President Donald Trump is frequently accused of authoritarian ambitions. It’s an image he often seems to relish, either sincerely or as trolling. “Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator,” he said in Davos. “But sometimes you need a dictator!” Over the past decade, he’s made a political career by dominating the news with spectacles of outlandish behavior and transgressions against the norms of American democracy. For Trump, there’s no such thing as bad press so long as he can cast himself as the all-powerful main character in every story.
Trump’s immigration operation in Minneapolis, with his loud declarations of “RETRIBUTION” as thousands of heavily armed officers flooded into a frightened and angry city, fit that brand. It has led to a new wave of concern among Americans that their basic freedoms are in acute danger. The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers made Minneapolis look like a testing ground for a new deadly phase of repressive violence by heavily armed and highly funded agencies accountable only to Trump, one that could be replicated elsewhere as needed.
But life in authoritarian regimes today rarely looks like the garish displays of force we saw in Minnesota. More often, it’s marked by a kind of stultifying normalcy: People go to work, raise families, start businesses, and even join opposition parties — they just have no hope of defeating the ruling regime in elections. Open violence is more often reserved for rare situations that pose an immediate and active threat to the government’s grip on power.
Durable authoritarian regimes in the modern era do not embrace the spectacle of politics that characterized regimes such as Nazi Germany. Fascist regimes like the Nazis embrace the visual imagery of authoritarian power, and films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s chilling propaganda piece The Triumph of the Will showcase the public spectacle of totalitarianism. But such regimes are rare in the contemporary era.
In this, the administration’s decision to target Minnesota for a highly publicized anti-immigrant campaign reveals a key contradiction between Trump’s own brand of politics and his administration’s long-term anti-democratic agenda. By taking his cartoonish strongman approach to violent new levels, he may have frustrated a far more dangerous and insidious effort by his allies to quietly lay the groundwork for the more subtle and enduring kinds of authoritarian regimes we see around the world.
What an authoritarian slide might look like in America
The most disturbing possibility of Trump’s second term is that figures like Stephen Miller, Vice President JD Vance, and others are looking beyond the current administration, toward a future in which the nation’s democratic institutions and independent centers of power, from the judiciary to activists to independent media to a professionalized bureaucracy, can be hollowed out or bullied into submission.
Trump’s closest allies and advisers can look to countries like Hungary under Viktor Orbán, where the ruling party has gradually consolidated power across civil society, as inspiration in this regard. And so far, the White House has made some early progress in emulating Orbán’s approach. The administration has decorated Washington with Trump’s face, promised to deliver grand new buildings, held military parades, and begun to rebrand the performing arts in honor of Trump. Business leaders have publicly embraced Trump this term, knowing he won’t hesitate to involve himself in their affairs, including by demanding favorable treatment from, or friendly ownership of, major media properties.
Independent economic institutions like the Federal Reserve face growing interference, including very public demands from Trump himself. The Justice Department now regularly opens up investigations into political opponents, including leaders in Minnesota during the current immigration standoff. And then there’s the concern that Trump will make headway in his long-running quest to interfere with or overturn elections themselves (in a chilling possible sign of the administration’s ambitions, the Department of Justice demanded that Minnesota turn over its voter roll as part of the latest immigration fight).
Dismantling democracy to build an electoral authoritarian regime is difficult, slow-going work. It is best done in secret, away from the spotlight, so that citizens do not know what is happening, or through administrative and legal maneuvers that are so uninteresting and gradual that citizens find it difficult to care. The idea is to show that there is nothing particularly menacing or terrifying about an undemocratic political order.
Authoritarian regimes can last for decades in this unremarkable state in which regime elites oversee peaceful but uncompetitive elections and voters participate without any expectation of political change. This kind of authoritarianism works because it is boring and tolerable: The government provides stability, predictability, and everyday comforts for most citizens, and in exchange, those citizens tolerate what they cannot easily change.
Minnesota won by exploiting Trump’s drive for attention
Trump’s compulsive need to create a spectacle means that his administration cannot hide its anti-democratic intentions. Rather, administration officials must continually engage with the public, communicating openly and aggressively about their actions and continually picking fights with their opponents. They must post edgy memes on social media, and they must tell obvious lies on the news. In Minnesota, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good was recording the encounter with a cellphone at the time, which some speculated tied into a White House push to aggressively turn out viral social media videos of arrests and confrontations. In doing so, they invite the exact kind of public scrutiny that can frustrate their anti-democratic agenda.
Electoral authoritarian regimes can still collapse due to intra-elite squabbles, external crises, or economic shocks — but they tend not to generate mass opposition or destabilizing protests. The key to maintaining a boring and tolerable political order is to ensure that there is nothing newsworthy to mobilize people into action. The population should not be angry; it should be indifferent.
When destabilizing mass protests do emerge in such regimes, as happened during the Arab Spring revolutions, they usually take everyone by surprise. In fact, the trigger for the Arab Spring — the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi — is exactly the type of tragic, gripping public spectacle that can mobilize populations to overthrow entrenched authoritarian regimes. In 10 years, Americans may look back on the public execution of two peaceful American citizens as a similar kind of tragedy that focused popular anger on the administration and its excesses.
This perspective helps to make sense of why the administration’s decision to target Minnesota has proven so damaging for its long-term objectives. Precisely because Minnesotans have ensured that the spectacle of violence by federal forces is so public, abetted by administration officials’ own shameful public statements which seem to revel in their mendacity, Americans can see what is happening — and they evidently don’t like it. Public backlash has already led to meaningful congressional scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security and its conduct, including public demands from Republicans for a transparent investigation.
Trump himself has always appeared more concerned with attention and power than building a political legacy that outlasts him. Minnesota may represent a temporary retreat, but his deep need to generate more and more explosive confrontations is not going anywhere, even if some of his allies would prefer he give them more room to play the long game in silence. The lesson for Americans who wish to support democracy is simple: Lean into Trump’s need to constantly seek self-aggrandizing confirmation of his own power, make the spectacle public and unavoidable, and show voters that the administration’s actions are intolerable. Americans may yearn for boring and tolerable politics, but they will not get it under these conditions.
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