foreign aid appropriated by the Congress (though it allowed continued contestation of the issue in lower courts). The 5-4 decision, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Trump-appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices, provoked outrage on the MAGA right. One crucial test will be whether it reconsiders (and if so how) the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. that the president does not have the power to fire a fixed-term, tenured member of a federal agency without cause. This historic decision, William Galston has explained, invoked a core restraint on the imperial presidency and an understanding of the separation of powers that dates back to Madison, Hamilton, and the founding of the American republic. Reversing this long-standing constitutional interpretation, writes Paul Verkuil, “has been in the conservative crosshairs for a long time,” and would accelerate the slide back to a 19th-century spoils system of corrupt governance.
The gathering constitutional crisis will boil over if the Trump administration defies an explicit Supreme Court ruling, in line with Vice President JD Vance’s claim that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” The claim, of course, hangs on what is constitutionally “legitimate,” which only the federal courts can decide. This is why Vance’s statement provoked such outrage from legal scholars, particularly given his prior endorsement of the apocryphal quote from Andrew Jackson, “The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Already, the administration seems to have clearly violated a court order in deporting some 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. NYU legal scholars Trevor W. Morrison and Richard H. Pildes have detailed the numerous tools courts have to compel compliance with their rulings, including holding actors in criminal contempt and even ordering defiant officials jailed (though this would require cooperation from a U.S. Marshals Service). Even if those measures failed, the lawyers complicit in defiance could be disbarred, and the decimation of the rule of law would likely provoke an economic crisis—or worse. As Jeff Bleich observed, if Trump blatantly defied the Supreme Court, the resulting legitimacy crisis would likely provoke “prolonged … chaos, including mass protests, riots, collapsing financial markets, military stand-offs, and collapse in support of the leader.”
The Collapse of Congress
In a presidential democracy, it falls heavily to the Congress to check presidential excess. But with the bulk of Republicans—who hold narrow majorities in the House and Senate—enthusiastically backing Trump’s agenda, and with the MAGA machine vowing to punish congressional defections with massively funded primary challenges, Congress has been missing in action.
The Trump White House is rapidly tilting the balance of power more and more radically from Congress to an imperial presidency. Carl Hulse and Catie Edmonson recently reported, “The Republican-led Congress isn’t just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House.” (Trump’s insane tariffs have caused some turbulence among Republicans who want to take back some of the president’s sweeping taxation powers but not yet enough to revolt.) A crucial step along this path was the House Republicans’ adoption of a White House bill to keep the government funded for six months, averting a shutdown that would have come on March 15. Even though Congress has passed many temporary stopgap measures to avert a government shutdown, this one was more radical and gave the president unprecedented discretion over the disbursement of federal funds. In a searing speech on the Senate floor, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, Patty Murray, condemned the Republicans’ surrender to a bill that “fails to include the typical, detailed spending directives—basic guardrails that Congress provides each year in our funding bills,” and that “turns many of our accounts into slush funds, [giving] the final say over what gets funding to two billionaires who don’t know the first thing about the needs of our working families.”
In a telling sign of the dire straits and deep divisions confronting congressional Democrats, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer felt compelled to back the stop-gap spending measure for fear that a government shutdown would give Trump and Musk even more sweeping power to eliminate large portions of the federal government. In the same bill, House Republicans also surrendered for the year their right to block Trump’s imposition of “emergency” tariffs even though many House and Senate Republicans privately oppose them. Now, the whole world is suffering the consequences of this cowardice. Senate Republicans have also fallen in line to approve Cabinet nominations they knew were terrible (such as Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). And they have sheepishly stood by while Musk has been taking over the federal government. In embracing their institutional castration, congressional Republicans have largely removed the legislative branch as a check on authoritarian drift, unless and until the balance of power shifts on Capitol Hill.
Could that happen before the next midterm elections on Nov. 3, 2026? Last election, Republicans won narrow majorities—220-213 (with two Democratic seats vacant) in the House, and 53-47 in the Senate. It would only take a few Republicans in either body dissenting to change the political dynamic. And in most committees, it would take only a single Republican defection to block a bill or a confirmation or issue a subpoena to someone like Elon Musk.
The presumption is that any House or Senate Republican marching out of lockstep would be committing political suicide, with Musk and other rich MAGA loyalists ready to pour tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to defeat them in a Republican primary. But what if a congressman or senator who saw the country approaching an authoritarian precipice refused to play that game and instead declared their willingness to run as an independent? Many of them come from red states or districts that Democrats have little chance of winning. In a straight contest between a Republican independent, conservative but principled, and a MAGA extremist, the principled conservative could well win by fashioning a coalition of concerned Republicans, independents, and Democrats. Such a strategy would test the Democrats’ capacity for strategic sophistication and discipline. That capacity might be bolstered by close study of other national experiences in reversing authoritarian drift, such as Poland, where the ability of parties to rise above narrow self-interest and form broad coalitions proved crucial to the defense and renewal of democracy.
