What Authoritarianism in America Would Look Like

Objects in the rearview mirror may be closer than they appear

The new movie, Civil War depicts a snapshot of life in America, under a dictatorial president, succumbing to extremist forces and a blanket of propaganda.  It is a scenario worth considering, some version of which many of us fear would become a reality should Donald Trump regain the White House.  While the origins and ideologies of the various factions in the movie are intentionally presented as ambiguous, in our real world there is one side that is more predisposed to violence than the other.  Don’t look for Democrats to be storming the Capital should they lose.  But then what happens? 

Rather than the full-blown, or even sporadic, hot civil war, we are far more likely to be like a Russian frog in boiling water.  Should Trump return to the Oval Office, there are strong indications that he will form an authoritarian system of government that erodes our democracy, not with a sudden burst of factional violence, but more likely, an administration that gradually eliminates the institutional norms that have long earned the critical mass of trust that makes our government operational.  Distrust of government already exists today, but it is not yet at a tipping point that would mark it for destruction by the people it serves.   Unfortunately, distrust is contagious, carried by conspiracy theories and falsehoods that, for example, emerged as “The Big Lie” four years ago – the ongoing narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.

The Big Lie has been effective propaganda - an example of how authoritarianism begins, with a singular focus on destroying trust in our incumbent governing institutions. A Trump “restoration” to the White House would signify the triumph of The Big Lie, in which enough voters are motivated by the belief that he is entitled to be president.  Once in office, we would begin to witness the dismantling of the administrative state (aka “the deep state”) and the concentration of power under Trump based on the rationale that he has a clear mandate to proceed.  The preparations are already underway.

And so is the submission and acquiescence of potential rivals that is a necessary condition of consolidating power.  We don’t need to speculate about what this will look like because we are already seeing it, bubbling up in every one of our institutions and branches of government.  Here are the foreboding developments within each:    

The Legislative Branch

Numerous Republican members in both houses of Congress have either chosen retirement, been primaried out of their seats, or sheepishly given in to their leader, Donald Trump.  The worst of them were once the most vocal about his unfitness for office, having only recently discovered that there is no room for dissent or dialogue within the MAGA-dominated Republican Party.  Authoritarianism is transactional, in which power is granted to followers only if there is no wavering from the diktats of their leader. 

While the actions of current Republican House Speaker Michael Johnson represent a refreshing break from the MAGA wing of his party by supporting the recent bill providing urgent aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, he still may lose his speakership role as a consequence of his defiance. 

In parallel, our tax money is being spent on kangaroo court-style hearings in the House of Representatives that are entirely devoted to wresting power from the “Biden Crime Family”.  Under a future Trump reign, we can expect a dramatic growth in these types of hearings, likely coordinated with the presidentially controlled Department of Justice, for the sole purpose of exacting retribution on Trump’s enemies. 

The Judicial Branch

Trump had the privilege of appointing over 200 federal judges during his term, including three Supreme Court Justices who have succeeded in carrying out his mandate to overturn Roe vs. Wade.  But no judge better exemplifies the transparent loyalty to the person who nominated them than Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon. Cannon is currently assigned to the case against Trump for his handling of classified government documents, and over the last several months, she has succeeded in delaying any meaningful movement forward on the case.  A trial is unlikely to happen until 2025, during which – if Trump is elected – the entire case will be thrown out.  What might be a corruption of judicial processes for the average American will be the standard operating procedure for our future authoritarian government, in which one's power is transactional in the worst possible way.

Meanwhile, in the Supreme Court, we are already seeing the extremist right-wing conservative justices giving actual consideration to the granting of full immunity to presidents.  Such a law would defy a core principle of our system of law and order by literally placing one man’s behavior above the law – a dysfunctional reality that also happens to be the origin story of America.

The Executive Branch

A healthy administration within a democratic republic relies on the delegation of administrative decisions to proven experts and/or competent managers.  While their mandate is to carry out the policy of the president, they are also constrained by regulations and guidelines that, in most cases, are an outgrowth of learnings through history.  Cars have seatbelts and airbags because they save lives, delivering a social net benefit that more than offsets the financial costs of complying with the regulatory requirements.

In an authoritarian regime, much of this will go away.  Based on the playbook known as Project 2025, a product of the increasingly extremist right-wing think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the administrative state will be dismantled and a disproportionate amount of decision-making and power will revert to the president.  Additionally, the customary independence that has long been granted to the Department of Justice (and by extension, the FBI) will be jettisoned, effectively transforming the DOJ into a judicial apparatus of the president that can be weaponized as needed, against his enemies.  The enduring principles of constitutional law and order will begin to blur.

