The current moment

Ongoing efforts to undermine democratic norms in America, viewed from a state that once took its own draconian approach

As President Donald Trump flouts constitutional protections and established rules of law in service of his personal and political agenda, his supporters frame such radical actions as a necessary reset of political power in the United States.

Yet the president’s actions are unprecedented, and in response, many historians and political observers are sounding alarms that the nation is at risk of being transformed into an authoritarian state.

New York Times contributor Ezra Klein, a progressive political observer known for his measured, informed assessments, has voiced growing worry about where the president’s actions are taking the country. In this podcast, he asked Quinta Jurecic, a senior legal editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, if there is reason to panic over the administration’s undermining of democratic norms.

Jurecic responded: “I feel like we’re getting there.” Klein asked if that meant the nation was at “threat level orange” and she said yes. That was in early February 2025, two months into the president’s second-term juggernaut.

Even a casual student of history can recognize evidence of authoritarian behavior. The question is whether the world’s oldest existing democracy is sliding toward autocracy or simply going through a risky recalibration. In this, the first of a series of articles on the topic, The Mississippi Independent looks at commentary about the ongoing moment and how Americans are responding or likely will respond. Future stories will recount precedents for authoritarian behavior on the state level in Mississippi. As Jurecic pointed out, there are also obvious antecedents in other nations that transformed democracies into authoritarian states.

“Americans often think of ourselves as exceptional, as outside of history,” Jurecic observed. “But we’re not. And because of that, I think it’s useful to compare what’s happening now in the United States to other instances of democratic backsliding around the world.” Jurecic pointed to Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who she said “has been very effective in dismantling checks and turning Hungary from a democracy into functionally an autocracy.”

Trump and his allies have, in fact, heaped praise on Orbán, who has undermined his country’s elections, weakened judicial independence, fostered corruption and curtailed press freedom. As a result of Orbán’s undermining of democracy, many Hungarians are leaving – almost 325,000 since he came to power in 2010, according to this site. During the 2024 election campaign, now-Vice President J.D. Vance summoned Orbán’s takeover of Hungary’s universities in 2021, telling CBS News that many of America’s public universities and colleges were controlled by “left-wing foundations” and, referring to Orbán’, argued that “his way has to be a model for us.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been particularly strident in her warnings, arguing in her newsletter “Letters from an American” that the president’s actions are antithetical to the country’s founding principles. Richardson, a professor at Boston College who studies current events within broader historical contexts, believes U.S. democracy is in existential danger. She described the administration’s actions as a “call to erase the rule of law and institute a dictatorship” and claimed they illustrate “how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism.”

Since returning to the White House, Trump has pushed and arguably exceeded the conventional limits of executive power and trod upon congressional and judicial authority, including by eviscerating government agencies and targeting American citizens, elected officials, corporations, institutions and anyone else he perceives to be a political enemy. He has long questioned the legitimacy of elections, sought to restrict mail-in voting and recently proposed requiring voters to present proof of citizenship when registering for federal elections -- an onerous requirement that would likely disenfranchise millions of Americans who don’t have passports or ready access to birth certificates. He has overseen the arrest and deportation of people whom he deems undesirable or a threat, sometimes in defiance of the courts. Many political analysts predict that a constitutional crisis is on the way, and may already be taking shape after the administration appears to have defied a court order against the deportation of a group of Venezuelans.

Given all that, there is no shortage of doomsayers, many of whom cite Nazi Germany as a cautionary parallel. Among them is Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, who predicted Trump’s move toward authoritarianism in his book On Tyranny, published in 2017 and updated in 2024, before the president’s second term began. Snyder evokes disturbing corollaries between Trump’s approach to governing and authoritarian episodes of the 20^th century, including in Nazi Germany. “Like the leaders of authoritarian regimes, he promised to suppress freedom of speech by laws that would prevent criticism,” Snyder writes. “As president, he used the word lies to mean facts not to his liking, and called journalists enemies of the people (as Hitler and the Nazis had done).”

