President Trump’s decision to distance himself from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino regarding their roles overseeing ICE operations in Minnesota is a positive development, but we must be clear-eyed about the ongoing threat.

Trump is making a tactical retreat amid mounting public pressure.

Subscribe now

Responding to the backlash over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and smearing of both victims as “domestic terrorists,” Trump touted phone calls with Governor Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey, claiming they were on a “similar wavelength” and agreeing to “look into” reducing the number of agents on the ground in Minnesota. Bovino has reportedly been demoted and sent back to his post in California.

But we should have no illusions: Personnel shuffles are not meaningful policy shifts. “Border Czar” Tom Homan, who is taking over operations in Minnesota and reporting directly to Trump, is also an extreme figure who has championed the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to allow ICE to wrongly deport people without due process and has also said, without evidence, that Good could be guilty of “terrorism.”

Noem, Bovino, Homan, and advisors like Stephen Miller, who referred to Pretti as a “would-be assassin,” are not outliers giving the president bad advice. They are appointees and employees following his directives.

Authoritarians, and those who have enabled them, throughout history have relied on the same tactic: defining the “other” as an existential threat to justify the consolidation of power. They do this to manufacture a cover for illegitimate force and takeovers. So, while many want to believe Trump is adopting a “new tone,” far more meaningful change is required.

The policy architecture that the administration has built to exploit immigration concerns, deploy federal agents, sideline critics, and tilt the electoral playing field in its favor is still fully intact. Especially in Minnesota.

A threat from the top and a politicized DOJ

The core authoritarian threat doesn’t come from Trump’s appointees; it comes from the top. As Bovino said in an interview regarding controversial federal action in Chicago, “Well, definitely, I mean, I take my orders from the executive branch, whether that’s President Trump or Secretary Noem.” The rearrangement of employees doesn’t alter where the power and the authoritarian impulse actually reside: with the president himself.

We are in this dire situation because Trump has been deploying thousands of DHS agents to American cities based on the false narrative, codified in a day-one executive order, that the United States is being “invaded” by criminals committing heinous acts against Americans and engaging in espionage and terror. And, of course, Trump continues to insist that non-citizen voting is the reason why he lost the 2020 election.

In his second term, Trump has issued more orders describing critics of his policies as “terrorists” and calling on his agencies to investigate them as such. Which the Department of Justice is doing. And when protests erupted across the country in response to his extreme policies, particularly when it comes to his immigration overreaches, he dispatched more federal agents and National Guard troops to quell his critics.

Beginning in December, the administration launched Operation Metro Surge, which officials called “the largest deportation operation ever.” And as we’ve learned, Trump’s immigration crackdowns are free speech crackdowns, too. Both Good and Pretti were exercising their right to observe federal agents and were unjustifiably killed in the course of doing so.

Read more: Free speech, ICE, and free elections in 2026.

Rather than ensuring accountability for the misuse of federal power or the killings of civilians, the administration has turned the Justice Department outward, using it as leverage against political opponents and dissenting states. And Attorney General Pam Bondi, a primary enforcer of Trump’s agenda, is comfortably ensconced in her position.

She is carrying out the president’s desire to target critics and is also investigating Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and local leaders for the “crime” of opposing the administration’s tactics with their First Amendment-protected speech. And on the very day federal agents killed Alex Pretti, Bondi connected the DHS deployment to the elections.

Read more: The DOJ investigation of Minnesota officials, explained.

In a Jan. 24 letter to Governor Walz that the Minnesota attorney general called a “ransom note,” she demanded that Walz “restore rule of law, support ICE officers, and bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota” with what she described as “common sense solutions,” which included the surrender of unredacted voter rolls.

The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the power to run elections, and the administration has no legal authority to control elections or to demand state voter rolls. Moreover, this demand has no plausible public safety justification. It does, however, provide the federal government with tools to intimidate political opponents, target communities, and manipulate the conditions under which future elections are conducted.

Read more: Election deniers want your data.

In moments like this, the Justice Department should be asking hard questions about the conduct of federal officers and the chain of command that authorized their actions. Instead, it has become a shield for power and a weapon against those who challenge it.

Administration officials leapt to the defense of the federal officer involved in the killings of Good and Pretti and smeared their victims. None of the officers has faced meaningful discipline, let alone criminal charges, and there is no prospect that this administration will conduct a legitimate federal investigation that could result in prosecution, as would ordinarily be the case in the event of the unjustified killing of a civilian.

Federal authorities have also refused to cooperate with state investigators, again, as would ordinarily be routine, making it much harder for state law enforcement to conduct its own investigation. Alarmingly, Vice President JD Vance has claimed that agents who use lethal force enjoy “absolute immunity.” Contrary to Vance’s claims, federal officers do not have absolute immunity and can be charged with state crimes in some instances.

Read more about pathways to accountability: How to stop ICE’s brutality and impunity.

A responsible DOJ would be investigating and considering federal charges. But under Trump, Jan. 6-style violence carried out in service of his agenda continues to be pardoned, excused, defended, and normalized.

The personnel shuffles in Minnesota are not meaningful policy shifts

The authoritarian project Trump continues to pursue is not defined by individual officials, but by his approach. An approach that’s evident in the deployment of federal power based on demonstrably false narratives, in the weaponization of government institutions against critics, and in the extraordinary leniency extended to those who commit violence in service of that agenda.

All three factors remain present in Minnesota today. And while Trump’s entrenchment agenda is dangerous, it is not inevitable or undefeatable. By standing firm, Minnesota is forcing an opening that must now be used to build toward the larger goal: the dismantling of the authoritarian architecture that produced the crisis in the first place.

President Trump has told us what he sees when he sees millions of Americans rising up in our cities and towns to protest his ICE overreaches: The enemy within. Rebellion. Reasons to use Democratic-run “cities as training grounds for the U.S. military.”

In response to the protests over ICE’s killing of Renee Good, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to stop “agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E.” Over the weekend, Trump put 1,500 soldiers on standby for deployment.

Read more: What Trump can and can’t do with the Insurrection Act.

The ease with which the Trump administration now activates federal troops signals a dangerous new reality: the normalization of state force as a first response to political dissent. Since taking office in 2025, Trump has deployed troops to 10 American cities, exaggerating and blurring concerns over crime and protests to assert control and tamp down his critics.

This is happening as heavily armed, masked federal immigration agents, in numbers that often dwarf state and local law enforcement, conduct raids with alarming levels of aggression and violence across the country. This surge in force is backed by a clear message from the top: By pardoning violent January 6 rioters, Trump has already signaled that political violence is acceptable so long as it serves his agenda.

Subscribe now

These are the conditions shaping our midterm elections. And as a historic number of Americans are rising up to oppose the Trump administration’s abuses of power, the White House, in return, is labeling them the “enemy” and sending federal agents to police them.

More than protest suppression

The impulse to intimidate those who challenge the administration’s actions extends well beyond protesters in the streets. The Trump administration began laying a foundation last year to exploit horrific acts of unrelated violence to target opponents at scale.

Read more: How autocrats use episodes of violence to justify crackdowns.

After the assassination of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, the president issued an executive order designating “antifa,” which is not an actual organization and is shorthand for anti-fascist, as “a terrorist organization.” He then followed the order with a presidential memorandum that called for a national strategy to combat domestic terrorism. The memo linked the assassination attempts on Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the assassination of healthcare executive Brian Thompson, to anti-ICE protests, and more broadly, to “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. “

The memo lumps these different political beliefs together as “anti-fascism,” labels it “domestic terrorism,” and then frames lawful acts of political dissent, such as tracking the movement of federal agents, as “sophisticated, organized campaigns” of unlawful conspiracy. Then, the memo directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, an interagency effort led by the FBI, to investigate suspected participants, funders, and organizers.

In response, more than 3,700 nonprofit organizations across the ideological spectrum issued an open letter that condemned Trump’s order, calling it “unchecked power to silence opposition and voices he disagrees with. That is un-American and flies in the face of the Constitution, including the First Amendment bar on targeting organizations for their advocacy.”

Read more: Two ways to read the “antifa” executive order.

In November, Protect Democracy, represented by American Oversight, sued the Trump administration to demand that it release lists of philanthropic and nonprofit organizations it is reportedly targeting for investigation based on their political views and advocacy work. The lawsuit was filed after the government failed to respond to FOIA requests for that information.

Undeterred, Attorney General Pam Bondi followed up on Trump’s directive with a leaked memo that provided a checklist instructing the FBI and prosecutors how to execute Trump’s order to rewrite domestic terrorism rules.

Per Protect Democracy’s lawsuit, the government has a deadline next week to explain whether those lists of investigative targets exist and why they have not been released.

The terrorism smear in action

The January 7, 2026, shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an ICE agent brings the Trump administration’s dangerous confluence of force build-up and rhetorical escalation into sharp relief.

On that snowy Minnesota morning, Good had dropped her child off at school and was participating in efforts to monitor federal immigration agents’ actions in a local neighborhood. Bystander videos, taken by other activists monitoring the agents, showed DHS agents surrounding her vehicle, Good calmly speaking to an agent, Good moving her vehicle forward and away from the agents, and then an agent firing multiple shots at close range, killing her.

But in the immediate aftermath of Good’s death, Trump falsely stated that Good “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” and Vice President JD Vance and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem labeled her a terrorist.

Vance held a press briefing and said she was “brainwashed” and “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job… A group of left-wing radicals have been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques to try to make it impossible for the president of the United States to do what the American people elected him to do, which is enforce our immigration laws.”

After massive pushback, Trump described Good’s killing as a “tragedy” but added, “You know [federal law enforcement officials are] going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody, or, you know, they’re dealing with rough people.”

Despite that admitted “mistake,” the Department of Justice is not investigating the actions of the officer who killed Good. Trump administration officials instead pressured multiple senior prosecutors to investigate Good’s widow, but several of the prosecutors objected and chose to resign from their jobs rather than follow that directive.

A repressive spiral

Good was just one of millions of Americans who are not terrorists and who have turned out to protest the White House’s policies, and in particular, immigration overreaches, in the past year.

According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a non-profit research project that collects, analyzes, and maps real-time data on political violence and protest, these protests represented a surge by 77 percent in the United States and Canada compared to 2024. Their research emphasized that “President Trump’s migration crackdown was a major driver of anti-Trump demonstrations, with roughly 60% of anti-Trump protests also showing support for migrants or opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and to efforts to arrest and deport them.”

But the Trump administration’s forces are large — and growing. A massive infusion of funding from Congress in 2025 effectively turned ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency in history, with a $170 billion four-year mandate to expand detention and enforcement — and now those forces are being turned against protesters, too.

After Good’s shooting, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, who has become the face of Trump’s militarized domestic response, has warned operations will continue “unabated” by what he calls “agitators and rioters.”

We are witnessing the Trump administration attempt to force dissenters into a repressive spiral, a dynamic where the state treats dissent not as a signal for dialogue but as a security threat that justifies even more aggressive force.

And while the White House continues to insist that heavy militarization of American streets may be required to allow ICE to perform its duties, physically confrontational behavior by protesters remains rare, even as provocations from ICE increase. It is true that some individual protesters have tried to intervene in arrests, block law enforcement vehicles, and attempt to blockade facilities, but research shows that these tactics were used in only roughly 1 percent of the demonstrations in 2025 and that fewer than 1 percent of the demonstrations have turned violent.

Trump’s narrative relies on the 1 percent to justify 100 percent of his overreach. As the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote, “Obstructing immigration enforcement may be a crime, but it doesn’t warrant military intervention.”

Free elections require free speech

Deployment of federal agents cannot become the standard response to political disagreements. If the public square is cleared of dissenters today, the ballot box cannot be considered “free” tomorrow.

The attempts to brand dissent into “domestic terrorism” and make observers into “conspirators” are strategic smears to intimidate and silence those who challenge the president’s overreaches and ultimately, compete against those policies in future elections.

Those who wish to protect our elections must be firm: Free speech is the prerequisite for a free election. The Trump administration sees a dual purpose in deploying federal agents in such massive numbers to blue states and cities. Trump’s immigration crackdowns have morphed into free speech crackdowns, too.

