During his first six weeks in office, President Donald Trump has embarked on a dizzying teardown of the federal government and attacks on long-standing institutions in an attempt to increase his own authority.
He has pardoned those who attacked the U.S. Capitol to overturn his 2020 election loss, placed loyalists atop the FBI and military, and purged the Department of Justice, which dropped investigations against Trump allies. He declared control over independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, punished media outlets for coverage he dislikes and his allies suggested he could defy court orders.
Those who monitor democracy across the globe had warned that a second Trump term could endanger America's 240-year experiment with democracy. His opening weeks in office have done nothing to dispel those concerns.
“Trump is using the classic elected authoritarian playbook,” said Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College, who joined more than 800 other political scientists in signing a letter warning that Trump is undermining the rule of law and the basic constitutional principle of checks and balances. “It's almost embarrassing how crude it is.”
Nyhan said some of Trump's moves echo those made by others who won democratic elections and then moved to centralize control, such as Hungary's Viktor Orban. Those who have resisted authoritarians in other countries say they are alarmed by what is happening in the United States.
“I feel like I’m living through this twice,” said Maria Ressa, a journalist who won a Nobel Prize after being prosecuted by the government of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2019, on a call last week about the threat of Trump to democracy.
“What you’re seeing is exactly that — think about it as death by a thousand cuts," she said. "You’re bleeding so much that, at some point, the body politic dies.”
‘What democracy is all about’
Trump has certainly embraced the image of a strongman.
The president declared, “we are the federal law” and posted on his social media site that “He who saves his country does not violate any law” — a quote often attributed to Napolean Bonaparte. The official White House account posted on the social media site X an image of a smiling, crowned Trump with the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
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Trump's supporters say he actually is trying to preserve American democracy by giving voters what they want — a strong president. How strong Trump can become is in question. Courts have paused several of his executive orders, including ones seeking to eliminate agencies created by Congress and ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who are in the U.S. illegally.
Trump campaigned last year promising to dismantle what he contends is a corrupt government bureaucracy, which he blames for failures during his first term and his subsequent prosecution. On his first day in office, the new president told reporters his goal was to “give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office in February, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump tapped to spearhead cuts to the federal government, claimed he is the one trying to “restore democracy.” Some of the lawsuits seeking to stop Musk's actions have been unsuccessful, allowing him to proceed.
“The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” Musk told reporters. “That’s what democracy is all about.”
But many who track democracy warn that Musk’s conception is incomplete.
“The power you gain through the ballot box is not unlimited power. That’s the essence of liberal democracy,” said Kevin Casas-Zamora, secretary general of the Stockholm-based pro-democracy group International IDEA.
‘Undermining our democratic traditions’
On the world stage, Trump and his administration have alarmed longtime allies in Europe over whether the U.S. remains committed to NATO and his siding with Russia in talks to end the war in Ukraine, a country the Kremlin invaded three years ago, and at the United Nations last month.
On Friday, Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Russian officials and many Trump allies expressed glee; European nations reacted in horror.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said the close relations between the Trump administration and Russian President Vladimir Putin's government amounted to an existential threat. "This Putin-Trump alliance means abandoning our allies, supporting authoritarianism and undermining our democratic traditions,” he said in a social media post.
The common theme throughout Trump’s moves is about expanding his personal power, said Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor.
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“It’s not even clear what it’s power in service of,” he added, noting that Trump has few strong ideological convictions.
Politicizing federal law enforcement
Despite concerns that the administration would disregard the judiciary, Trump and Musk said it would obey court rulings and eventually seek congressional approval for the changes they are making. Still, Musk and some other Republicans have also called for impeaching judges who rule against the administration.
There are plenty of other warning signs, chiefly the aggressive use of the Department of Justice to promote Trump's political interests.
The department directed prosecutors to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, citing his cooperation with the administration's immigration crackdown. That led to several senior Justice Department officials resigning after saying such a deal was dangerous and some former top prosecutors warning about the risks to the rule of law.
Trump's pick to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, represented some defendants who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Martin, in his interim post as the top federal prosecution in the nation's capital, contacted at least two congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, to “investigate” previous statements they had made. One statement related to Musk and another dealt with the conservative Supreme Court justices who were in the majority ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion.
“This notion that you can use your power to reward your friends and punish your enemies — it reminds me of something that has long been a staple of Latin American politics,” said Casas-Zamora, who is from Costa Rica.
Threatening perceived enemies
Trump has escalated attacks on media outlets whose coverage he dislikes, kicking them out of their Pentagon workspace or barring them from the Oval Office and Air Force One and picking which will be allowed to cover his events. His appointee to head the Federal Communications Commission is investigating PBS and National Public Radio, which receive federal money.
Trump also issued an executive order to take control of independent agencies such as the FCC, Federal Election Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Some leading Democrats have used striking analogies in warning about Trump's actions. In a State of the State address last month that ended with a scathing assessment of Trump's actions, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who is Jewish, implored lawmakers to remember what gave rise to Nazism in Germany nearly a century ago.
“If we don’t want to repeat history,” Pritzker said, "then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.”