From his creation of a ‘papers-please’ police force to unilateral military actions to his disregard of court orders, even those who warned it would happen are alarmed.

One year into Donald Trump`s return to the White House, those who warned Americans that he would try to rule as an autocrat confess they got one important detail wrong.

They never imagined it could happen so fast.

"This was the picture we were painting," said Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia who was among a cadre of Republicans urging voters to support Democrat Kamala Harris over Trump. "Unfortunately, we`re having to live this out."

From the moment he took the oath of office, Trump immediately began consolidating power, issuing a string of executive orders declaring various "emergencies" to justify expanded unilateral authority to waive rules and laws. He pardoned hundreds of violent domestic terrorists who had assaulted police officers to advance his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. He cut programs already funded by Congress and spent money on things for which they had not. He defied federal judges. He declared he had the authority to kill suspected drug smugglers on the high seas and then to attack a foreign country, without congressional approval, to capture its dictator. And most recently, he has deployed a de facto secret police force in military gear, answerable only to him, in a city where he is broadly despised. One 37-year-old mother and American citizen is already dead, shot in the head following a dispute with immigration agents.

Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government and co-author of 2018`s "How Democracies Die," said he did not foresee how quickly Trump would move.

"It`s been a little bit more aggressive than I anticipated," he said, adding that he and a colleague who published an article a year ago previewing Trump`s return were especially taken aback by his readiness to use deadly force against Americans through agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "We didn`t anticipate the deployment of ICE as a violent paramilitary arm of the state."

Trump`s staff deny that he is an autocrat. When asked to comment for this story, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called the inquiry "deeply unserious" and evidence of "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Trump himself has instead turned the suggestion that he is an autocrat on its head, and accused his critics and Democrats of undermining democracy. "Because the fact is, I am not a threat to democracy, they are," he said at a rally in September 2024.

That formulation worked for him during that election, as exit polls showed that while American democracy was a top issue, Trump supporters believed it was he, despite Jan. 6, who would be better for the continuation of the republic.

That view may be shifting, with new polls showing that most Americans do not support his military adventurism - threatening to take Greenland by force, for example - or the way ICE is behaving.

"The secret police created by Trump and DHS and funded exuberantly by Congress are far more diabolical than anyone imagined," said Ty Cobb, a lawyer in Trump`s first-term White House. "Masks, suppressors, mistakenly perceived immunity and license to kill American citizens. Just dystopian."

Robert Kagan, a neoconservative scholar who worked in the Reagan administration, made what was considered by many at the time an outlandish prediction when he wrote in late 2023 that a Trump dictatorship was the most likely outcome if he returned to power.

Today, he says Americans, even as polls show their support for Trump falling, still are not alarmed enough.

"Everybody has to understand that he is not going to allow the Democrats to take power in the 2026 elections. We`re 10 months away from the end of elections," Kagan warned. "If I`m getting credit for predictions, that`s the prediction I`m making."

Autocracy promised, autocracy delivered

Even during his first run for the White House in 2016, many Americans, including a significant percentage of "mainstream" Republicans, grew alarmed by his demagoguery and embrace of violence. No less than JD Vance, now Trump`s vice president but at the time working at a venture capital firm, confided to a friend that Trump could well be "America`s Hitler."

After Trump won and took office in 2017, the autocratic declarations continued, although were often ignored by many Americans because then-Vice President Mike Pence and most of Trump`s top advisers and Cabinet members, who were largely mainstream Republicans, either talked him out of his plans or ignored him, knowing that his short attention span meant he was likely to forget.

Trump spoke about acquiring Greenland in his first term, too, but as a purchase. When Denmark made clear it had no interest in selling the territory and with most of his advisers stressing the importance of the NATO alliance, that was the end of it. Trump also spoke of shooting protesters and illegal border-crossers, but his first-term military advisers told him that doing so was illegal, and they would not comply.

The confidence among his aides that his autocratic excesses could be contained, however, grew less certain as the years passed, and then disappeared entirely when he lost reelection in 2020 and spent the next two months plotting to remain in power regardless. His efforts resulted in the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the Capitol.

Many Republicans, including then-Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, believed Trump had been chastened by the uniform condemnation of his actions and that, in any event, he was finished politically.

Trump, though, never showed the slightest remorse for inciting the attack that injured 140 police officers and led to the deaths of five. Indeed, as federal prosecutors ramped up an investigation into his actions leading up to and on that day, Trump began claiming that it was being done solely to prevent him from returning to office.

With the complicity of many Republicans who feared his followers and a news media eager for access and willing to downplay Jan. 6 in return, Trump just 2 1/2 years after having left the White House in disgrace had become the front-runner to win his party`s nomination.