Safe and healthy civic spaces do not magically appear on Election Day. The election environment is cultivated in the months leading up to Election Day through robust, sometimes uncomfortable, debates. And those debates are often messy; rarely is one side ever completely correct. But no matter who is right or wrong, we must insist on a baseline environment where our viewpoints can be expressed safely, without the looming shadow of state-sanctioned punishment.

By raising the specter of investigations, terrorism charges, and military deployments, the administration seeks to fracture the coalitions that are standing as a bulwark against executive overreach.

If that ground — meaning our collective right to stand in our neighborhoods and say “no” — is ceded now, there will be little to stand upon in November.

Mayors and governors are sending a unified and urgent message to the White House: Federal forces are unwelcome and uninvited in their cities. Still, President Trump remains undeterred, threatening to send the military to more than half a dozen Democratic-led cities, saying it’s necessary to combat a “war ... from within,” and vowing to “straighten them out one by one.”

On Monday, he said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy troops if the courts blocked his deployments to Chicago and Portland.

Subscribe now

While the official line from the Trump administration is that the National Guard and Marine deployments are needed to clamp down on protests and combat crime, Trump has explicitly spoken about using American “cities as training grounds for our military,” and, on the ground, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies are acting like they, too, are the military, using Black Hawk helicopters, drones, explosives, chemical weapons. and unmarked cars in their operations.

The aggressive actions DHS — and especially ICE — are taking in American cities should not be viewed as a sideshow to the military deployments; they are a grave warning of how the administration expects all federal forces, including soldiers, to operate. As Trump recently encouraged troops to use excessive force against protesters: “If they spit, we hit.”

These operations do not de-escalate with the presence of military force; the presence of the military sharpens this threat by layering combat-trained soldiers into volatile situations that demand restraint.

In his crackdown on blue cities, Trump is dangerously and perversely fusing the roles of the U.S. military and domestic agencies. The U.S. military is trained and equipped to confront foreign adversaries, operating under rules of engagement designed for war. Agencies like DHS and ICE are constrained by the U.S. Constitution and are supposed to protect constitutional rights. What we are seeing now is the worst of both worlds: domestic agents adopting military tactics, and the military itself being drawn into domestic political conflicts. Neither the military nor federal agents are trained or legally intended to perform each other’s roles.

Trump’s meme-generated warning to Chicago was ominous. His post, styled in the form of an Apocalypse Now movie poster as “Chipocalypse Now” depicted Trump as the amoral warmonger Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore. It included the quote, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” and a message that Chicago was “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The situation is playing out accordingly:

• ICE recently conducted an overnight operation in Chicago, where agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter and surrounded a building before breaking down doors to detain and question residents, which included U.S. citizens and children who were restrained with zip ties. Neighbors reported seeing unclothed children herded into U-Hauls without their parents. Rodrick Johnson, 67, was one of the American citizens detained. “I asked [agents] why they were holding me if I was an American citizen, and they said I had to wait until they looked me up,” Johnson told the press. “I asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.”

• This echoes similar events in Huntington Park, California, where armed agents used explosives to blow up the front door of a residence of U.S. citizens before sending in a drone to search the house for a man accused of a traffic violation. “If they would’ve knocked on my door I would have opened the door, but they blew up the window and door first,” said Jenny Ramirez. “There didn’t have to be that violence to enter my house … They didn’t knock on the door, they didn’t let me know they were them, they just blew up my window and my door and a drone came in.”

When these agents engage in such needless violence and reckless invasions of privacy, their presence surrenders any legitimacy as a mission of ensuring the public’s safety, which is precisely why this mission should not be reinforced with the U.S. military.

Read more: Eight things to know about the National Guard in Washington, D.C.

To understand why all of this is happening — and why the unjustifiable military deployments must be stopped — it’s essential to ask four key questions.

First, who wants this, and under what authority? The administration claims these deployments are a necessary response to crime, but courts find that Trump’s narratives about “war-ravaged” cities collapse under scrutiny. The Trump-appointed Judge Karin Immergut has stated, for example, that Trump’s assessment of conditions in Portland is “simply untethered from the facts.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller is frank about his desire to use troops to suppress political opposition, declaring the Democratic Party is “not a political party, it is a domestic extremist organization” and stating that “the only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle” their networks.

On Saturday, Judge Immergut blocked the administration from deploying Oregon National Guard troops in Portland. Flouting the judge’s order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth then authorized hundreds of Texas National Guard soldiers to deploy to both Portland and Chicago on the same day, escalating the administration’s clash with the judiciary and the rule of law itself. The federal judge then issued a second order blocking the administration from deploying any troops in Portland to “help” in this way.

Second, who is in charge? The National Guard is a hybrid force, typically under the command of a state’s governor. In our nation’s history, the extraordinary federal power to override a governor has been a last resort in moments of true crisis, such as when enforcing desegregation in Little Rock or quelling an actual insurrection.

But that’s not what’s happening here. The White House is sending troops from Texas to Chicago, not to address a genuine emergency, but to override political opposition. In sending troops from red states to police blue states who object to their presence, the White House is bypassing that structure and overriding the will of the states.

The troops being sent to Chicago from the Texas National Guard represent an express end run around Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who stated the deployment is a symbol of “gubernatorial authority being trampled, state sovereignty being ignored, and the constitutional balance between states being attacked.” The United States cannot remain a federalist system when soldiers from one state are sent to police another state against the explicit wishes of its elected leaders and when the justification for it is a lie.

Third, what are these troops doing? The missions being assigned to these soldiers represent a misuse of their skills. Soldiers are trained for lethal combat and life-saving disaster relief, not the nuanced work of policing their fellow citizens. Additionally, the budgets that support them are being diverted and degraded, leaving fewer resources to fight wildfires, respond to hurricanes, or aid in flood relief.

Finally, what does this mean for democracy? The long-term damage is the most alarming. Using soldiers to enforce civilian law blurs the line between the police and the military, conditioning Americans to accept armed troops on their streets as normal. It creates loyalty tests for mayors and governors, undermines the nonpolitical standing of our military, and shreds the checks and balances that protect our freedom. This is a hallmark of tyranny, which our Founders recognized clearly when the king’s soldiers patrolled the streets of colonial America, intimidated opponents of the monarchy, and suppressed their speech.

Share

Taken together, the answers to these questions reveal a deliberate pattern of abuse against the rule of law and the rights of citizens, which includes an acute threat to free speech rights.

In response to the events in Broadview, Illinois, and the greater Chicago area, a broad coalition of media organizations, clergy, and private citizens, represented in part by Protect Democracy, filed a lawsuit against the administration for violating their First Amendment rights. The lawsuit details the kind of violence the president’s ‘war’ rhetoric encourages: federal agents striking an ordained minister in the head with pepper balls as he prayed, shooting at clearly identifiable journalists with crowd-control munitions, and arresting reporters for simply documenting their actions. This legal challenge follows a recent federal court ruling in a similar case, which found that such tactics “undoubtedly chill” the media’s ability to cover events and citizens’ rights to protest.

In a democracy, vigorous reporting and public protest are the primary means by which we hold power accountable. By targeting journalists and protesters, the administration aims to silence dissent, obscure its actions, and entrench its own power.

Normalizing the sight of troops on our streets paves the way for their use in the political arena. Such a scenario is hardly out of the realm of possibility. Trump has sought to prime them for political use in speeches and rallies, and in explicitly partisan speeches to military audiences, he framed his domestic political opponents as enemies. His message to our armed forces is unmistakable: Trump’s critics are not people to be protected, but adversaries to be subdued.

Read more: Not his military

The intimidation of the media and protesters we are seeing today could be a preview of the intimidation of voters tomorrow. If federal forces can make citizens afraid to exercise their First Amendment rights on the street, they can make them afraid to attend a rally, support an opposing candidate, or cast a ballot in upcoming elections.

The president warns of threats to our system of government and to our future elections. But with its steady escalation of military force against its own citizens, this administration proves that the most immediate threat to our constitutional order is not on the streets.

It is coming from inside the White House.

Yesterday, on the Constitution’s 238th birthday, the president’s chief ideological enforcer attempted to rip out its most central protection: the First Amendment.

Subscribe now

Here’s what happened in simple terms:

• Comedian Jimmy Kimmel, in a monologue on Monday, made remarks that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, Trump’s self-appointed ideological sheriff, considered politically offensive.

• Carr threatened to use the commission’s broad regulatory powers to retaliate against Kimmel’s corporate bosses at ABC and Disney.

• Fearing the consequences, those corporate leaders dutifully obeyed. Kimmel was suspended indefinitely.

This sort of overt censorship, what legal experts call jawboning — when state actors use threats to inappropriately compel private action — is blatantly illegal. There is no ambiguity. (Good luck finding a reputable First Amendment lawyer anywhere in the country who would even think twice about it.)

Disney’s lawyers surely know this — they understand that such threats are patently unconstitutional. Yet Disney CEO Bob Iger obeyed anyway. That is a very ominous sign.

The Trump administration and the FCC have dropped any pretext of legality or constitutionality. They have made it clear that the coming campaign to censor and retaliate against any perceived ideological enemies in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination will have no basis in law and will violate the Constitution. And now powerful people like Bob Iger are behaving as if they will succeed, as if the law no longer protects even the most powerful voices in our society from government

Unless all of us — Congress, civil society, the media, business leaders, and everyday citizens — act quickly and collectively, we may soon find our most cherished constitutional rights and freedoms to be as flimsy as the 238 year-old-paper they are written on.

On that front, two glimmers of hope:

First, the backlash to Carr and the White House’s growing censorship campaign has been swift, unequivocal, and increasingly bipartisan. Here are condemnations from The Free Press, Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, and, yes, Tucker Carlson.

Second, congressional leaders announced a legislative effort that would dramatically curtail any president’s ability to use the federal government to unconstitutionally target, censor, and retaliate against political enemies. This law would help protect all of the nonprofits, businesses, schools, and other perceived political opponents that this (or any future) administration may target for personal and political gain.

More about the NOPE Act at the bottom.

Share

The FCC has become a weapon of ideological censorship

Congress created the FCC to regulate broadcast communications and to ensure they are available to all the people of the United States. Under Chairman Carr, the FCC has transformed itself into the White House’s chief censorship office. Most visibly, it held up a proposed merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media until CBS News and 60 Minutes capitulated to the White House.

The administration’s leverage over corporate mergers also seems to be at play here — not just in one merger, but three. The two largest TV station owners in the country, Nexstar and Sinclair, both have potential mergers pending before the FCC and were quick to pull Kimmel’s show from local markets. Disney, too, has a potential merger in the works as it seeks to acquire Fubo, with the Justice Department currently investigating.

Less visibly, the FCC has also opened investigations into ABC and NBC; investigated a California radio station (owned by George Soros-backed Audacy) for its coverage of an ICE raid; threatened to investigate PBS and NPR over sponsorship practices; and made demands from Comcast, NBCUniversal, Disney, and ABC related to their DEI programs.

(All of this is a key authoritarian tactic. Threatening regulatory retaliation against individual outlets was key to how Viktor Orbán and his allies consolidated power over the press in Hungary.)

This campaign has been so alarming that a bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners were compelled to speak out, commenting in an official proceeding on the commission’s efforts against CBS News:

From our many combined years of experience as Commissioners, we cannot stay silent. The Commission on which we served, regardless of the party of its Chair or the policy agenda of the President, was an independent agency. It contains a bipartisan group of five commissioners due to the sensitive nature of regulating broadcasters, and the critical role they play in free press and free speech, the bedrock foundations of our democracy. It was dedicated to ensuring that the broadcast spectrum helped to create the marketplace of ideas that undergirds political debate and ensures the richness of American culture. We have taken great pride in the Commission’s historic bipartisan commitment to that position.

To remain true to its mission, the Commission must close this proceeding without further action. To do otherwise would suggest that the Commission has been transformed into a tool of White House-driven speech suppression.

[Read their full comments.]

Just last year, the Supreme Court affirmed that this sort of jawboning is illegal in a case called NRA v. Vullo.

