Don't Expect To Wake Up And Someone To Say "Trump Became A Dictator Today"— It's A Process

The Next Republican Could Even Be Even Worse

This week, Robert Reich wrote in an email that “Authoritarians benefit from an under-informed population— which is precisely why Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Republican Party are carrying out the most sweeping assault on the American mind in modern history. Trump has effectively dismantled the U.S. Department of Education— gutting its staff and attempting to close the department altogether. American children be damned. He's cutting funding to public libraries and museums— invaluable places that provide internet access, literacy programs, and homework help to millions. He's going after scientific research. Silencing dissent. Threatening universities, researchers, and students and their free speech and academic freedom… These efforts aren’t about policy, efficiency, or saving taxpayer money. They’re about control. It's about creating a culture of fear and complacency. It's about tearing down the means and institutions that allow people to think critically, challenge authority, and participate in democracy.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian published a piece by Rachel Leingang, Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada, about Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018). Stanley swapped his job at Yale for one at Torononto’s Miunk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy because he sees the U.S. in danger of becoming a fascist dictatorship. He wants to raise his kids in a country that isn’t tilting towards fascism. “When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted— that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said. “You’ve got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities. And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight. Columbia was just such a warning. I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that’s a losing strategy.”

Noah Smith posed a disturbing question on his substack on Wednesday: If and when you live in a dictatorship, how will you know? Smith wrote that Trump isn’t a dictator right now “but over the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration has done or said a number of things that sort of pattern-match to the stuff dictators usually do. And this is causing reasonable people to worry that Trump is slowly, carefully trying to push in the direction of a dictatorship… [M]any of the MAGA movement people are openly advocating for Trump to assert truly dictatorial powers.” He used quotes from outright fascists Sebastian Gorka, Tom Homan and Michael Flynn as examples, noting that “if Trump doesn’t push to become a true dictator, it’ll only be because he and his subordinates choose to defy the desires of their activist base. And that’s not something I’m particularly comfortable betting the future of the country on.”

Trump himself is near the end of his life, and he’s reached the top; there’s no real scope for further personal ambition. Instead, he seems to be motivated by a combination of rage and nostalgia. He wants revenge on the people who insult him in the media, and who worked to stop his attempted coup in 2020. And he genuinely wants to return America to the 1920s version of the nation that exists in myth and memory, mixed with an isolationist Lindberghian America that never was— pattern-matching to an era when America felt truly great.

As for Trump’s subordinates, that topic deserves a longer post. But the short version is that I think their motivation is ideological— they see themselves as defending Western Civilization from overthrow by an alliance of Islam and a quasi-communist woke movement.

Both of those visions require a deep remaking of America, involving major demographic, economic, institutional, and cultural changes. It’s a task to which Trump’s movement is particularly unsuited— it’s not a true mass movement like communism or Nazism, but more of an online fandom. That means the deep changes Trump and his people envision can’t be accomplished from the bottom up; they’ll have to be imposed from the top down. Which means Trump himself will have to amass ever more power in order to make it work.

This sort of arrogant ideological project is one of the main reasons dictatorships tend to fail (the others being rash decision-making, and internal power struggles). It’s very hard to pull off, and most people don’t really like it, and it requires you to ignore a lot of important stuff like economics. So no matter how much power Trump manages to seize, I don’t see him achieving his big goals; the main question is how much chaos he’ll produce in the attempt.

Trump is not a dictator yet. In his first term, his opponents often warned that he was trying to become one; when he didn’t, it seemed like they had been crying wolf. But one thing people seem to forget about that story is that at the end, the wolf actually comes.

But unlike in his first term, the conditions for Trump consolidating power are now far more favorable to him. The Republican Party is no longer just tolerating his authoritarian impulses— it has fully embraced them. The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions culminating in its ruling on presidential immunity, has signaled that there may be no legal check on his actions. In 2020, the military and parts of the federal bureaucracy resisted his efforts to overturn the election; he has returned the the White House with a government purged of dissenters and filled with loyalists who view him as a messianic figure.

His movement is preparing for this moment. Project 2025 lays out a blueprint for a sweeping transformation of the federal government into an instrument of authoritarian control and so far his regime is almost entirely based on it. Election-denying secretaries of state are positioning themselves to interfere with the next vote count. MAGA activists are calling for mass arrests of political opponents, from journalists to Democratic politicians to anyone they deem “un-American.”

Trump’s dictatorship, if it comes, won’t arrive all at once. It is unfolding in a series of shocks, each one testing the boundaries of resistance. His first term was just a warning. 77 million Americans liked what they saw— although many were just too stupid to understand what they were seeing.