It was then that Kagan published a lengthy, detailed essay warning that Trump was likely to win the presidency and then make himself a dictator. Two years later, the piece proves remarkably prescient, predicting step by step how Trump would win back the White House and how he would behave once there.

"Let`s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day," Kagan wrote.

As Kagan foresaw, Trump has, in fact, used the excuse of the criminal investigations into his own actual conduct to turn the Justice Department into his personal attack dog, launching criminal probes into his former FBI director, the attorney general of New York, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, lawmakers who taped a video urging members of the military not to follow illegal orders and, most recently, elected leaders in Minnesota who oppose his deployment of ICE there.

With a sycophantic defense secretary unwilling to tell him what he is not allowed to do, Trump has summarily killed more than a hundred alleged drug smugglers on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific without even a formal criminal accusation, let alone a trial. He similarly attacked the capital of Venezuela to capture its dictator - another supposed "law enforcement" exercise but which nonetheless killed dozens of people, both Nicolás Maduro`s security guards and ordinary Venezuelans alike.

"The pardons for Jan. 6 rioters were extended to all violent criminals, his DOGE disaster with (billionaire donor Elon) Musk, his reckless foreign policy adventurism, gross politicization of the Justice Department and deployment of the military to 10 American cities are all instances where the stated threat was not taken seriously enough by people," said Amanda Carpenter, once a Republican Senate aide and now a researcher with the Protect Democracy nonprofit group.

American democracy`s last stand

As hopeless as it all might seem now to democracy defenders, Kagan, Levitsky and others believe a Trump autocracy can still be thwarted, although doing so now that he once more has the levers of presidential power is a considerably taller order than it would have been in 2023 and 2024.

The biggest challenge, they worry, remains persuading the 77 million Americans who, having watched Jan. 6 live on television and then listened as Trump campaigned on "retribution" and "taking back" the country from "vermin," still believed that Trump was an acceptable choice as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

The task is made even tougher when so many of the country`s top institutions - business leaders, universities, major law firms - quickly and publicly pledged their fealty to Trump. They donated millions to his inauguration and stood behind him as he let loose a speech packed with all his favorite grievances from his campaign. They caved to his open coercion and extortive demands. The head of Apple, the company that in 1984 released an iconic ad decrying tyranny, offered to Trump a solid gold trinket as tribute during an Oval Office visit.

"If Columbia University and Paul, Weiss and Paramount can`t stand up to this government, then how the hell can the average American?" Levitsky wondered. "It`s a powerful signal."

Yet even among those Americans who, unlike typical voters, do pay close attention to current affairs and do care deeply about the rule of law as a core value, the portrait of Trump as an emerging despot is still viewed as alarmist.

Hugh Culverhouse, a wealthy Miami lawyer who donated $500,000 to put Trump back in the White House, now has serious misgivings about his behavior in office. Back in 2024, he said he had no concerns about Trump`s autocratic tendencies because of the checks and balances provided by the judicial and legislative branches. "This will be a short period in history and we will swing right back to the middle," he said then.

Today, the one-time federal prosecutor said he is appalled by Trump`s extrajudicial killings. He opposes the clearly political prosecutions against his critics. As to the ICE presence in Minnesota: "Granted, what`s happening in Minneapolis is something that got out of hand."

Yet Culverhouse does not blame the president for this, describing it as just Trump being Trump, behaving the same way he has his entire adult life. "You got a Doberman Pinscher. A Doberman by birth is aggressive," he said. "You can`t breed it out of him."

Instead, Culverhouse blames Trump`s closest advisers for not reining him in and, most of all, members of Congress, of both parties, for not standing up to him. "The remedy is for the Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate to do their fucking job," he said.

Despite all this, Culverhouse believes those who worry about a looming Trump dictatorship are still needlessly catastrophizing: "Outside of a law school professor wanting publicity, it`s never happened and it`s not going to happen."

Kagan, as he did in his 2023 essay, said that depending on Congress to stand up to Trump is absurd. Just four Republican senators could, today, block Trump and save American democracy by voting with Democrats, he said. He was quick to add he has no illusions about that happening.

"The Republican leaders in the Senate and the House are willing to have a dictatorship if they can keep their jobs," he said.

Which means that the only way to check Trump`s continuing drive for autocracy is for everyday citizens who do care about democracy to turn out in droves come November and hand Republican candidates a resounding loss, Kagan and others said.

The results need to be unambiguous, Levitsky said, or Trump would try to overturn the results, just as he tried in 2020 after losing to Democrat Joe Biden by seven million votes.

"I worry about ICE agents intimidating people at the polls," Levitsky said. "We know they`re going to try to manipulate the election. The only question is if they are going to get away with it."

 

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S.V. Date
Senior White House Correspondent, HuffPost