Justice Sotomayor, writing for a unanimous 9-0 Court:

[W]here, as here, a government official makes coercive threats in a private meeting behind closed doors, the “ballot box” is an especially poor check on that official’s authority. Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries.

The opinion also noted that jawboning allows the government to be more “effective” in “speech-suppression efforts because intermediaries will often be less invested in the speaker’s message and thus less likely to risk the regulator’s ire.” So here: the targeted intermediary, like others, has opted not to vigorously defend speech rights in court.

Businesses play right into the censorship campaign by capitulating. Disney likely felt too vulnerable, and suspending Kimmel seemed safer than trusting the courts would eventually protect their rights.1

Certainly Brendan Carr seems to be acting as if this is a power play unconnected to the law or Constitution. Here’s what he reportedly texted when asked for comment.

Unless something changes, the path we’re on ends in a very dark place.

Which is where the NOPE Act would come in.

A new proposed law would tightly constrain censorship efforts

The crackdown on speech violates our Constitution and laws. Full stop.

We shouldn’t need new laws to prevent it.

But in a situation where the government is seeking to circumvent basic constitutional principles, Congress can step in to insist the law be observed. And today, a group of lawmakers announced plans to introduce legislation to strengthen and clarify existing law and give those who are targeted better tools to push back on censorship and retaliation.

The No Political Enemies (NOPE) Act has five major components. Per the sponsors, it would prevent the targeting of individuals or organizations on the basis of their constitutionally protected speech, beliefs, and political participation by:

Reaffirming our Constitution and laws prohibit the president from weaponizing government against people who disagree with the administration. Uphold foundational constitutional principles that protect free speech and political participation. The DOJ, FBI, IRS, and other government agencies cannot be used to silence or target people for criticizing the government with constitutionally protected speech.

Deterring government officials from abusing their power to silence or retaliate against critics. Deter misconduct by making clear there are consequences for violating federal civil rights laws and that federal officials can be held accountable for abuses.

Providing tools for those wrongly targeted to defend themselves in court, including meaningful access to evidence, correcting the imbalance of proof, having the legal costs to defend themselves covered, and allowing courts to quickly dismiss abusive actions.

Providing due process for any U.S. nonprofits the government attempts to label as criminal or terrorist organizations.

Improving transparency and accountability for federal agencies that seek to silence critics. Create mechanisms for improved reporting and accountability for government agencies so that officials who commit misconduct by abusing their power to censor or retaliate against critics can be held accountable.

As if to emphasize how badly we need action from the legislative branch, here is how Bloomberg summarized the executive branch’s views of the First Amendment as of today:

We have two choices: either act now, or accept this as our future.

Following a string of high-profile payouts from elite universities — and with Harvard still negotiating a half-billion-dollar settlement — the Trump administration is now seeking a staggering $1 billion from UCLA.

That jaw-dropping demand is the predictable result of elite institutions treating authoritarian shakedowns like business deals. These agreements don’t buy peace — they invite continued meddling and set a precedent for the next, even larger ransom.

Subscribe now

Harvard’s approach shows how this pattern takes hold. According to The New York Times, Harvard was prepared to pay the administration’s $500 million levy to restore federal research funding — until its Ivy League rival, Brown, agreed to settle its own case for just $50 million. The news reportedly stunned officials in Cambridge, who are now scrambling to renegotiate, alarmed that a competitor had secured a “better” deal.

Treating these payments as “deals” is a mistake — and so is assuming the Trump administration is genuinely interested in treating its targets fairly and applying the rules evenly. Authoritarian bullies don’t negotiate; they extract. The settlements are eye-wateringly profitable shakedowns that will further fuel Trump’s operation. Axios recently calculated that President Trump has squeezed more than $1.2 billion in settlements from elite institutions.

The money these institutions are forking over isn’t sitting in a rainy day fund for the greater common good. Settlement funds will bankroll Trump’s agenda.

Big Law firms have agreed to provide the Trump administration hundreds of millions in legal services. Trump is claiming millions worth of free public service announcements from media companies and funding for his future presidential museum and foundation. Universities are agreeing to give the Trump administration control over their academic programs, hiring, and admissions.

There’s a lesson to be learned from another modern-day shakedown: ransomware attacks. And the best practices for responding are well-established and perfectly applicable here.

When a hospital’s systems are seized by criminals, its leaders face a terrible choice. Paying the ransom might seem like the fastest way to restore order and avoid losing business. Yet the FBI’s advice is unequivocal: Do not pay.

The directive to defeat the ransomware attacks is clearly stated on the FBI’s website:

The FBI does not support paying a ransom in response to a ransomware attack. Paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee you or your organization will get any data back. It also encourages perpetrators to target more victims and offers an incentive for others to get involved in this type of illegal activity.

The billion-dollar demand from UCLA underscores the ransomware logic at work: Once attackers see that targets will pay, they raise the price for the next victim. The Trump administration isn’t just recycling its tactics; it’s scaling them.

Every dollar paid — whether it’s by Harvard, ABC News, or Paramount — greenlights the next round of dictates. No surprise that the Trump administration has set its sights now not only on UCLA but Duke and George Mason University. The strategy is working.

It would also be naive for the ransom-payers to believe a one-time payout will end the harassment. After Skadden paid a settlement to the Trump administration, the firm was reportedly pressured by a Trump ally to provide representation for a client who was allegedly unfairly issued a protective order related to his divorce. Skadden replied it was receiving “many outreaches for assistance … in the wake of our agreement with the White House.”

By paying a political ransom, America's elite institutions are not buying peace.

A settlement doesn't just grant Trump's allies leverage to intervene in an institution's day-to-day work; it's an open invitation for them to come back for more deals. Cash is cold, hard evidence that the target believes they are better off capitulating to the president’s demands than refusing them.

So, what is the alternative? A unified firewall strategy that adopts the same thinking CISA experts advise for ransomware: Invest in and build a system so resilient that the attacker has no leverage. That requires a mutual understanding that no single institution stands alone and that the attacker must not be allowed to play them off against each other.

When it comes to cyberattacks, security professionals will develop a “ransomware kill chain” to identify critical points where the threats can be detected and stopped. Cloudflare has emphasized that “success hinges on a comprehensive, layered defense strategy that addresses every stage of the ransomware kill chain.”

For their part, universities, law firms, and media companies could also create a “settlement kill chain” by hardening themselves — legally, financially, and operationally — against political shakedowns. It would require a shift from competition to solidarity: abandoning rivalries to form a firewall of mutual support, where institutions present a single, unified front against the aggressor. The “settlement kill chain” could include plans to share crisis-communications plans, pool funds to resist federal pressure, and joint commitments not to settle without sector-wide consultation. It’s a collective action approach that treats an attack on a single organization in their shared sector as an attack on them all.

California Governor Gavin Newsom called Trump’s $1 billion demand “extortion” and vowed to “follow a different path.” He’ll need people to help hold the line. The reason UCLA finds itself in this position is that previous targets didn’t.

Doing the necessary organizing to defeat President Trump’s ransomware attacks won’t be easy. But the current strategy of individual appeasement only leads to authoritarian triumph.

Every year on the Fourth of July, Americans gather to celebrate the nation’s founding rejection of tyranny and monarchial power. Across the country — in small towns and big cities — we wave flags and light fireworks to affirm our independence.

At the heart of that freedom is a principle as old as the republic itself: We are governed by the rule of law, not the will of one man. The president is Commander-in-Chief of the military, but the military serves the Constitution — not the person in the Oval Office — and it is not meant to be used on American soil, except in the most extreme emergencies.

Subscribe now

Today, that distinction is under threat. Under President Trump, the military is being politicized in ways that would have been unthinkable under previous administrations. In recent weeks, we’ve seen troops used as a backdrop to jeer the press, paraded before Trump’s watchful eye in Washington, D.C., and deployed to Los Angeles over the objections of its elected leaders.

These actions vary in scale, but not in significance. They reflect a dangerous throughline: Trump views the military not as a constitutional institution, but as a personal tool.

Politicizing war powers

While other presidents have launched strikes without explicit congressional approval, Trump’s unilateral action against Iran fits a disturbing pattern.

Read more: Congress should decide if we go to war with Iran.

When people raised questions, the Trump administration responded by cutting out Democratic lawmakers from subsequent intelligence briefings and issuing full-throated attacks against members of the press. Rather than making the persuasive case to justify its actions, the White House’s impulse was to defensively lash out, attack, and sideline anyone who disputed the narrative that the attacks were an unqualified success. This response was made possible by a system-wide effort, established early in the administration, to install loyalists across the government — especially in influential legal, national security, and defense roles — and to eliminate the likelihood of any meaningful pushback.

Soldiers on our streets

Domestically, Trump’s personalization of the military is more clear-cut. After declaring there was an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, he deployed thousands of U.S. Marines and National Guard troops to quell protests against his immigration policies, despite vociferous objections from the California Governor and others. Then, troops were sent miles away from any protests to assist in drug raids by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Trump has warned the Los Angeles deployments may not be limited to that city and that it “is the first, perhaps of many” while senior military officials are trying to shift hundreds of National Guardsmen back to their life-saving roles combatting wildfires.

These actions contradict a foundational constitutional principle, clarified in the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids forces under federal authority from engaging in civilian law enforcement unless “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.” No such authorization has been given. Posse Comitatus isn’t a mere legal technicality; it's a fundamental barrier meant to protect us from an overreach of executive power and uphold the rule of law.

These deployments also erode national readiness. Troops are being pulled away from critical missions — from overseas deterrence to natural disaster response — for politically motivated show-of-force operations. Our National Guard, our military’s primary combat reserve, intended to protect our communities when disasters strike, is being rerouted into legally questionable assignments at a moment’s notice. This hinders our ability to respond when real peril arises.

Read more: Sowing confusion in LA with the military.

Expanding ICE

Although the Department of Homeland Security does not oversee the Marines or National Guard, DHS’s increasing use of force, particularly through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), must be discussed in this context. The agency’s methods raise profound questions about transparency and accountability.

ICE’s street-level tactics are alarming. ICE agents are making themselves hard to identify by wearing tactical gear, donning masks to obscure their identity, or, at other times, wearing plain clothes, sometimes without presenting warrants or identification. Their arrests have led to people, including Americans, being deported without due process, sometimes to foreign prisons that are not even in the person’s country of origin.

DHS and ICE’s actions aren’t accidental overreaches; they are chilling, un-American tactics that deny the right to confront one’s accuser and learn the charges.

Earlier this week, in Huntington Park, California, armed agents used an explosive to blow up the front door of a residence of U.S. citizens before sending in a drone to search the house for a man accused of a traffic violation. He was not home, so agents instead terrified his girlfriend and two small children. "If they would've knocked on my door I would have opened the door, but they blew up the window and door first," said Jenny Ramirez. "There didn't have to be that violence to enter my house…They didn't knock on the door, they didn't let me know they were them, they just blew up my window and my door and a drone came in.”

It would be unwise to view this as an isolated incident. Under Trump, DHS has become increasingly politicized and, in turn, less professional from the top down.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem pledged to use federal force to “liberate” Los Angeles from the “socialist and burdensome leadership” of its Democratic mayor and governor — language that sounds more like a military coup than a federal enforcement strategy. Noem made that statement at a news conference shortly before Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla was pinned to the ground and cuffed for attempting to ask her a question.

These are the conditions in which ICE is on pace to receive massive spending infusions from Congress. Vice President JD Vance said the funding boosts for ICE were so important that other major components of the spending bill, such as tax cuts and Medicaid funding, were “immaterial.”

USA Today reported that current proposals increase “immigration enforcement spending on a scale never seen before in the United States. It authorizes $168 billion, an almost fivefold increase from current spending on enforcement.” Noem and White House advisor Stephen Miller will use those funds to meet their reported goal of making 3,000 arrests per day.

There is now a preview of what could come from Florida. There, Trump and Noem appeared to praise the Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent-city type prison quickly stood up in the middle of the Florida Everglades to serve as a “one-stop shop” to detain, house, and process deportations. Trump has signed off on a proposed plan to deputize members of the Florida National Guard to serve as immigration judges.