What will this look like in practice?  We’ve already gotten a glimpse. 

Many of us remember an infamous cabinet meeting early in Trump's term when, before the cameras, he went around the room for the specific purpose of accepting praise from each of his obsequious minions.  In a nation of empowered individuals, we often think of cabinet members as the most talented, experienced, and well-respected leaders within their fields.  What we instead witnessed was a ritualistic demonstration of sycophancy typical of Putin's Russia or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, or perhaps an episode of The Apprentice.  It was the “Dear Leader" protocol of standard authoritarianism – a nauseating display of weakness, fear, and subservience, with their expected loyalty to the country warped into loyalty to a single human. It is offensive to anyone with normal American sensibilities.  

The Private Sector

Businesses are politically and morally agnostic – they are motivated by profit, for better or worse, but with the right guardrails of regulation and oversight, we can align corporations and their profits with moral behavior.  But because they are predisposed to pursue profit, they will naturally seek to be on the winning side of any political realities that disrupt what we would consider the free market.  As self-interested entities, “freedom” includes being free to get away with anything they can to maximize profit.

In an authoritarian government, freedom is a far more relative term; it is an asset allocated to businesses based on the value they represent to the authoritarian.  While in a healthy economy, the marketplace picks the winners, incentivizing performance and morality, in an authoritarian regime, the president picks the winners.    

This means that the right business decision relies on serving the president as the premier stakeholder (ahead of shareholders, customers, and employees).  We can already see business leaders subtly positioning themselves to remain in the good graces of Trump in case he regains the presidency, and because this particular president diligently tracks who said nice things to him vs, who said mean things to him, we are subjected to platitudes like that of JP Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon who recently opined that  

“(Trump) was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.” 

To properly hedge his bets, Dimon has also said many nice things about the Biden economy, but what he failed to say is that Trump represents a threat to a viable free market in general, and if that comes to pass, he wants to make sure he and JP Morgan Chase are safely on the winning side.    

This is a business decision.  This is what businesses do when faced with the conditions imposed by an authoritarian leader, and it is the reason that Russia has oligarchs running all of their major companies.  Trump will favor his favorites – those who are nice to him – and punish those who are not, as he attempted to do to AT&T in their pursuit of a merger, simply because CNN was mean to him.  And that leads to the next institution that would inevitably be corrupted under an authoritarian

The News Media

We already have a large and vocal right-wing media structure, with Fox News having effectively served as the “state media” arm during the Trump administration.  Following in a long tradition of authoritarians, Trump has declared mainstream media as “the enemy of the people,” and if he regains the White House, there is nothing to prevent him from attacking and subduing that “enemy”.  He has long threatened to expand libel laws to prevent the media that he doesn’t like from doing their job, and he has expressed his long-held opposition to the First Amendment in various ways.

What would be different under a new Trump presidency?  He would be in a better position to carry out these threats. 

Because the media is also a business that reports to shareholders, the leaders of the major outlets would be forced to make the tough decisions necessary to keep them functional and operating.  Since they would be under threat of having their broadcast license revoked or becoming a target of DOJ legal action or even forcibly shut down, the sacrificial lamb is likely to be editorial freedom.  These executives will take pains to avoid making it look like censorship, they will let contracts with their more vociferous personalities expire, they will enforce hands-on approval of all content, and they will rationalize all of it based on anodyne statements like It is better to have a voice than no voice at all.

But that voice, and every other voice of opposition, will be effectively silenced.  We might not even see it happening because the large majority of what we are permitted to see and hear will not betray any reality that could upend the government-authorized narrative. 

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An authoritarian America will maintain the pretenses of democracy without the substance to hold our American origin story in place.  It will, of course, migrate to becoming a full mythology, in which those who support the new government are the real patriots, and the dark chapters of our history are painted over with an Orwellian flair of nationalism.  The government will throw some highly visible bones to the populace – stimulus checks, token social programs, things that Trump will claim Democrats wanted to do but couldn’t.  Combined with the control of information, it will subdue opposition and provide the pathway to further erode democracy.

The shadow of dystopia won’t fall upon us overnight – it will happen gradually, and then suddenly. Like that frog in the boiling water, we will die without knowing it.  We will be a different country, much like Russia is today, in which the only path to survival (or for a select few, prosperity) is complete submission. 

Each day under such a regime, we who love democracy will lose strength, increasing the odds that we the people will ultimately succumb to a government that is no longer by and for the people.  The disturbing reality is that plans are already well underway to make this happen.  The one thing we all must do to prevent it from progressing is to hold tightly to the reins of power with our voices and our votes in the crucial months ahead.

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