A Time For Action
In the end, there is no substitute for electoral victory. Authoritarian projects are halted most decisively when they lose at the ballot box. This will require a complex, multi-level, and coordinated electoral strategy from the Democrats, but it cannot wait until the next two federal elections. Democrats are sorely in need of more vigorous and coherent messaging to expose the corruption and self-interest behind the Trump agenda and the immense damage it is doing to the economy; to the well-being of ordinary Americans; to the faintest notion of a fair society; and—not least—to U.S. national security.
Elections are focal points of opposition. They give large groups a clear goal and ordinary citizens an opportunity to become involved—to donate to candidates and parties, knock on doors, write letters, make phone calls, host events, and speak their minds. This work will need to take place on a massive scale in the next two election cycles, but it must begin now. The opposition party must relentlessly challenge Trump’s ruthless and destructive policies. It must also offer a more viable and humane alternative to the status quo. To recapture the middle and working classes, it needs to reach humbly across social and cultural divides to offer new pathways to job creation, community revitalization, and technological innovation. It has to pitch a broad tent that welcomes diverse constituencies rather than subjecting them to cultural litmus tests.
Mass vigilance and mass action will need to come as well from outside the arena of electoral politics. Internal resistance and external mobilization work in tandem. Many members of Congress have already felt the heat from town hall meetings and office phone lines flooded with protests. “At events from Georgia and Wisconsin to Oklahoma and Oregon, House Republicans faced sometimes-hostile crowds furious about the sweeping budget cuts and mass firings of federal workers,” NBC reported in late February. Mass demonstrations are being organized, like the April 5 “Hand Off” rallies in Washington and all over the country. It is vitally important that they remain strictly nonviolent, civil in tone, and disciplined in resisting provocation, or Trump and his movement will seize upon them to discredit the opposition. Historically, global democratic movements (including the American civil rights movement) have made use of a wide variety of tactics of nonviolent civil resistance. These have included not just marches but strikes, consumer boycotts, and civil disobedience. To constrain or defeat authoritarian projects outside of elections, Hardy Merriman observes, citizens must withhold obedience, and to do so effectively, they must coordinate. Civil resistance movements succeed to the extent they muster unity, planning, and discipline on a large scale.
This point cannot be overestimated: Power requires obedience. The key to resisting authoritarian power is, to quote Timothy Snyder’s essay On Tyranny, “Do not obey in advance.” He warns from history: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” It was freely given when Washington Post publisher and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos withdrew his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, and then more recently when he imposed unprecedented restrictions on the paper’s opinion page—ironically with the claim of focusing on “personal liberties.” It was freely given when social media plutocrat Mark Zuckerberg traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate after the election to pay obeisance with massive Facebook policy concessions, and further when he along with numerous other tech titans donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration fund. It was given when Republican Sen. Joni Ernst crumbled under threats and pressure and withdrew her opposition to Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary. It is given every day that institutions do not speak up in legitimate defense of their rights and interests.
Consider two examples. Universities are now paralyzed with fear as they grapple with disastrous cuts in federal funding for research and more aggressive assaults to come. The administration’s recent letter to Columbia University, demanding highly specific and invasive changes in university policy as a prerequisite to any consideration of lifting the cancellation of $400 million in federal government grants and contracts, has struck alarm in universities nationwide. This follows a stream of other administration actions zealously exceeding Supreme Court rulings to demand an end to all diversity-related programs; threatening Georgetown University’s law school with a federal jobs blacklist for its students if it doesn’t remove DEI elements from its curriculum; and apprehending for deportation a recent Columbia University graduate student from the Middle East, Mahmoud Khalil (a U.S. permanent resident), for his anti-Israel advocacy on campus.
“So far,” write Harvard political scientists Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky, “America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education” (though Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has been one exception). If that silence continues, higher education in America will suffer grievous damage to its ability to advance U.S. competitiveness and foster a marketplace of ideas and innovation.
The same goes for the country’s big law firms as they grapple with the consequences of Trump’s ferocious “retaliatory spree” against firms that have been associated with the opposition party or with legal cases against Trump. Many individual lawyers at a host of top firms have signed an open letter condemning the president’s actions (which seek to cripple the firms by barring them from interaction with federal agencies), and the president of the American Bar Association has made a similar statement. Once again, federal judge Beryl Howell blocked the administration from implementing a constitutionally dubious policy, claiming it was “viewpoint discrimination” that “runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections.”