Speaking to the press while touring the facility, Trump talked about deporting United States citizens for crimes. “Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth," he said. "So maybe that will be the next job."

This isn’t the first time Trump has talked about that idea, either. He also spoke about it publicly in the Oval Office at a press briefing with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has agreed to imprison deportees sent from the American government, regardless of whether they had any connection to El Salvador.

“Homegrowns are next,” Trump said at the time.

Share

The Founders were right: No kings

Our nation’s founders, after rejecting a king and securing their liberty, built a system designed to prevent the kind of unchecked use of force we are now seeing.

Trump’s repeated references to “my generals” and “my military” aren’t just rhetorical. They reflect a belief that the armed forces answer to him personally. They do not. When he acts like they do, he endangers all of us, weakening these institutions, degrading trust, and putting Americans at risk.

Personalization of the military is not just a breach of tradition. It’s how authoritarians consolidate and entrench power. And it risks unraveling the very republic the military was created to defend.

This year, the Fourth of July needs to be more than a celebration. We need a recommitment to the idea that our military does not belong to our highest office holder. It is ours — sworn to protect the Constitution, and the people who live under it — and not any king.

Late Saturday, against the wishes of California’s governor, the president federalized the National Guard and deployed them to Los Angeles to respond to protests against a wave of immigration raids in the city.

Yesterday afternoon, the Secretary of Defense ordered a 700-person Marine Corps battalion to join the federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

Subscribe now

This is all extremely unusual. And it is extremely troubling.

The last time a president deployed the National Guard against the will of a governor was sixty years ago — in 1965 to protect Civil Rights marchers in Alabama. That alone makes this a major escalation.

With tanks ready to roll through DC on his birthday, the president’s decision to disregard the views of state and local authorities and put military boots on the ground is but the latest step in the administration’s efforts to remake the role of the U.S. Armed Forces — an escalation that poses enormous risks to both civilian and military communities.

The president’s order is unneeded and prompts more questions than answers

Leading up to Saturday’s order, the protests in Los Angeles were relatively small and geographically limited. Mostly they were concentrated in a small area around a detention facility. There was little indication that local law enforcement was overwhelmed or unable to deal with the situation. In fact, there was not much of a situation to “deal with” at all until President Trump issued his order calling in the National Guard.

The White House and Pentagon usurped state authority and bypassed all normal procedures for states and localities to request federal assistance.

Shortly after 5 PM local time on Saturday, the governor publicly stated that California did not require military assistance and that he believed deploying the military would only escalate the situation. Less than two hours later, the president unilaterally federalized National Guard troops anyway, despite the Los Angeles Police Department maintaining that the situation was under control.

The president’s memo issuing the order doesn’t specify a city or state for their deployment, nor does it specify that the role of the Guard is only to respond to violence. Instead, it authorizes the activation of the National Guard and the regular Armed Forces wherever “protests … are occurring or are likely to occur.”

In other words, the current deployments in Los Angeles probably won’t be limited to Los Angeles, or even to California. This carte blanche to deploy the military in the U.S. is unprecedented. Under this order, any inkling of a protest could now be cited as justification for troops on your street.

The federal troops’ role is supposed to be limited to protecting federal personnel and property under the cited statute, but its invocation under these circumstances has little legal precedent to understand what that means in practice –– consider that the 101 freeway in Los Angeles, a hub of activity over the last few days, is one of a number of federal roadways crisscrossing the city. It also doesn’t cap how many National Guard or active-duty troops can be deployed, and the latter isn’t limited to 60-day deployments like the Guard.

Share

Why the Armed Forces shouldn’t police our streets

The National Guard is trained to support national defense and respond to emergencies like natural disasters — not to act as a domestic police force. The Marines are even less prepared to respond to domestic civil unrest.

Unlike local, state, and federal law enforcement, they are not trained in the legal complexities, community dynamics, and de-escalation tactics that policing demands. As Alex Tausanovich wrote last year:

“Even if the military had unlimited resources (it doesn’t), it is not in the business of preparing soldiers to do a hodgepodge of domestic jobs. Deploying soldiers to function in tense situations without adequate training or clear objectives is not only a disservice to the members of our armed forces, it can be genuinely dangerous.”

History bears this out. Consider what happened in 1992, the last time federal troops were deployed in LA (that time, at the governor’s request). One incident involved police officers that responded to a domestic violence call with Marines as backup. As recounted by Joseph Nunn, after a shotgun was fired at them through the door, “one of the officers shouted to the Marines, ‘Cover me’—a request, in law enforcement parlance, that they raise their weapons and be ready to fire if necessary. But the Marines, in accordance with their own training, took it as a request for suppressing fire. They riddled the home with more than 200 bullets. Miraculously, no one was killed.”

And now, unlike in 1992, Guardsmen and Marines have been deployed without the consent of local or state authorities — or any consultation at all. Local law enforcement, in almost all situations, should be the principal responders and coordinators, with National Guard troops acting as back up. The president’s decision to override local authorities risks creating deadly confusion due to competing command structures and limited coordination.

It’s not fair to our service members or the American people to put them in this untenable position to score political points.

What’s more, deploying service members into partisan, highly charged domestic situations risks politicizing the military. The National Guard is made up of citizen-soldiers: Americans who serve both their states and the country. Their legitimacy hinges on being seen as apolitical public servants who are trusted to protect, not provoke. When troops are sent into communities that didn’t request them — especially to enforce controversial policies or suppress protests — it erodes that neutrality and damages public trust. And in the fog of the moment, it can be difficult for protesters and the general public to discern who is police, other law enforcement, National Guard, or Marines. This confusion about roles and authority can escalate tensions and create dangerous confrontations with potentially deadly consequences.

Our troops should never be used to send a political message or create a spectacle, whether on American streets or in a military parade (like the one planned this weekend in DC on the president’s birthday).

Why oversight matters, especially now

The President isn’t the only one with a seat at this table: Congress has a responsibility to assure the Guard and active-duty forces alike are mission ready. With fire season rapidly approaching, hurricane season underway, and a long hot summer ahead, dispatching the Guard to American streets reduces their readiness to respond to Mother Nature’s worst. In fact, the lawsuit California filed against the Trump administration on Monday notes that among the federalized National Guard units are a large number of Guardsmen who serve in the state’s specialized fire combat unit — Guardsmen now unavailable to combat wildfires for the duration of this deployment. The deployment also impairs the ability of Guard units and active-duty troops alike to meet the genuine national security challenges our country faces.

Beyond safety concerns, these deployments carry a steep financial cost. Local law enforcement costs a fraction of what it takes to deploy the Guard or active-duty troops given housing, equipment, transport, and hazard pay.

And when they aren’t housed, they end up sleeping on the floor.

The federal National Guard mission in Los Angeles will cost $134 million, according to the interim defense department comptroller — over $2.2 million per day, based on the 60-day authorization. When federalized, the expense comes out of the federal defense budget, diverting funds from other defense and emergency needs. If training budgets are cut to support these deployments, policymakers need to be asking whether these decisions from the White House are undermining military readiness.

There are also military family issues at stake, which policymakers must address. These deployments take a toll on military families, who often face prolonged separations, increased childcare burdens, and disruptions to employment and education. Already, the Pentagon has announced a diversion of $1 billion from military housing — which is already underfunded and insufficient for countless military families — to cover immigration-related missions. If the president pushes the military into domestic politics, it harms our civilian and military communities alike.

How to respond to this unnecessary crisis

Looking ahead, we offer three suggestions for how to respond:

1. Keep the emphasis on nonviolent, non-confrontational protest. The TV images of military personnel facing violent chaos are simply not the reality in most of Los Angeles. Protesters across the country should keep it that way and not hand the administration the pretext to escalate further. Those who wish to stand in solidarity by protesting should consider treating it as a patriotic exercise of their First Amendment rights, American flags and all. (If you’re looking for a good opportunity, this Saturday’s “No Kings” protests will be happening in a city near you.)

2. Contact your representatives to call for increased oversight. Another way to make your voice heard would be to contact your state and federal representatives to let them know how you feel about the presence of the Armed Forces on American streets. Find your representatives and their contact info here.

3. Do not accept politicization of the National Guard and military as normal. Again, the White House wants to normalize the president using troops to carry out his political agenda. Sustained criticism — above all on behalf of the servicemembers that the president seeks to use for political ends — is critical to ensure this politicization is rejected and not repeated.

For more on domestic deployment of the military, see here.

In just the past week:

• President Trump backed down on firing the Federal Reserve chair after markets panicked.

• Trump blinked in his escalating trade war with China as he seemed to miscalculate both his adversary and economic realities.

• The administration was forced to backtrack and restore thousands of international student visas across the country.

• The president’s hostile threats toward our largest trading partner backfired, delivering the ideologically aligned Conservative Party of Canada (which, just months ago, was projected to win by 20+ points) a stunning electoral defeat.

• Trump’s attempts to bully academia into political submission were met by a strengthening front of resistance from universities across the country (the most prominent target, Harvard, sued rather than submit).

• His most prominent deputy, Elon Musk, promised to step back from the administration after failing to significantly reduce spending (and amidst a disastrous earnings report at Tesla, driven in large part by backlash against his political activities).

• Department of Justice prosecutors resigned rather than accept political interference in the Eric Adams case.

• The most prominent conservative lawyer in the country agreed to represent a Wisconsin state judge targeted by the Trump administration.

• And the administration was on the losing end of more than a half dozen court decisions on a wide variety of fronts, including a major setback on its dangerous attempt to reshape elections. As of April 28, at least 123 rulings have at least temporarily paused administration actions, and of cases that have reached a decision of some kind, the administration has lost more than 70 percent. (The courts are also showing greater signs of frustration: “Give me a break,” a judge snapped at the administration lawyer in a case on the Big Law attacks.)

Subscribe now

More importantly, Trump’s political support is cratering. Most polls find he is now underwater on every issue (including the economy and immigration) and with almost every demographic. More than a quarter of Republican-leaning voters say Trump has gone too far.

In turn, a wide variety of past supporters — people like Joe Rogan and Ken Griffin and Candace Owens and Rod Dreher and Dave Portnoy and the Wall Street Journal editorial board — have all started criticizing the White House.

At the 100 day mark of Trump’s second term, here are the numbers:

Oh, and the price of eggs is up more than 50 percent since December!

The key to consolidating power is slipping through Trump’s hands

Trump is losing in court, losing the public, losing over and over, which ultimately means he's losing the one thing critical to the success of autocrats: momentum.

To undo democracy and consolidate personal power, autocrats need to force every other powerful actor and institution in a political system to submit to their rule. To, one-by-one, decide not to resist. It’s a domino effect: Each politician, journalist, CEO, or civil society leader needs to look around, see others folding (or even just slightly retreating), and then decide to do the same.

Because of that, autocrats need people to perceive them as unstoppable, like they cannot be slowed — so you might as well get out of the way and save yourself. Leaders committed to democratic legitimacy can (and do) see their political stock rise and fall in their time in office, but autocrats count on consistently increasing power. They need momentum. Otherwise the illusion of inevitability will shatter and they will likely fail.

For the first month or two, Donald Trump had momentum – his shock-and-awe, flood the zone campaign was damaging and dangerous and often lawless, but it created the appearance and reality of momentum. But as we exit the first 100 days, his forward motion seems to have almost completely collapsed. This will make it much harder for him to succeed in his authoritarian agenda.

Harder, but not impossible

Still, I imagine not all of that is fully reassuring. How can it be? To point out how the authoritarian movement’s power is faltering is sort of like learning that stage 4 cancer is no longer spreading. It’s good news, yes, but no victory. And like cancer, Trump’s brand of autocracy has come back from remission before.

So we must remain focused on the ways he is continuing to attempt to consolidate power and override our system of checks and balances. Over a year ago, Protect Democracy predicted that — if he returned to the Oval Office — Donald Trump would seek to implement the authoritarian playbook through six specific tactics: 1) pardons to license lawbreaking, 2) directing investigations against critics and rivals, 3) regulatory retaliation, 4) federal law enforcement overreach, 5) domestic deployment of the military, and 6) refusing to leave office.