Snyder observes: “The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

The president’s supporters dismiss such comparisons as overblown, and conservative writers have said opponents’ characterization of Trump as a fascist is a tired trope. Snyder responds that Nazis also downplayed others’ alarm over their tactics, and that Germans yearning for normalcy tended to accept incremental injustices that eventually led to unimaginable atrocities.

Economic analyst Noah Smith recently noted, “Only Trump’s most florid and hyperbolic opponents would claim that as of March 2025, our President is a dictator. 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.”

The potential for descending into an authoritarian or autocratic state has antecedents closer to home, in Mississippi, where segregationists employed draconian tactics to suppress African American voting rights and to limit free speech during Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights era. A key difference is that during the Civil Rights Movement the federal government provided a backstop, which is no longer the case under Trump. As the liberal argument goes, the United States – about half of it, anyway -- has in some ways become Mississippi, the only question being how far down that path the nation will go.

Trump and his supporters have lashed out at anyone who stands in their way, most notably during the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the runup to the attack, MAGA supporters resorted to “a relentless deployment of propaganda, demagoguery, intimidation, and fearmongering aimed at persuading as many Americans as possible to repudiate their country’s foundational principles,” reporter Luke Mogelson, who was at the Capitol that day, wrote in a first person account for The New Yorker. Though the assault ultimately failed, Trump has since issued a blanket pardon for those convicted of related crimes, including many violent offenders, and proposed giving them financial compensation. At the same time, he seeks the arrest and deportation of pro-Palestinian protesters.

Anyone caught in the MAGA crosshairs faces attacks on constitutionally-protected free speech and threats of targeted violence, firing, weaponized investigations, blacklisting, deportation, doxing and swatting (the practice of endangering an opponent’s safety by sending police to their homes under false pretenses).

Among the administration’s unilateral actions have been the arrests of foreign nationals who were legal green card holders, including one who was initially disappeared (his location was eventually revealed to be a Louisiana prison). Trump’s media allies have meanwhile gotten dangerously personal, publishing biographical details about children of judges whom the president dislikes.

The message is clear: Oppose the president at your peril. The Constitution no longer offers a guarantee of protection.

Conservative media and Trump allies counter that the administration is targeting the “deep state” and that they have also faced doxing and swatting – by liberals. The solution, they contend, is a more brutally powerful president. Faced with judicial rulings against some of the president’s actions, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson recently floated the idea of eliminating some federal courts. There is precedent for this elsewhere, as well: Strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Orbán consolidated power by overpowering their countries’ judicial systems.

Trump’s radical moves have come with such frequency that it is sometimes difficult for the media and the public to keep up. Trump advisor Steve Bannon has said the best strategy for commandeering the public discourse is to “flood the zone with shit,” an approach that Snyder says is straight from the fascist playbook, as is exacting personal, financial and political retribution from anyone who fails to toe the line. Among the more telling recent developments are American corporations, major law firms and Republican elected officials preemptively caving to the president’s demands to avoid retaliation. Many colleges and universities have followed suit, with Columbia University agreeing to alter its programs to the president’s liking under threat of losing $400 million in federal funding – the exact amount the university had previously refused to pay Trump when he was a real estate mogul, to buy property he owned that was adjacent to its campus.

As all of this has been happening, the Democratic party has had difficulty rising to the occasion, its weak response encapsulated by lawmakers holding up paddles bearing the words “This is not normal” during the president’s first second-term speech to Congress. It appears that any meaningful checks will likely come from courts, whom Trump has suggested he could defy, or from a public that is struggling to differentiate between real threats and ideological or political differences of opinion. Recognizing the difference is not always easy given America’s profound polarization, the atmosphere of global political tumult, and the pervasive disinformation and blatant lies for which Trump is now infamous, which have proven remarkably effective.