But the larger problem remains: a lack of courage. The point of these attacks, writes the historian and autocracy expert
, is to intimidate the field, “to make every university afraid to offend the administration; to make academics self-censor; to make students wary too.” For the moment, intimidation is working. Every actor, every institution, is ducking for cover and hoping others will walk the plank for them. Universities, law firms, media enterprises—these are core institutions of a democratic civil society that autocrats target as they seek to amass unassailable power. If each of them cowers in fear, waiting for something to happen, by the time a critical mass of resolve emerges, it may be too late.The American public simply does not realize how aggressive, ambitious, far-reaching, and extreme is the Trump administration’s assault on independent institutions. The defense of democracy requires persistent, principled, and coordinated action, and now is the time to organize it.
It sounds so hackneyed to recall the ragged band of freezing revolutionaries at Valley Forge, the more than 600,000 dead in the American Civil War, the existential struggle against fascism in World War II, freedom’s close call during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, the brutalities endured by legions of African Americans and their partners who stood up, sat down, and marched for civil rights—and so much more. So many brave people, extraordinary and ordinary, of every color, ethnicity, status, and faith, have sacrificed so much to build this democracy. We have no right to throw it away now.
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy rallied the country to meet an existential challenge, and to lean into it: “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”
We should do so now as well.
This article is adapted from the "Diamond on Democracy" column hosted by American Purpose at Persuasion. To sign up for Larry Diamond's column and other content from the American Purpose family at Persuasion, click here.
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" MADE IT MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!"
Trump's professor at Penn's prestigious Wharton School, William T. Kelley, stated "Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had."
Trump traded in a formal education and even the development of a vocabulary beyond the 4th grade for the life of a morally dissolute playboy after his father arranged for him to evade the draft to join the family's real estate firm.
Over the years, Trump hungered for more and more publicity and constantly appeared in the tabloids surrounded by fawning women. We now know that along the route, he bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, one of whom successfully sued him for sexual molestation and defamation, cheating on his wives and cooking his company's books to "catch and kill" the revelation of his sexual forays with a porn star.
He also managed to set up a self-glorifying university which turned out to be a fraud on its students, as did his applications to numerous creditors whom he swindled out of hundreds of millions of dollars by vastly overvaluing his assets.
So how did Donald Trump get to go from being a rich dissolute playboy with the morals of an alley cat to being a rich dissolute President with the morals of an alley cat?
The closest explanation I can think of is by means of a riff on a comment made by Samuel Johnson to his biographer James Boswell about an acquaintance: " Sir, he was repugnant in his company, he was repugnant in his style, he was repugnant everywhere. He was repugnant in a new way and that made many people think him great."
Yes. He was repugnant in a new way. Paying a ghostwriter to write "The Art of the Deal" in Trump's name and with his wealth, swagger, ego and bluster, this blowhard and clown came to be the perfect sitcom attraction for prime-time t.v. And the more he growled, grated, gloated, grimaced and glamorized himself on t.v., the greater his audience swelled to be entertained by his bloated ego, bombast and put-downs.
In short. No one had even seen such a pompous, obnoxious and egotistical blowhard before, with the possible exception of Don Rickles's onstage persona. He was novel and refreshing, and offered a new face and style to enter the political arena with the support of right-wing conservatives, along with wealthy and influential friends, domestic and foreign, who learned how to manipulate his insecurities through flattery, money and promises of power.
During his first term in office, the dark side of him palpably emerged, in which he revealed his insecurity and desperation and lust for power and admiration, relying on lies and self-delusions to sustain his mental equilibrium. Over time, even his staff openly admitted that he relied on conjuring "alternate truths " and "alternate facts" to hold his world of illusions together. Even his niece, a psychologist with a Ph. D. in psychology, has openly referred to his serious mental unbalance and delusions of grandeur.
As we all too painfully know, his unwillingness to accept reality and to accept defeat in the 2020 election led to his desperate lies to his gullible cult followers that he actually won the election, though he was unable to convince a single court among the 80+ law suits he filed that his election was stolen. To this day, he is mentally incapable of letting go of his delusion that he won the 2020 election.
And while his victory in 2024 was more a repudiation of Joe Biden than a vote of confidence in him, he still cannot let go of the fact that he was a loser and that most people know he was and may still be.
I believe that it this obsession to crush his perceived enemies and non-believers through promises, threats, manipulations and extortion, and blackmail that drives his every waking hour.
And though Donald Trump now believes that he is on the verge of dominating every facet of life in the United States, it is not enough to satiate his unquenchable ego.
It is the entire world to which he now looks to become the Master of the Universe by turning upside down every country's economy and evoking the fear and admiration of every human being on this planet, all of whose lips will now be talking about the mighty and powerful Donald Trump.
So at what price to all of us does Trump aspire to be top of the world?
It conjures up visions of Jimmy Cagney's movie character's self-immolation shouting:
"Made It Ma !Top of the World!"
All of this. All of this.