Here is an assessment of where we are on Day 100:

On pardon abuses, especially the January 6th pardons that endorsed political violence and cemented alliances with paramilitary groups, we’re in very dangerous territory. The presidential pardon power, intended as a tool for mercy, has been weaponized into a tool to license violence committed in service of the personal interests of the president.

On investigations against rivals, the White House has directed investigations against critics, universities, law firms, and political adversaries — both through the Department of Justice and the IRS. All of these are textbook authoritarian plays (and in the pre-Trump but post-Watergate era, would have been widely considered to be impeachable offences). These orders are intended to have a chilling effect, and they have, but whether our justice system is able to stand up to these abusive tactics will determine how fearsome a weapon these orders ultimately become.

On regulatory retaliation, the list is long. Notable examples include the media, elite universities (which are looking at massive funding cuts unless they submit), and any actor in civil society who fails to bow to the administration’s crusade against diversity, equity, and the rights of the trans community. Here too, it remains to be seen whether the courts will put an end to this assault on the rule of law, but the threat alone of a government that rewards its friends and punishes its perceived enemies has brought much of the private sector to heel. For just one example of how far this regulatory retaliation campaign has progressed, watch this extraordinary (and courageous) clip that aired on 60 Minutes this week.

On law enforcement overreach, the most notable abuses stem from the lawless deportation of migrants, including Kilmar Ábrego García and others who were legally protected from deportation, to a brutal third-country prison in El Salvador. The arrest of a judge in Wisconsin in dubious circumstances is also a red flag. This is all (unfortunately) likely just the beginning of abuses carried out by federal law enforcement.

On domestic military deployment, for now, the White House and the Pentagon seem to have backed off a plan to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. Domestic deployment of the military for domestic and civilian law enforcement has clearly been discussed at the highest levels, but has not — so far — been widely pursued.

Finally, on refusal to leave office, the third term chatter has increased in frequency and bluntness (such as the Trump Organization selling “Trump 2028” hats, top allied elected officials openly endorsing it, and supporters beginning to make legal arguments). While one purpose may be to create enough doubt to postpone Trump’s lame duck status, another may be to test the waters and begin normalizing an idea that is anything but.

So at the 100 day mark, two things appear to be true at the same time: The authoritarian movement is stumbling badly and it is making alarming progress. That is part of what makes this moment feel so challenging and uncertain.

But it reflects a larger and reassuring truth about our democracy (and indeed, about democracy in general). Our fate is not sealed. It never is.

To believe in democracy is to believe that we, collectively, have the power to shape our collective future. That we as a society are capable of making choices between a better future and a worse one. And that until democracy is completely vanquished — and then even after — ultimate power rests in the hands of We The People.

We made it out of the first 100 days. That was likely the most dangerous period of this administration. Our democracy is badly battered but it is still intact. It is still ours. We owe ourselves that small celebration, so long as we commit ourselves with redoubled effort to the work ahead.

By standing together — by choosing collective courage over individual cowardice — we can not only make it through the next 1,361 days. We can build a stronger, better democracy on the other side.

It was the first real constitutional crisis. As Jeffersonians emerged to challenge the early Federalist administration of John Adams, the president’s reaction was to quash dissent. Too young to have much experience with free speech and the right of citizens to question and even rally patriotically against the party in power, Congress passed and the president signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

That package contained four statutes: The Naturalization Act, which made it harder to become a US citizen; The Alien Friends Act, which authorized the president to deport aliens he deemed dangerous (Adams feared many non-citizens would become Jeffersonians); The Alien Enemies Act, which authorized the president to imprison or deport aliens of hostile nations during wartime; and The Sedition Act, which criminalized criticism of the government.

Subscribe now

Many drafters of the Constitution were horrified. James Madison wrote in response that:

The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon… has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.

The American people sided with Madison’s view. Three of the statutes quickly expired or were repealed (only the Alien Enemies Act remains on the books today and has been invoked extremely rarely, by FDR to intern Japanese-Americans and recently by Donald Trump). The crisis over the Sedition Act set the foundation for 250 years of freedom in this country, in which we can not only criticize our government, but organize as citizens to hold our leaders accountable.

As a result, America has the most robust civil society in the world, in which citizens openly debate the issues of the day, organize with each other to contest policies, and form groups on all sides of public debates, from those that advocate for pro-life positions to those that litigate for voting rights to those that educate about environmental conservation to those that research ways to lower taxes.

Precisely because this robust right to free speech and civic organizing is such a bedrock of freedom, it’s what autocrats around the world typically attack first. Those attacks don’t begin with tanks in the streets. They start with something quieter: a smear campaign, a sudden tax audit, a whisper of investigation. Civil society becomes the target, and the justification is always the same: These groups are not truly patriotic. They are foreign-backed. Corrupt. Dangerous. Even “terrorists.”

This is how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán tightened his grip on Hungary, portraying independent NGOs as agents of George Soros and foreign interference. It is how Russia crippled dissenting voices, labeling groups as "foreign agents" and driving them out of public life. It is how Turkey, India, and countless others have methodically defanged the institutions that check government power.

If Donald Trump is truly following that same playbook, we can expect that script to come to the United States.

What the attacks on nonprofits will look like

If the administration’s actions of the past several weeks are a guide, we should expect it to come in the form of yet another executive order, this time targeting not law firms but civil society groups, and potentially the donors that fund them. If following the overseas playbook, it would accuse such groups of being anti-American, or of operating in bad faith under the guise of public service. It would likely direct the IRS to strip them of their tax-exempt status and instruct federal agencies to investigate them for vaguely defined wrongdoing.

This would not be a move designed to uphold the law. It would be designed to punish dissent. If it happens, it should be seen clearly for what it is: not a defense of democracy and free speech, but an attack on them.

If President Trump tries such an executive order, the intent will be to send a message: Criticize me or seek to hold me accountable — and I will destroy you. It would be a transparent abuse of power, one that echoes the worst tendencies of illiberal regimes across the globe.

Using the IRS to attack civil society would also be patently illegal. We don’t know precisely what form such an attack will take, but an order from the president directing the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of certain categories of non-profits because they focus on ideas that are disfavored by this administration — like climate change or democracy — would likely raise serious procedural and constitutional problems. And federal law is clear that:

It shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.

There is no gray area here. As Sam Brunson, a scholar of tax and nonprofit law notes, Congress was specifically worried about this possibility:

Now perhaps this won’t come to pass. Mr. Trump has long bristled at the suggestion that he harbors autocratic instincts. "My revenge will be success," he said on Fox News, insisting he is not interested in retribution. But his record — and his own words — tell a different story. He has issued executive orders against law firms and former government officials who he believes have wronged him, and has already directed the Justice Department and other agencies to take action against perceived critics. His administration has worked feverishly to purge career civil servants and replace them with loyalists. He continues to describe the press as the enemy of the people. And now the target could be civil society itself.

The United States has always benefited from a strong nonprofit sector. From civil rights to environmental protection, from legal aid to investigative journalism, these organizations do the work of active citizenship the First Amendment imagined and fill the gaps where government falters and where private enterprise cannot reach. They are not perfect. But they are essential.

Accusing them of undermining our nation is not a policy choice. It is a signal. It is the first step in criminalizing dissent. And it is an especially effective tactic because it cloaks itself in a veneer of legality — in audits, in investigations, in IRS code. But the language of legality is not the same as legitimacy.

If such an executive order is issued, expect it to follow a well-worn rhetorical path. The groups will be framed as foreign-influenced or part of an elite cabal. The language will suggest that they are weaponizing the law, when in fact the law is being weaponized against them. The justification will be national security, or election integrity, or "restoring faith" in institutions — phrases so vague they can mean whatever the speaker wants them to.

Trump will deny that it’s about revenge, even as the targets neatly match the list of those who have crossed him or oppose his policies. This, too, is from the playbook: Sow enough confusion, enough plausible deniability, that people no longer know what to believe.

Attacks on civil society come from fear, not strength

But we can believe this: When leaders attempt to silence civil society, it is not strength. It is fear. When they attack watchdogs, it is because they fear being watched. And when they preemptively accuse others of subversion, it is often to mask their own.

If such an order comes, it will arrive not as a revelation, but as confirmation. Confirmation that Mr. Trump is not interested in preserving democracy, but in bending it to his will. Confirmation that the accusations made by his critics — that he will use power to punish his enemies — were not exaggerations, but warnings.

And confirmation, perhaps most importantly, that those who still believe he can be restrained by norms or institutional guardrails must finally confront the evidence that he cannot.

This is not about left versus right, or liberal versus conservative. It is about whether the government can be used to punish those who dare to criticize it — a form of cancel culture so extreme that the framers explicitly forbid it in the First Amendment. If that happens and we allow it to stand, we reverse 250 years of freedom and send this great nation down a different path, one in which speech is no longer protected, and civic engagement is punishable if not to the liking of whoever happens to be in power. Eventually that comes for all of our rights.

That would not be a constitutional crisis so much as a constitutional funeral.

As anticipated, the second Trump Administration began with an aggressive “shock and awe” blitz of executive actions designed to undermine democratic institutions, overwhelm the public, and throw the nation off balance.

While Trump is intentionally creating chaos on numerous fronts, at the core of his actions is a dangerous undermining of America’s fundamental tradition of an executive kept in check and balanced by Congress and the courts. We see this expressed in real-time as Trump willfully ignores legislation and funding authorizations from Congress — including longstanding legal protections designed to ensure the health, safety, and security of the American people. And as he razes government agencies wholesale and purges thousands of federal workers to install unqualified, unvetted “yes” men and women in their places.

Subscribe now

This edition of The Entrenchment Agenda assesses the degree to which Trump has advanced his six most extreme anti-democratic measures in ways that, ultimately, aim to make it difficult for voters to dislodge authoritarians from office: (1) pardons to license lawbreaking, (2) investigations against critics and rivals, (3) regulatory retaliation, (4) federal law enforcement overreach, (5) domestic deployment of the military, and (6) the potential refusal of autocrats to leave office.

Pardons to license lawbreaking

As he promised, and despite what even close supporters (including Vice President JD Vance) said should not be the case, Trump granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 rioters charged with crimes related to their actions on January 6, 2021. He did so regardless of the violence committed, including granting clemency for offenses involving violence against law enforcement officers. In doing so, Trump solidified his alliance with domestic paramilitary actors, and pardonees have since gone on to menace January 6 police officers, return to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress, and appear on stage at a Trump rally.

Beyond the mass clemency he granted to January 6 rioters and in-step with the pattern he established in his first term of handing out pardons for his political allies, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, founder of a dark web platform used for illegal drug trafficking whose cause was championed by the libertarian movement and cryptocurrency advocates. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he pardoned Ulbricht in honor of “the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly,” making the connection between political support and the pardon explicit.

Assessment: Trump’s January 6 pardons vindicated his allies’ use of violence to pursue political power. Without any constraints on this executive power, Trump will likely continue to use it to place himself and his supporters above the law.

Directing investigations against critics and rivals

Building on his false assertions that the 2020 election he lost to President Joe Biden was “rigged” and the January 6 rioters did “nothing wrong,” Trump is staffing the Department of Justice with high-ranking officials who adhere to those misguided beliefs and have signaled their willingness to act on them.

On Inauguration Day, Trump installed Ed Martin as acting D.C. U.S. Attorney, a former leader of the Missouri Republican Party who represented rioters and served as a “Stop the Steal” activist during the 2020 campaign. From that perch, Martin, who describes himself performing that role as one of “Trump’s lawyers,” moved to dismiss a case in which he represented one of the January 6 defendants, fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on cases related to January 6, and sent letters to Democratic lawmakers Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Robert Garcia threatening to investigate the officials over critical statements they made about Elon Musk’s DOGE activities.

Kash Patel, a close Trump ally who claimed the FBI played a role in stoking the January 6 attack and published a book in 2023 listing dozens of high-profile Trump critics by name, labeling them as “the most dangerous threat to our democracy,” was narrowly confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become FBI Director in late February.

