Introducing: The Entrenchment Agenda

How Trump plans to dig in, cement power, and crush competition

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?

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.

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.

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.