Politics / Authoritarian Watch / January 2, 2026

How to Save a Democracy

Looking at how the Trump administration fits into a pattern of authoritarian governance can empower people to think about how to best resist the country’s slide to autocracy.

By Sasha Abramsky

As year two of Trump 2.0 gets underway, my column will be shifting focus. For the past year, I have been writing on the corrupt and cruel acts being carried out by the US government. I will continue to look at these actions but will now analyze them through the lens of rising authoritarianism.

My column, previously titled “Hiding in Plain Sight,” is now “Authoritarian Watch.” Each week, I will chronicle Trump’s push to reshape the United States as an autocracy. I will be talking with, and writing about, scholars, activists, legal theorists, politicians, elections officials, and others who are charting—and in many cases resisting—the Trumpian assault on democracy.

By looking at how the actions of the Trump administration fit into a pattern of authoritarian governance developed by governments around the world and across the decades of modern history, my aim is to empower readers to think big picture about what this moment means and how to best resist the slide to autocracy.

Trump, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the other horsemen of the authoritarian apocalypse like to paint their political triumph as inevitable. Yet there is nothing God-given in this trajectory. Poll after poll has shown that most Americans oppose the key elements of their agenda. If Trumpism wins, it will not be because of its enduring popularity; it will be because the opposition remains fragmented. If, by contrast, Trumpism as a project is ultimately consigned to the trash can of history, it will be because in 2026 that opposition found its sea legs and successfully pushed back against the new authoritarians. My hope is that “Authoritarian Watch” will help shape this conversation.

When a regime embraces the cult of the strongman and the notion that illegality is not illegal so long as the strongman orders it, it is to that leader that all loyalties must be attached. In such a regime, all politics is personal, and the public good is inevitably sacrificed to the private profit of a political and economic elite. When this happens, the government becomes little more than a mafia state, a place where all concepts of the public good are shredded and where the might of the state is channeled for the private benefit of its leaders. In 2025, that is what we witnessed in the United States.

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It is difficult to think of another year in US history so thoroughly besmirched by a sitting president and his henchmen as 2025. In the first year of his second presidency, Trump has governed like a mob boss—ordering his underlings to carry out one illegal or immoral act after another, ensnaring them in a web of actions ranging from the venal to the war criminal that ensures him their loyalty. Trump demands that his ring be kissed and shows his followers the consequences should they eventually refuse to kiss it.

By wielding the presidential pardon, Trump can keep his cronies out of prison and in the halls of power—but he will only do so long as they swear fealty to him. Through his willingness to use the full force of the government—its regulatory agencies, its Justice Department, its security apparatus, its powers of taxation, tariff-imposition, and auditing—against his enemies, Trump has demonstrated the vast costs that people and institutions who are seen to cross him can be made to pay. And in this environment where the honorable people have long since headed for the exits, those who remain in Trump’s circle are the dregs—the opportunistic, the feckless, the most willing to put morality to one side.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, for example, has soldered his fortune to Trump’s by ordering—and publicly glorying in—the assassination of civilians. In embracing the sadism of indiscriminate ICE raids as well as the illegal deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to the supermax CECOT prison in El Salvador, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has similarly tied her future to that of Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi has also sacrificed her integrity on the altar of the MAGA leader by turning the Justice Department into both a vengeance machine for the president and a protection agency, using its discretion to steer investigations away from Trump—including by censoring the Epstein files. Tom Homan, the scandal-plagued border czar who reputedly accepted a bag full of cash in a sting operation shortly before the 2024 election, knows that the moment he crosses Trump he becomes vulnerable to prosecution. RFK Jr. has so thoroughly demolished large parts of the country’s public health infrastructure that, were it not for Trump’s patronage, he’d have been run out of town months ago. And the list goes on. At every level, Trump has coopted government officials, military leaders, cabinet secretaries, and intelligence analysts to his sordid and vicious agenda.

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For the past year, I have documented this ugly moment. Throughout these long months, Trump has repeatedly sought to punish political rivals. He’s demanded that the DOJ conjure up absurd criminal charges against individuals and has financially penalized cities and states whose leaders don’t do his bidding. He has ritualized humiliation as a modus operandi in his wars against immigrants, transgender Americans, proponents of diversity, academic and legal organizations deemed not sufficiently MAGA, scientists seeking to raise the alarm around climate change, public health officials, and labor organizers.

In 2025, Trump busted through a range of anti-corruption barriers, enacted by Congress over the past century to protect the republic from leaders interested in wielding vast political power to secure equally vast private wealth. He stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and started to solicit “gifts” such as Qatar’s donation of a luxury jet to serve as the next Air Force One and arrange pay-to-play dinners at which investors in Trump meme coins gain private access to the Trumps. It should be no surprise that allegations are now doing the rounds that donors can reputedly pay six-figure sums to lobbyists close to Trump, favored organizations, and Trump-affiliated political action committees to start the ball rolling on individual presidential pardons.

Trump’s actions, against which his cabinet and the GOP leadership in Congress have pushed back not a whit, have made previous episodes—such as the 1920s Teapot Dome Scandal—in which presidents and their cabinet secretaries have traded political favors and protection for cash, look like nickel-and-dime operations.

It’s tempting to think of the Trump’s second term as simply an endless firehose of crude statements, brutal actions, corrupt practices, denigrations of other democracies that have historically been America’s close allies, and endorsements of the wackiest conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet. At times it can come off as little more than a malignant form of chaos.

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