Trump then appointed Dan Bongino as Deputy FBI Director to assist Patel, thereby breaking the longstanding norm of appointing a career agent to that role. Bongino, a former Secret Service officer-turned-commentator, has described the left as “evil,” said Biden “should be in prison” and investigated for “possible treason,” and promoted numerous conspiracy theories about Democrats, the 2020 election, and January 6.

On Monday, Patel was sworn into office by Attorney General Pam Bondi, another Trump ally who prominently boosted Trump’s 2020 election conspiracies. At her own swearing-in-ceremony, Bondi announced the creation of a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate those who handled criminal investigations related to Trump on both the state and federal levels. In an interview on Fox News on March 3, Bondi said she was getting “rid of the Jack Smith team” that had investigated Trump’s handling of January 6. She said, “They’re gone, gone” and vowed to “root out” and “find” those at the department she believed “despised Trump…everything is on the table, everything…everything is being looked into.”

Assessment: Trump made “retribution” against those who investigated him a centerpiece of his 2025 campaign. He has installed high-ranking officials who are acting accordingly. The FBI Director has identified other targets by name, and a pair of Democratic lawmakers have already been subjected to legal harassment. Weaponization of the Justice Department is underway and is likely to escalate.

Regulatory retaliation

Eliminating the “deep state,” Trump’s shorthand for various government officials who opposed his unlawful actions during his first team, was one of Trump’s central 2025 campaign pledges that’s now creating enormous upheaval throughout the federal government.

As a first step, Trump signed an executive order known as “Schedule F” to shift government employees into an employment classification with fewer protections.

But, Trump’s alliance with tech mogul Elon Musk, which intensified during the campaign's final months with Musk’s significant financial contributions and personal zeal for Trump’s re-election, has supercharged his efforts to purge the workforce. Trump tapped Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is not an official department established by Congress and is tasked with slashing the federal workforce and cutting spending.

Without authorization from Congress or serious security vetting, Musk and his DOGE employees took over the Department of Treasury and Office of Personnel Management computer systems, gaining unfettered access to vast troves of sensitive information. DOGE staff used the access to email millions of government workers asking for their resignations and employment information, to offer retirement agreements, and later, terminate employment. These activities raise substantial concerns about privacy, Appointments Clause violations, and conflicts of interest Musk may have with his private companies that have business before the federal government.

Musk has also appeared in the Oval Office to make widespread accusations of fraud without evidence. He has repeatedly taken to his social media platform, X, to disparage Democrats and various government agencies and programs. One is USAID, which the Trump Administration quickly shuttered, even though Trump has no authority to abolish it, as Congress established it and would require its authorization. Trump had said it was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”

USAID is a test case of sorts for the administration. Trump's allies have made it known that they don’t believe in the idea of independence at federal agencies, which Congress designed to be apolitical, and that they want to use the agencies to advance their entrenchment agenda. One way Trump is stamping out independence at other agencies is by firing Inspectors General, apolitical investigators tasked with rooting out corruption, conducting audits, and making sure laws are being followed at their assigned agencies. On January 25, Trump abruptly fired Inspectors General across 17 agencies, eliminating those safeguards.

At the Federal Communications Commission, Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, has ordered a review of CBS’s editing of an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, citing concerns over possible “news distortion” — a classification previously reserved for only extreme cases of news misrepresentation and has, in rare instances, caused stations to lose their licenses. Carr is looking into PBS and NPR over its aired sponsorships and a San Francisco radio station over coverage of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid. Carr has also ordered investigations into Comcast over its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, which the Trump Administration has banned across the government and seeks to eliminate in the private sector, based on false claims that speech and policies promoting DEI are unlawful.

Institutions of higher education are being impacted, too. Georgetown Law was recently warned of an inquiry over its DEI practices, as D.C. Interim Attorney Ed Martin, mentioned above, vowed not to hire anyone from schools that “teach and utilize” DEI. The Trump Administration is canceling $400 million in funding and contracts for Columbia University as a part of efforts to stop what it considers to be “illegal” protests on campus.

The White House also punished the White House press corps for its speech. When the Associated Press refused to incorrectly call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as Trump desired, the White House retaliated by banning the outlet. Soon after, the White House determined that the independent White House Correspondents Association would no longer decide which outlets would be permitted to cover the White House and would control the press pool instead.

Trump is also targeting single individuals for retaliation. Upon taking office, Trump swiftly revoked security clearances for dozens of officials who spoke out about Russian disinformation, including top intelligence officials from the Obama and Bush administrations and also Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who published a memoir critical of Trump.

More recently, Trump moved to remove security clearances from lawyers who Trump investigated him or did work for his political opponents. In late February, he targeted those who provided legal advice to former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the Department of Justice’s previous January 6 investigations into Trump. On Thursday, he issued an executive order to suspend security clearances held by attorneys at the law firm Perkins Coie over what Trump’s executive order labeled as “dangerous and dishonest activity” linked to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Trump.

Lastly, Trump's tariff policies should also be considered a form of regulatory retaliation, too. He wields them inconsistently as a means of leverage, causing tumultuous effects on the global markets.

Assessment: Purging employees is the first step towards replacing them and remaking government agencies to comply with Trump’s agenda. When that happens, regulatory retaliation can be expected to accelerate in all forms, especially as the administration restricts press access, terminates government watchdogs, and eliminates other accountability measures. The administration's aggressive moves to tamp down on free speech should be vigorously countered as a first line of defense.

Federal law enforcement overreach

Trump announced in his inaugural address that he would declare a national emergency to send troops to the southern border and use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to “repel the dangerous invasion of our country” by mustering “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement” to carry out mass deportations.

Although Trump demands that most federal agencies reduce their operations, immigration enforcement resources are growing. This is in keeping with his campaign promise to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and Homeland Security investigators,” which already had substantial law enforcement operations. The Migration Policy Institute described the current state of play as:

“Reaching beyond the federal ambit, the administration is also doubling down on its pressure on state and local authorities to conduct immigration enforcement actions traditionally reserved for federal agents, and is seeking or threatening to penalize those that offer resistance….The whole-of-government machinery displayed by this administration in its first month—accompanied by a muscular, carefully crafted messaging campaign—has the closest parallels with the actions that occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when broad swaths of the federal government were repurposed to serve the national security mission.”

Trump’s pick to run the DHS, Kristi Noem, and the “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, have echoed Trump’s war-like rhetoric about an “invasion” and other extreme ideas as they have pledged to execute Trump’s vision. Homan has said he expects “collateral arrests” in the process.

Assessment: Although Trump has vowed to increase immigration enforcement to conduct the “largest deportations operations in American history,” the data has not yet reached that level. That said, as Trump continues consolidating law enforcement resources and his officials increase demands for assistance from local and state law enforcement, that could rapidly change.

Domestic deployment of the military

During the first Trump Administration, Trump faced off with officials from the Defense Department about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. This time around, Trump has selected a Defense Department head, Secretary Pete Hegseth, who described the act of calling up troops to put down protests on American soil as a “mainstream idea” and is enthusiastic about sending the military to the border to defend the country “in your own country.”

Setting the stage for potential future action, Trump, in his January 20 declaration of a national emergency at the border, ordered the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security to issue a joint report within 90 days on whether invoking the Insurrection Act to “obtain operational control” of the border would be necessary.

Assessment: Trump could position the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to conduct joint operations for immigration enforcement. The forthcoming April 20, 2025, report from both departments about invoking the Insurrection Act may provide a framework for this and other purposes, such as quelling protests.

Autocratic refusal to leave office

While the Constitution clearly states that a U.S. president may serve no more than two terms, Trump and his allies suggest that this prohibition is open to interpretation. For example, one member of Congress has proposed amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to run again, some activists are plotting a “Trump third term” project, and one poll has indicated that more than half of Americans believe he will run again in 2028. Regardless of whether Trump formally runs as a candidate, he continues to raise political funds at an impressive pace, assuring his ability to wield considerable political influence in future elections.

Assessment: The Trump Administration’s moves to transform the federal workforce into enablers and enforcers of his autocratic agenda is the strongest indication that, whether he runs as a 2028 candidate or not, that authoritarian faction is intent on entrenching generational power. “Autocratic refusal to leave office” extends beyond Trump, and it will become harder to dislodge authoritarians from office as their entrenchment degrades democratic institutions and political opposition over time. Additionally, autocrats often name and install successors and then exercise power behind the scenes, which is a realistic option for Trump in the future.

Key takeaways

Trump has swiftly advanced his authoritarian playbook to entrench power, but the degree of implementation varies across different elements. As it stands today, Trump’s maximalist and unprecedented deployment of the pardon power remains a major vector of abuse and corruption. So, too, does his approach of ignoring the laws of Congress that establish federal agencies and fund the government. And, the administration's relentless scapegoating of vulnerable communities and aims to clamp down on speech, whether that’s in the form of DEI bans or investigations into critical press coverage, is grave.

On a more hopeful note, there are early signs that the federal courts may rein in Trump’s authoritarian takeovers of government programs in some meaningful ways. Similarly, the alarming steps members of the Trump Administration have taken to make government services and funding (as well as employment) contingent on fidelity to Trump is generating a healthy degree of outcry that, if channeled properly, could translate into widespread political opposition that may guard against authoritarian excesses.

Other aspects of the playbook are still in the early days of implementation, particularly regarding the administration’s potential organization of large-scale operations through the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, whether that comes to immigration enforcement or cracking down on future political protests.

On September 5, 2023, Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was sentenced to serve 22 years in prison and 36 months supervised release for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the breach of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Ultimately, Tarrio served less than two years. On January 20, 2025, as one of his first acts upon taking office, President Donald Trump granted clemency to all January 6 rioters, allowing Tarrio to leave prison. The signal was unmistakable: freeing the insurrectionists was a top priority.

Subscribe now

Immediately after his release, Tarrio appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s program, thanking Trump for “literally giving me my life back.” Tarrio then demanded swift action from the administration to punish those who investigated him, stating, “Success is going to be retribution. We have to ensure the next four years set us up for the next 100 years.”

When invoking the idea of setting “us up for the next 100 years” Tarrio is talking about entrenchment, which is how authoritarians consolidate and leverage government power to stay in power.

This newsletter is a part of our ongoing series about Trump’s Entrenchment Agenda that explains how he and his allies seek to dig into office, cement power, and crush electoral competition. Paramilitary forces have historically played a big role in these sorts of politics, and their alliances with authoritarian leaders have dangerous consequences.

History of paramilitary pardons

Any plausible deniability Trump attempted to maintain between himself and those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 evaporated with the mass pardons. Trump’s act marked the first time in U.S. history that the leader of an insurrection pardoned insurrectionists, putting an American president in the column of other authoritarian leaders around the world who have used pardons to license lawbreaking by paramilitary actors and entrench themselves in office.

Before Trump took office, we warned about this dangerous history in The Bulwark: Get Ready for Trump’s Jan. 6th Pardons

• Early in his chancellorship, Adolf Hitler pardoned street-fighting members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, who had been convicted of murder. In East Germany after the war, some SA were given pardons if they agreed to spy for the Stasi.

• Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Alberto Fujimori of Peru used blanket amnesties to protect their security forces.

• Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe pardoned hundreds of militants who carried out widespread election-related violence on his behalf.

• Jair Bolsonaro, regularly at odds with the Brazilian Supreme Court, pardoned a far-right lawmaker who called on supporters to assault its ministers.

• Katalin Novák, the president of Hungary and a loyalist of authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, pardoned a far-right movement leader who set fire to the homes of Orbán’s political rivals.

• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey has pardoned a bevy of violent allies, including the leader of an ultranationalist paramilitary group.

Paramilitary actors who share an ideology with the authoritarian leader often take it upon themselves to act as extralegal enforcers of the leader’s agenda. The pardon power is a valuable tool for placing paramilitary supporters who do an authoritarian’s bidding above the law. When authoritarians deploy the pardon power this way, it also acts as a license for more law-breaking in other areas. As democracy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld found and predicts:

Research in Israel, Germany, and the U.S. shows that when political extremists think the government is on their side and they will not be held accountable for violence, they commit more violence. We are likely to see more vigilante action in communities facing immigrant round-ups, more militias along the border trying to “assist” law enforcement, and greater threats inspired by the words of politicians and influencers.