There is no real template for responding to a president who defies the Constitution and the nation’s system of checks and balances, though Snyder, who is more partisan in his assessments than many historians, provides a checklist for recognizing and responding to such threats. That includes paying close attention to language and symbols, investigating the truth independently and avoiding the temptation to tune out disturbing news due to fatigue. Snyder admonishes Americans: “Do not obey in advance” and “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.”

The editors of the New York Times offered other possible remedies, writing: “Mr. Trump’s testing of America’s legal system has probably only begun, and it will require a more vigilant response in coming months. If he continues to defy court orders, judges may need to begin holding his lawyers and aides in contempt. Chief Justice Roberts, as well as his Supreme Court colleagues, may have to become bolder about protecting the legal system they oversee.” The latter may be a long shot, given that the president essentially created this Supreme Court and the justices have already ruled that he is immune to prosecution for his actions while in office.

And, as Ezra Klein observed of the president’s court-defying posture, “If they began simply saying the court system’s authority is illegitimate, that would throw American politics into a genuine constitutional crisis. Can the president simply ignore the courts and decide for himself what his power is? And what can or will the courts do if he tries?”

Beyond a potential judicial correction, public opposition could interrupt a slide toward authoritarianism, the Times editors noted. “Mr. Trump,” they wrote, “for all his bluster, does sometimes respond to political and legal pressure and pull back in the face of opposition.” The question is where such opposition might come from and what form it might take.

Former Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who has criticized Democrats for their generally tepid response to Trump’s actions, said during a podcast interview with former Washington, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone that with the president positioning himself to undermine the courts, “I think the only recourse is taking to the street at some point.” Kinzinger stressed that he was not promoting violence but said resistance could take the form of mass protests and strikes.

Fanone, who was critically injured in the Jan. 6 attack, said he expects the president to ignore court rulings, “then it’s going to be on the American people to decide what to do next.”

Writing for The Good Men Project, journalist Maria J. Stephan observed that “we collectively know a great deal about the playbook authoritarians from around the world, from leftist dictatorships to far-right fascist regimes, use to pit people against one another, gut freedoms, institutionalize corruption and consolidate their power.” She added: “Their kryptonite is a reliance on the active and passive support of ordinary people throughout society, who provide them with the resources and other sources of power they depend on to get things done. Power can be given, and power can be taken away.”

Yet it is extremely difficult to take power away once it has been consolidated, and doing so almost always involves violence, as evidenced by the most notable historical episodes that led to fascists being ousted: World War II, the Cold War and the Arab Spring. Though dictators and other authoritarians were once typically overthrown by such wars or by military coups d'état, today the mechanism is more likely to be a popular uprising, according to this academic paper.

Whatever form resistance takes, it is more likely to be effective when mobilized early, democracy scholar Larry Diamond wrote in a February 2025 essay. Diamond acknowledged that Trump supporters might see his treatise as purely partisan, but said his aim was to articulate an “urgent concern for the future of American democracy, shaped by my study over the last half-century of how democracies rise and fall, and my last two decades of tracking and unpacking the global democratic recession,” the latter a term for the ongoing rise of authoritarianism worldwide.

“Having won the presidency fair and square, Donald Trump has earned the right to propose, and in many cases to implement, radical new policy directions,” Diamond wrote. “But he does not have the right to violate the law, the Constitution, and the civil liberties of Americans in doing so.”

In Diamond’s view, “the crisis of American democracy is now squarely upon us. Multiple illegal and unconstitutional acts are happening, and the guardrails that check and restrain authoritarian abuse are rapidly falling away.” He predicted that “it is going to get a lot worse,” partly due to the lack of effective resistance from Democrats, which he attributed to confusion and division, and to opportunism and submission among Republicans and “tactical decisions of key actors in business, the media, and the bureaucracy to comply in advance, again partly out of opportunism but also heavily out of fear. Fear is the common denominator in all of this — palpable, paralyzing, and quite justifiable fear.”

That fear, Diamond contends, “is the most visceral indication that America has entered an existential era for the future of democracy.”

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Image: Screen cap of Ezra Klein podcast banner, New York Times