The very specific way America could become authoritarian

After the Trump administration pressured late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air last week, my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about what it tells us about President Donald Trump’s roadmap to ending American democracy. I spoke with him about some of his big takeaways, including what we can do to prevent that kind of democratic erosion, for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can also sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

It was an eventful week. What changed in your understanding of the Trump administration and democracy?

My view for most of the second Trump administration has been that they are pursuing a policy agenda that threatens American democracy, but that they were doing so poorly and haphazardly (and thus were likely to ultimately fail).

But recently, and especially since Charlie Kirk’s death, they seem to have gotten a lot more serious about consolidating power. By that, I meant that the White House has taken credible steps toward policies that would materially stack the deck in favor of the Republican Party.

A few examples include striking a deal to spin off TikTok USA and put it in the hands of MAGA-friendly ownership; threatening to go after leading liberal NGOs using RICO, an anti-racketeering law designed for mob prosecutions; and weaponizing a little-used FCC rule to threaten station licenses if they air Jimmy Kimmel, leading to his suspension.

No single one of those policies, on its own, destroys democracy. But they point to a generalized pattern: one in which policy is bent toward crushing the financial and civil society support base that allows for meaningful democratic politics.

You write that you’re afraid of the US sliding toward “competitive authoritarianism.” What is that?

Authoritarian governments come in lots of different styles. This one doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition, formal martial law, or even Russian-style fake elections. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.

Competitive authoritarian regimes target opposition parties through burdensome tax audits, dubious criminal investigations, and uneven application of campaign finance regulations. They also focus on attacking the civil foundations of the opposition — meaning attacking the donors who might fund them, the activist groups who might stand up for their rights, and the free media they depend on to get their message out.

Silence or co-opt enough of these voices, and the ruling party doesn’t actually have to outlaw political opposition or stuff ballot boxes. The opposition will simply be weak enough that letting them compete poses little threat.

In the US, this would look like a country where corporations depend on the goodwill of the White House to remain profitable, leading the wealthy to cease meaningful support for Democrats. The press would be owned — in large part, though not entirely — by the regime’s favored and trusted oligarchs. And what remains of the independent media and liberal activist class would be subject to relentless state harassment, draining the resources they would need to fight back on an increasingly uneven playing field.

How far are we down that road?

There are roughly four areas you should be watching for progress.

First, Trump using hiring and firing powers to purge career civil servants from key agencies, like the Justice Department, and erode the traditional barriers preventing undue political influence on law enforcement and regulatory decisions.

Second, Trump using the power of these newly Trumpified agencies to target dissent in civil society — a broadening of the assaults on Ivy League universities.

Third, Trump bullying and bribing large corporations until significant economic power is concentrated in the hands of regime allies dependent on the president’s goodwill for their survival

And fourth, Trump turning this accumulated power against the political opposition — turning elections into facially free contests where, in fact, Democrats face enormously unfair hurdles (and would likely be unable to govern even if they managed to succeed).

Of these four, I think there has only been significant progress in the first. He has extensive control over the executive branch, thanks in part to the willingness of key officials like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Andrew Ferguson, and Brendan Carr to play ball. But American civil society remains vibrant, large corporations and the media mostly independent, and the opposition still relatively free to act.

But what’s happened recently looks a lot like Trump offensives in the other areas, especially the second and third. This is a serious emergency.

What can we do to prevent that future?

Actually, a lot!

The slide toward competitive authoritarianism in America depends, crucially, on acquiescence — on the idea that people are unwilling to bear the costs of standing up to each individual attack on liberty before they can combine into true authoritarian control over society.

Even the most pessimistic assessments would say we’re not there yet: that Trump can’t pull something like what he did with Kimmel and expect to avoid mass pushback. Trump is immensely unpopular, and Republicans are likely to lose at least one house of Congress in the midterms, which could significantly limit his ability to silence other prominent voices.

Trump’s approach also depends on a tactic that political scientists call “salami slicing”: cutting off one little bit of democracy at a time by targeting one specific person or group, thus avoiding a sense that the collective needs to stand up for shared rights. That’s why we’ve seen not an attempt to criminalize dissent per se, but a series of discrete efforts like the Kimmel threats and the New York Times lawsuit.

Defiance, collective defiance, can make a big difference. The more that people across sectors take public and coordinated action — Congress, the media, the business world, even ordinary civil society — the more they can puncture Trump’s sense of inevitability, by fighting against and delaying his power grabs until 2027, when Democrats could hold real power to stop and hold him accountable for them.

This means, specifically, that we need more senators talking about democracy the way Chris Murphy does. It means more business organizations refusing to implement Trump’s directives and working with pro-democracy organizations like Leadership Now to demand nonpartisan regulatory policy. It means donors making a show of putting more money, not less, toward anti-Trump causes in general and toward the legal funds of targeted institutions in particular. It means media refusing to bend to Trump and providing relentless coverage of situations like Kimmel’s.

And it means individual citizens attending protests and volunteering with the organizations under threat, as well as with political campaigns that could change things in 2026.