“Success is retribution” — pardons trigger purges

Trump launched his 2024 re-election campaign on a theme of “retribution,” and the MAGA faction is bound in the belief that merely pardoning violent actors for their participation on January 6 is not enough. They also want to punish those who sought accountability for their roles in the violent attack.

To advance the agenda of entrenching the authoritarian faction into power over the long term — or, as Tarrio put it, “the next 100 years” — the rule of law is being turned upside down to not only free those who attacked the Capitol but to punish those who defended the constitutional order and sought accountability.

Trump has made his intent clear, and his chosen political appointees are well aware of his wishes and vetted for their loyalty to Trump’s vision of a retributive government. NPR tallied that while campaigning for re-election, Trump made more than 100 threats to prosecute or punish his perceived political enemies, many of those directly associated with the January 6 investigations. Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, an election-denying activist who has said January 6 was an “inside job,” raised money for jailed rioters, and wrote an “enemies list,” is pending Senate confirmation.

This posture led Trump to fire prosecutors involved in investigating January 6 and issue a call for the names of FBI agents associated with the case. Assisting Trump in the firings was Ed Martin, whom Trump appointed as the interim D.C. U.S. Attorney. Martin, a former leader of the Missouri Republican Party, previously advocated on behalf of jailed rioters and during the 2020 campaign as a “Stop the Steal” organizer.

Share

The Washington Post reported:

“Since being appointed on Jan. 20, Martin has ordered top supervisors in the office to investigate their colleagues’ handling of the Capitol riot prosecutions in the wake of Trump’s mass pardons and threatened subordinates who disclose or criticize his actions.”

The purges are essential for Trump’s entrenchment agenda, which stretches beyond the January 6 investigations. On their face, the firings clear the department of anyone seeking accountability for Trump’s role in inciting January 6. But more crucially, by taking direct control over the Department of Justice and eliminating expert staff, Trump is creating room for his loyalists to take their places, shielding him from accountability for future criminal actions.

Rewriting history

Trump’s pardons and purges are not just about absolving his supporters but rewriting history to position them as victims rather than perpetrators.

Trump’s pardon proclamation stated that he was ending “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of reconciliation.” And, with those words, Trump effectively wiped out the Department of Justice’s most comprehensive investigation in American history, in which approximately 1,583 defendants were federally charged with crimes.

These pardons should also be considered with an executive order Trump issued in his first days in office, Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, that was vaguely written but widely interpreted as directives for his appointees to target those associated with January 6 investigations.

For example, the “weaponization” order states, “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” notes that the Department of Justice “ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6,” and then empowers the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to take “appropriate action.”

In addition to stoking violence, as Trump did with the January 6 rioters, this order is designed to quash dissent and spread disinformation. These are three key authoritarian tactics Trump is deploying to dig into office, cement power, and crush political competition.

Subscribe now

Henchmen pardons: A new class of clemency

Trump’s January 6 pardons do not mark the first time he has demonstrated his willingness to give clemency to violent actors who provided some kind of personal or political benefit to himself.

Protect Democracy tracked and analyzed how Trump deployed the pardon power during his first term in office. Although the trend toward self-serving presidential pardons was not new, Trump supercharged an entirely new class: “henchmen pardons,” which include three types.

• Self-Protective Pardons: Used to incentivize associates not to cooperate with investigations, as seen during the Mueller inquiry.

• Rewarding Political Allies: Exemplified by Trump’s pardon of Dinesh D’Souza for illegal political activity.

• Licensing Violence: Most notably, pardons for Blackwater contractors — who massacred Iraqi civilians — and January 6 rioters.

The January 6 pardons are an escalation of this alarming trend, creating a pact between Trump and insurrectionists. By signaling that political violence will not only be tolerated but rewarded, Trump invites further chaos in pursuit of power.

Shifting the path

In his book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder cautions: “When paramilitaries and official forces intermingle under the banner of a leader, the end of democracy is near.” Yet, history also provides hope. Opposition to authoritarianism has succeeded when individuals, institutions, and movements respond with action.

American activists, for example, who worked in the civil rights movement, were routinely threatened by paramilitary violence from the Ku Klux Klan. Courageous leaders emerged to organize sit-ins and marches. They used the media to show the country the shocking violence that was waged against them in places like Selma and Birmingham. Speakers like Martin Luther King Jr. inspired thousands to join their cause. This helped create momentum for landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional by a vote of 9-0, and for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The January 6 pardons could be used to mobilize action, as they have proven to be unpopular and divide members of Trump’s party. A January 2025 poll commissioned by Protect Democracy United across the 43 most competitive Congressional districts in the country and conducted by YouGov found 75% of Americans oppose pardons for those convicted of using a deadly or dangerous weapon at the Capitol, including 55% of Republicans.

While a president’s pardon power is vast, that does not mean others are helpless. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, for example, has moved to block pardon recipients from obtaining state jobs. Members of Congress have introduced legislation to create a federal prohibition against private paramilitary conduct, which includes intimidating government officials, interfering with government proceedings, and training to engage in such behavior. Some state lawmakers have updated outdated laws to address paramilitary activity.

Other pro-democracy organizers are well-positioned to continue appealing to the courts for justice and robustly exercising our democratic right to speak, assemble, organize, and campaign against authoritarian candidates.

Responding to these threats is an urgent task. Trump’s entrenchment agenda, driven by unprecedented abuses of the pardon power, is aimed at intimidating critics and licensing political violence so that opponents can’t dislodge the authoritarian faction from office.

And violent actors, for now, remain confident in their methods.

USA TODAY published a story on February 8 in which staff interviewed four top leaders of the Proud Boys given long prison sentences for their actions on January 6, including Tarrio, who is considering a run for Congress in Matt Gaetz’s former district. None of them expressed remorse for their actions. When “asked if they were proud of their actions, all four unequivocally told USA TODAY they would do the same thing all over again.”

When we started thinking about this series — about how to explain Trumpism’s ambition to stay in power indefinitely — our first call, as it often is, was to Cambridge, Massachusetts. We called one of our advisors, Steven Levitsky.

Levitsky is a professor of Latin American studies and government at Harvard. He’s the co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of the monumentally influential How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, both books that have shaped how we and others understand and have responded to the last decade.

Subscribe now

But we wanted to talk to Levitsky about another of his books, one that’s not quite as widely read outside academia: Competitive Authoritarianism (written with Lucan Way).

This concept, “competitive authoritarianism,” which Levitsky and Way first diagnosed 23 years ago in 2002, is more or less exactly what is happening right now in the United States. The entrenchment agenda is competitive authoritarianism. The concept diagnoses the new wave of authoritarians — the Hugo Chávezes and Viktor Orbáns and Recep Tayyip Erdoğans of the world — and their hybrid regimes that sit somewhere between totalitarianism and democracy.

What competitive authoritarianism helps us understand is that there’s no hard line between democracy and tyranny. That, in the 21st Century, autocrats don’t need to jail every opposition leader and shutter all newspapers and cancel elections and shoot every protestor to successfully entrench themselves in power. They just need to tilt the playing field far enough that all of those things don’t really matter much anymore. Competition still exists, it’s just unfair. A political system can retain competitive elements and still be authoritarian.

That is what’s happening in the United States. We’re becoming a competitive authoritarian regime.

What became clear, talking with Levitsky, is that so many key actors in our democracy — members of Congress, civil society and business leaders, the news media — are clinging to the first half of this dynamic, the “competitive” part, without noticing (or perhaps, willfully ignoring) the second half. Many are reassuring themselves that we still have a playing field, ignoring how fast it is tilting.

It became pretty clear to us that this disconnect, this lack of understanding, is a five-alarm fire.

Share

The end result of those conversations is an essay, published yesterday in The Atlantic: The new authoritarianism (gift link).

Levitsky’s piece is a call to action. It captures how and why the United States is well on its way to becoming a competitive autocracy. And here’s the central conclusion:

[T]he opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

It’s not too late to stop the U.S. from becoming a competitive autocracy like Turkey or Hungary or El Salvador. But democracy only survives if we manage to work together — collectively, forcefully, aggressively — to defend it. Otherwise our democracy may already be lost.

But seriously, read (or listen to) the full essay. It takes less than 10 minutes, and you’ll have a much deeper sense of what’s happening now (without having to read the book).

Read: The New Authoritarianism

The second Trump Administration? More like the first Trump-Musk co-presidency. Maybe even the advent of President Musk.

Subscribe now

At least, that’s how the last few weeks have played out. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, is tearing through the federal government with seemingly open disregard for Congress, the courts, the separation of powers, and every other aspect of our constitutional system.

For the best summary to-date of Musk’s hostile takeover, read Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic: The ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of the United States Government.

Musk’s de-facto elevation to co-chief executive is just part of a growing alliance between Donald Trump and key elements of the US technology industry. That alliance between the authoritarian faction and tech leviathans like Musk (and Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel) should ring alarm bells. Why? Because together they control two key prongs of autocratic consolidation: information and surveillance.

The entrenchment agenda — Trump’s plans to dig in, cement power, and limit competition — involves more than just government power. It’s also about harnessing the capabilities of modern tech.

If this techno-authoritarian alliance deepens, it could result in a system where ruling leaders not only have direct control over much of our democracy’s information ecosystem, but also have direct visibility into the behavior, activities, and beliefs of its citizens.

Share

Prong one: Control over information ecosystems

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has built the prototypical modern competitive authoritarian state. (So much so that Trump and his allies explicitly cite it as a role model).

Last year, Amanda Carpenter wrote about Orbán’s successful effort to seize and centralize control over media broadcasters and platforms: The MAGA model for returning to power and dismantling democracy.

The story of how Orbán took over the country’s independent media and used it to quash dissent is worth learning from. It began with a coordinated effort to legally harass and bully independent outlets until they were on the brink of financial insolvency. And then the twist:

Faced with the crushing pressure of the regulations and dwindling advertising revenue, many owners eventually succumbed to offers to buy their floundering media companies. For many, the choice was: sell or go bankrupt.

But the buyers were not saviors. They were Orban’s oligarch allies, ready to pool those previously-independent media outlets into a centralized propaganda machine.

Today, Orbán and his allies directly control the flow of information to the majority of Hungarians.

It’s difficult to imagine Trumpism similarly succeeding in their efforts to capture traditional media outlets in the United States. (Even as cable news outlets like ABC and newspapers like the Washington Post engage in anticipatory obedience, we’re still a long way from outright control and propaganda — though there are notable parallels between Trump’s lawsuits targeting the press and the legal harassment that marked the outset of Orbán’s quest to control independent media.)

Read more: The existential struggle between journalism and authoritarianism.

But the thing is: Most Americans don’t get their news from cable TV or newspapers anymore.

According to Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans get their news online. And a growing portion of that is occurring on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter/X.

Musk’s takeover of Twitter shows what a growing Orbánization of social media platforms could look like.

Musk transformed a mainstream social media platform into his own personal political megaphone through a process not unlike that which he is now applying to the federal government: bring in a small team of loyalists to make dramatic cuts to personnel (especially in roles like, say, Trust & Safety), seize technical resources, make radical policy changes, and count on speed and shock to ensure a fait accompli before critics find their feet.

Research and reports from X engineers have revealed Musk’s demand that his X account be algorithmically preferenced on the platform. Having the most followed account on X has allowed him to model the preferred form of engagement (including Musk’s own 200-fold increase in political content). Meanwhile, the so-called “Trump’s Online War Machine” and Musk’s political action committee’s "Election Integrity Community" group on X have galvanized users to disseminate election conspiracy theories resulting in the harassment and attempted doxing of individuals.

The site has also become a powerful tool to target individual critics, civil servants, and opposition figures. For instance, federal workers whose positions Musk derided as “fake jobs” have experienced a wave of harassment that drove some off of social media entirely. Similarly, after Trump’s May conviction on 34 felony counts, his followers called for jurors to be doxxed and killed, going so far as to publish some jurors’ addresses. Most recently, the American Accountability Foundation published online a “DEI watch list” with the names and photos of fifty federal workers the organization encouraged Trump to fire.

