“A lot of people are saying that maybe we’d like to have a dictator.” So spoke Donald Trump on Monday, during another one of his rambling Oval Office press conferences.
It may be time to invent a new terminology that describes the amazingly rapid political transformation that is now underway in the United States.
Seven months ago America was a functioning democracy. Today it is governed by a much-despised bully who has no respect for the rule of law and who feels emboldened to do anything he wants.
Donald Trump, on an almost daily basis, launches policies and executive orders that violate the law, the Constitution, and turn upside down the norms and practices of American democracy.
Until a few months ago, my principal fear was that Trump would transform America into an illiberal democracy, in the style of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. He would weaken the Justice Department, the FBI, and the courts, and then use the Supreme Court to do his bidding. This he has done. But Trump has exceeded every limit, crossed every red line, and is now pushing America away from democracy altogether. He has arrested judges who disagreed with him, intimidated and humiliated America’s leading corporate leaders, from Mark Zuckerberg to Tim Cook, and even forced Paramount to cancel The Tonight Show simply because he disliked the biting satire of Stephen Colbert. He sent the FBI to raid the home of John Bolton, his own former national security adviser, because Bolton had dared to say on CNN that the victor in the Alaska summit had been Vladimir Putin, and that Trump was incompetent.
This week Trump threatened to deploy U.S. military troops across America, in cities where he claimed crime was “out of control.” He announced plans to send soldiers and tanks into Chicago, Baltimore, and New York City. He also made sure that the U.S. soldiers now patrolling Washington, D.C. are fully armed. National Guard troops deployed by Trump carry M17 pistols and M4 rifles. More than 2,200 are now in the nation’s capital.
The truth is that there is no crime crisis in Washington; crime was actually down 25% before Trump sent in the troops. Trump was lying about the “emergency” he declared that allowed him to send in the troops. But the truth does not seem to matter anymore.
Illinois’s Governor, JB Pritzker, has warned: “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power.”
But Trump does not care about criticism or the protests against his abuse of the military. He thrives on it. He want this response. Watching his troops march into Democratic-run cities is, for him, like watching a violent UFC fight. He derives pleasure from the use of power, and from sending armed forces into what he sees as enemy territory.
Some of Trump’s harshest critics say that his deployment of the military against American citizens in major cities is a form of “dress rehearsal” for the future imposition of martial law at the national level. They could be right. Press reports indicate that Trump and his assistant, Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, may be targeting more than ten major cities, all of them with a Democratic mayor. With the midterm elections coming up in November 2026, this is very worrying.
In the United States, domestic law enforcement is supposed to protect the citizens, while the military is supposed to defend the country from foreign enemies. Never before has a U.S. president deployed the army to police American streets. Nor have we ever seen a president so explicitly threaten freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of the arts.
Now Trump has broadened his war on free speech. In recent days he has turned his fury against the media giants ABC and NBC, labeling them “fake news,” “Democratic mouthpieces,” and even “a threat to democracy.” On Truth Social, he openly suggested that these networks should be stripped of their public broadcasting licenses, threatening their very right to operate on the public airwaves. This is not only an authoritarian maneuver; it is a criminal abuse of power, a direct attempt to coerce independent broadcasters into mimicking his propaganda or risk being silenced.
In America, we have never before witnessed a sitting president proposing to cancel the frequencies of major national broadcasters simply because he dislikes their editorial line.
And this is just one front in his war against democratic checks and balances. Trump has also:
• Continued to bully and intimidate the U.S. Federal Reserve, America’s most respected central bank, undermining its independence.
• Claimed—falsely—that Intel had decided to “gift” him 10% of its shares after his months of harassment against the company.
• Ordered Republican governors, especially in Texas, to redraw electoral maps ahead of the midterms. This gerrymandering means deliberately redrawing district lines to favor one party, slicing up Democratic-leaning neighborhoods and attaching them to large Republican districts, with the explicit goal of manufacturing an extra 5 to 10 Republican seats in Congress. In plain language: it is cheating voters by rigging the rules of representation.
Each of these actions, taken separately, is troubling. Taken together, they form a systematic pattern: the construction of what can only be described as a presidential dictatorship.
The phrase may sound contradictory, but Trump embodies it perfectly.
Trump speaks and behaves like a dictator. But he is a democratically elected president. Think about that.
He is a democratically elected autocrat who uses the legitimacy of the ballot box to dismantle the very system that elected him. He speaks like a strongman, acts like a caudillo, and governs like a man convinced that the institutions of the republic exist only to serve him.
A presidential dictatorship in America. Just saying the words out loud feels unthinkable. And yet, here we are, in a new reality, and after just seven months of Trump.
