Wednesday Reads: Can We Still Prevent A Trump Dictatorship?

Good Morning!!

We are in deep trouble as a country. Trump hasn’t even been in the White House for 100 days, and he has made rapid progress toward turning us into a dictatorship. I think Congressional Democrats are beginning to wake up, but not nearly quickly enough. Too many of these elected Democrats still aren’t taking the danger seriously enough. In my opinion, they should calling press conferences at least every few days to explain how Trump is destroying our government.

There’s an excellent piece in The Atlantic by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance (gift link): A Ticking Clock on American Freedom. It’s later than you think, but it’s not too late.

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.

Maria Ressa

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.

I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”

The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.

Trump’s methods clearly mirror those of authoritarian leaders in other countries.

The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the

Rodrigo Duterte

United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.

Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook fascism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)

Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.

This article is essential reading. I hope you’ll use the gift link to read the rest at The Atlantic.

Dave Davies of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed political science Professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die: Harvard professor offers a grim assessment of American democracy under Trump.

In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats’ warnings that American democracy was in jeopardy if Donald Trump was elected failed to persuade a majority of voters. Our guest, Steven Levitsky, says there’s plenty of reason to worry about our democracy now….

In a new article for the journal Foreign Affairs, Levitsky and co-author Lucan A. Way write, quote, “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the Second Trump administration in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy – full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties,” unquote. We’ve invited Levitsky here to explain the threats he sees to democracy and to talk about dramatic developments in the Trump administration’s confrontation with Harvard University.

DAVIES: You note in this article that Freedom House, which is a nonprofit that’s been around for a long time, which produces an annual global freedom index, has reduced the United States’ rating. It has slipped from 2014 to 2021. How much? Where are we now, and where did we used to be?

Steven Levitsky

LEVITSKY: Freedom House’s scores range from zero, which is the most authoritarian to a hundred, which is the most democratic. I think a couple of Scandinavian countries get scores of 99 or 100. The U.S. for many years was in the low 90s, which put it broadly on par with other Western democracies like the U.K. and Italy and Canada and Japan. But it slipped in the last decade, from Trump’s first victory to Trump’s second victory, from the low 90s to 83, which placed us below Argentina. And in a tie with Romania and Panama. So we’re still above what scholars would consider a democracy, but now in the very low-quality democracy range, comparable, again, to Panama, Romania and Argentina.

DAVIES: And does Freedom House explain its demotion? Why? Why did this happen?

LEVITSKY: Oh, yeah. Freedom House has annual reports for every country – the rise in political violence, political threats, threats against politicians, refusal to accept the results of a democratic election in 2020, an effort to use violence to block a peaceful transfer of power are all listed among the reasons for why the United States has fallen. I should say that even in the first four months of the Trump administration, it’s quite certain that what’s happening on the ground in the United States is likely to bring the U.S. score down quite a bit.

DAVIES: You say that the danger here is not that the United States will become a classic dictatorship with sham elections, you know, opposition leaders arrested, exiled or killed. What kind of autocracy might we become?

LEVITSKY: I think the most likely outcome is a slide into what Lucan Way and I call competitive authoritarianism. These are regimes that constitutionally continue to be democracies. There is a Constitution. There are regular elections, a legislature and importantly, the opposition is legal, above ground and competes for power. So from a distance, if you squint, it looks like a democracy, but the problem is that systematic coming (ph) abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. This is the kind of regime that we saw in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. It’s subsequently become a full-on dictatorship. It’s what we see in Turkey under Erdogan. It’s what we see in El Salvador. It’s what we see in Hungary today. Most new autocracies that have emerged in the 21st century have been led by elected leaders and fall into this category of competitive authoritarianism. It’s kind of a hybrid regime.

DAVIES: So free and fair elections lead us to a leader which takes us in a different direction?

LEVITSKY: Right. And because the leader is usually freely and fairly elected, he has a certain legitimacy that allows him to say, hey, how can you say I’m an authoritarian if I was freely and fairly elected? So citizens are often slow to realize that their country is descending into authoritarianism.

You can read the rest of the interview or listen to it at the NPR link.

Jamelle Bouie writes at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Wants You to Think Resistance Is Futile. It Is Not.