To be clear, Musk’s X is just one piece of the online ecosystem puzzle right now. We don’t know if and whether other platforms — such as Meta’s Instagram and Facebook — will continue their post-election drift towards Trump. We don’t know yet what will happen to TikTok (Trump this week proposed it be effectively purchased by the US government). We don’t know how many other tech investors will follow in what appears to be the increasingly authoritarian footsteps of Mark Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

But still, it’s not difficult to imagine a broader “X-ification” of the internet where the platforms themselves become increasingly ideological tools to embed the authoritarian faction in power.

Prong two: Scaled surveillance

Over the past week, Elon Musk and his team of handpicked operators from Musk’s tech enterprises have gained access to some of the most sensitive payment and information systems of the US government, including the personal data of millions of civil servants.

This raises an even larger, longer-term risk.

For the last quarter century, the United States, regardless of who or what party occupied the White House, has built increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for both federal data collection and surveillance — with only limited safeguards. Under the first Trump Administration, this apparatus and its applications noticeably grew.

Federal immigration authorities proposed expanding the collection of biometric data to surveil immigrants and their families, increased their tracking of social media information from noncitizens, signed a contract to deploy autonomous AI-enabled surveillance towers along the 100 mile-wide zone north of the border, refined biometric data collection by federal agencies to monitor public places via surveillance cameras, and used facial recognition technology to identify people who took part in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Today, the surveillance industry consists of a growing field of startups linked by a small group of investors and executives.

Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen’s firm, is invested in two AI surveillance startups: Skydio, an AI-enabled startup focused on drone flight, and Ambient.AI, which offers AI to monitor surveillance cameras for suspicious activity. After winning its first federal contracts under Trump, Peter Thiel-funded Anduril has continued to expand its government footprint. And, Clearview AI, another Peter Thiel-backed venture, is now among the top vendors for supplying facial-recognition software to federal agencies.

Share

We don’t know yet how aggressively the Trump-Musk administration will pursue surveillance as an entrenchment tool, but it very much appears to be on the table.

For example, a former Trump official has assessed that Trump is likely to support expanding the use of AI in border surveillance, while the CEO of a prison contractor recently told investors that he expects the administration to “take a much more expansive approach” to immigration monitoring. Meanwhile, Musk and his allies are aggregating a number of datasets containing sensitive information about citizens via the guise of fraud detection — one piece of their broader discussion around deploying AI as part of their administrative takeover.

If all these new surveillance and AI tools were to make the jump to deployment against Trump’s critics — especially if combined with the additional data on countless Americans now in the hands of Musk and DOGE — they could become a powerful tool to intimidate opposition and quash dissent.

President Musk ‘moves fast and breaks things’

In uncanny alignment with the tech ethos of “move fast and break things,” Musk hasn’t wasted any time since the start of the administration using Trump’s reacquired powers to advance their tech agenda.

We don’t know exactly where this is all going to lead, but it’s happening fast. So it’s worth asking the hard questions now before the hypothetical becomes reality:

• What happens if the government and social media platforms effectively fuse – and pursue a shared campaign to intimidate and harass their opposition?

• What would it look like if a politicized law enforcement gains access to dramatically expanded, AI-powered surveillance tools?

• How far can an unelected set of tech oligarchs get in entrenching and wielding political power through an aligned administration?

We probably don’t want to know the answer to any of those questions.

Protect Democracy’s Alexandra Chandler, Edison Forman, Ben Gips, Izzy Gray, and Cecelia Vieira contributed to this piece.

Photo credit: Chris Unger, Getty Images

Four years after illegitimately attempting to remain president by inciting a mob to overturn the 2020 election results, Donald Trump has reclaimed the presidency by way of legitimately winning the 2024 election.

What are pro-democracy advocates to do now?

Subscribe now

In the near term, we have to take the long-lens view of how authoritarians in other countries have undone democracies.

Trump’s 2016 win and subsequent 2025 return to power follow The Authoritarian Playbook used by modern-day autocrats — who take office by winning democratically-run elections and then abuse power to entrench their faction in office and make it difficult for voters to dislodge them. They do this by politicizing institutions, quashing dissent, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, scapegoating vulnerable communities, corrupting elections, and stoking violence. Trump tailored the playbook for 2025, making specific promises to do things like pardon violent January 6 rioters, purge government officials who might challenge his unlawful actions, and deploy the Department of Justice to harass his political adversaries.

We would be mistaken to downplay or consider the threats separately — or to ignore the common theme that unites them. They’re all part of the same strategy. We should interpret them holistically as potential acts of entrenchment that will make it extremely hard for the public to vote the autocrats out of power.

Share

What is entrenchment?

Entrenchment refers to how authoritarians consolidate and leverage government power to stay in power. They use various tactics to dig in, cement power, and crush electoral competition.

Entrenchment happens primarily through politicizing government resources, funding, and services; turning them into carrots and sticks to coerce or sideline civil society — for example, media and tech executives; critics of administration policies; members of the political opposition; or institutions that could hold them accountable to the law. This tilting of the rules enables authoritarians to win, keep winning, and stay in office indefinitely — without voters having a fair chance to choose our representatives. The MAGA movement, which models itself after the Orbán regime in Hungary, has signaled its intent to pursue this path.

How long could this go on?

We must acknowledge that Trump frequently discusses the possibility of seeking a third term as president. Even if he doesn’t, he may very well avoid lame-duck status and maintain control over the political system as a kingmaker, keeping members of his family or other close associates in power and continuing to exert power behind the scenes, just as Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have done in the past.

We should plan accordingly.

This newsletter series, The Entrenchment Agenda: How Trump plans to dig in, cement power, and crush competition, will analyze the Trump Administration's actions that pose the greatest danger of preventing meaningful electoral competition and discuss what can be done to protect democracy.

Preserving electoral competition is about more than elections

While many complex challenges lie ahead, preventing entrenchment and preserving electoral competition and the ability to challenge autocrats in fair and free elections in the future should be a top priority.

Preserving electoral competition means more than going through the motions of holding elections. After all, authoritarian states regularly conduct ceremonial elections to maintain the appearance that their citizens live in a democracy. The giveaway is that incumbents almost never lose — which isn’t happenstance. Their elections are inconsequential because citizens are unable to muster any serious opposition.

Before elections are scheduled, citizens need to be able to promote their ideas and recruit and fund candidates that can pose a genuine challenge to incumbents. They need to be able to challenge the incumbent themselves. Retaining the ability to speak, assemble, organize, and campaign is critical.

Focusing solely on elections is insufficient because meaningful elections don’t happen independently; they only can result when citizens exercise those rights. When those rights are degraded, our chances of holding healthy elections diminish.

To prevent entrenchment and preserve electoral competition for 2026, 2028, and beyond, we must:

• Protect civic space and our right to free speech.

• Protect organizations and individuals who challenge the administration.

• Protect checks and balances that constrain the executive branch from going after the opposition.

• Protect free and fair elections.

Understand the difference: Advancing a policy agenda is democratic; entrenchment degrades democracy

We should expect the autocratic faction to manufacture chaos to distract, confuse, and polarize the public by floating many threats and proposals. In addition to sorting the rhetoric from the action, it will be necessary to discern which actions are geared toward pursuing within-bounds policy goals (however repugnant some of us may find them) and which are out-of-bounds acts of entrenchment (aimed to prevent the voting public from having a say in who holds power).

Read more: How to pay attention

A shared understanding distinguishing entrenchment from policy disagreements will make this easier. The seven core strategies outlined in The Authoritarian Playbook provide a framework for understanding what issues are characteristically dangerous autocratic actions versus politics-as-usual.

Using that framework, here are some real-world examples:

• Many presidents consider pardoning sets of people around a particular offense to render an objection to policy, such as when President John F. Kennedy pardoned first-time offenders of the Narcotics Control Act of 1956. Trump, however, pardoned criminals who attacked the Capitol on January 6th in hopes of keeping Trump in power. This will likely stoke violence and license future lawbreaking to help secure Trump’s hold on power, making it a form of entrenchment and much different than a mass pardon to extend a mercy that advances a general policy preference.

• Pursuing reforms to make government more effective and efficient is a worthy goal. Circumventing federal laws that help ensure federal employees are hired and fired based on merit to install unqualified political loyalists is entrenchment.

• Trump’s next FBI Director may want to step up enforcement of specific laws (for example, around drugs or immigration) and allocate more resources to that goal. Although many may reasonably oppose such actions, they would be within the Bureau’s duties. Such functions would be markedly different from politicizing the FBI to harass and investigate Trump’s perceived political opponents to punish and sideline them. The latter is for entrenching power, while the former is not.

• In step with his desire to break the Department of Justice’s tradition of prosecutorial independence, Trump similarly seeks to interfere with other federal agencies. While a president can appropriately express support for general tax regulation changes or views on media consolidation practices, telling Internal Revenue Service officials to audit particular adversaries or ordering the Federal Communications Commission to revoke media licenses out of anger over a particular outlet’s reporting on the White House would be entrenchment.

• Trump may create a task force or advisory committee to recommend spending cuts to Congress. That is within the bounds of regular administrative activity. Unilaterally impounding funds or freezing forms of spending legally passed by Congress to coerce states or other actors or gain leverage over other countries or business interests to boost a campaign would be a form of entrenchment. Trump did this in his first administration by holding up funding for Ukraine to coerce Ukrainian leaders to interfere in the 2020 election. He also reportedly resisted wildfire aid to California until his aides showed his supporters in the state were impacted.

As these not-so-hypothetical examples show, there’s a purposeful distinction between a democratically elected administration using legal authorities to advance its policy agenda — and abusing the powers of the state in ways that make it more and more difficult for the public to speak about it, organize against it, and have a fair chance of competing in elections. The former is democracy-enhancing. We have elections so people can choose representatives to pursue policies they voted to support. The latter is not. Entrenchment degrades democracy and ultimately makes it harder for the electorate to “throw the bums out” and select a different set of representatives.

Entrenchment happens within parties, too

The assault on electoral competition isn’t just about trying to make it difficult for an opposition political party. An autocrat can abuse the tools of power to defeat and avoid competition within their party.

Considering our country's two-party system dynamics, an autocrat can accumulate and hold on to immense influence by entrenching himself and his allies into one party. Two choices in a general election aren’t much choice, and these odds give extreme candidates a dangerous advantage if they’ve taken control of one party.

As Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die, in healthy democracies, parties police bad actors from within and improve the quality of candidates they produce for elections and officials they appoint to office.

But when authoritarian-minded leaders are in control of the party and entrench themselves — as we have seen Trump do as he has dominated the Republican Party since 2016 — they systematically purge those who attempt to check on such impulses.

The most illustrative example is the Republican Party’s treatment of former House member and long-time conservative Liz Cheney, who is former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter and held the third-highest position in House leadership. That is, until she spoke out on January 6th and agreed to serve on a House committee to investigate the attack.

For this, she was removed from her position in House leadership, censured by the state and national party, primaried, and defeated in her re-election. Trump has accused her of “treason” and amplified calls for her to be prosecuted and tried with televised military tribunals.

Trump, boosted by aligned MAGA media outlets and organizations, similarly worked to isolate, shame, and intimidate many other Republicans who supported and served him when they objected to his unlawful actions. This includes top-tier officials from his first administration, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, former Acting Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and others.

We should anticipate that many of Trump’s early actions in his second administration will be targeted toward further exercising this kind of entrenchment of his and his allies in the Republican Party and to eliminate intraparty obstacles.

Unite to defend targets

Using these entrenchment tactics, autocrats exploit their targets' natural instincts for self-preservation. They strive to engineer an environment where people submit to authoritarian leadership voluntarily through anticipatory obedience — or involuntarily through various forms of coercion — creating a vicious cycle that becomes harder to stop and reverse over time.

Share

A critical remedy is to unify and defend those targeted. We need to recognize that entrenchment isn’t about punishing individuals; it’s about systematically working to take away our ability to criticize and offer alternatives to those in power, and to choose who governs us and the future of our country.

Defending first targets early and effectively is critical, not only for their well-being, but to send the message that while Americans have voted in favor of Trump’s policy views and are unhappy with the status quo, entrenchment does not lead to reform; it leads to ruin.