As President Trump wields more and more control of the Government of the United States, some experienced political analysts have cautioned that the Great Republic may be on the brink of dictatorship.
Andrew Coyne writing for the Globe and Mail opinion column claims Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator and asks if he can be stopped?
At some point, American democracy will find it is caught, immovably, a colossus in quicksand. The question is whether it has reached that point, or, if it has not reached it yet, whether it can still avoid doing so.
The examples pile up by the day. In recent days, weeks and months, Mr. Trump and his officials have:
Installed National Guard troops and other military forces in the centre of major American cities, first Los Angeles, then Washington, and soon (if Mr. Trump’s threats are to be believed) Chicago, Baltimore and New York, under the guise of fighting crime. Some of the guardsmen are armed; some have been conducting arrests, for which they have neither training nor authority. The D.C. police force was likewise taken under federal control.
Seized thousands of suspected illegal immigrants off the streets, the snatchings carried out by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents without badges, their victims bundled into cars without markings, to be sent in some cases to barbaric foreign prison camps, in some cases to their domestic counterparts, without trial, without even charges. ICE is increasingly seen as Mr. Trump’s personal police force.
Initiated criminal investigations into various of Mr. Trump’s antagonists, from Letitia James, the Attorney-General of New York who prosecuted him for fraud, to Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted him for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, to John Bolton, his own former national security adviser who has since become one of his severest critics, to Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senator and lead manager on his first impeachment, to Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor who stands in the way of his desired takeover of the U.S. central bank.
Fired or demoted police officers and prosecutors responsible for bringing the Jan. 6 rioters to justice, having earlier issued a blanket pardon for the rioters themselves.
Threatened television networks whose programs or performers irritated him with suspension of their licences, or adverse regulatory rulings.
Extorted massive settlements from the same networks, or law firms who had acted for his antagonists, or universities he deemed too liberal, or even corporations, like Intel, he fancied a piece of.
Demanded Texas, Florida, Indiana and other states redraw their electoral maps, in a transparent attempt to gerrymander more Republican districts into being in time for the midterm elections; at the same time, Mr. Trump talks openly of banning mail-in ballots, while issuing executive orders demanding “proof of citizenship” for voting and requiring federal review of state electoral rolls.
Fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics for issuing unemployment numbers that displeased him; fired the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency for issuing after-action reports on the U.S. bombing of Iran that likewise disagreed with Trumpian dogma.
Defied court orders with regard to various of the above.
Defied Congress with regard to the spending of money for the purposes for which it was appropriated by Congress, while imposing tariffs that must constitutionally be approved by Congress.
Issued a series of executive orders for which he has likewise no constitutional authority.
As if to give visible signs of his intent, Mr. Trump has been furnishing himself with various of the accoutrements of a dictator, from the giant portraits that now hang on government buildings, to the gold-encrusted palace that was once the White House, to the military parade on his birthday, to the endless public displays of sycophancy he requires of his cabinet members. Indeed, he has taken in recent days to musing about dictatorship as a possibility – “a lot of people are saying ‘Maybe we need a dictator’” – as if he were not just trying out the description with the public, but habituating them to it. (Coyne & Drolet, 2025)
Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American, comments on a May report in Politics & Policy written by political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa.
Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades.
The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of the Dresden University of Technology. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.
The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.
The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.
The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.
That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power. (Vergano, 2025)
“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail.
“If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. (Vergano, 2025)
Sara Dorn, a Forbes news reporter who covers politics, reports on Trump addressing Generals and Top Military about an ‘Invasion From Within’ that necessitates military response to ‘Straighten Out’ major cities.
Trump said “we are under invasion from within” that’s "no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms,” as he said he wants the military to focus more on domestic security, including tamping down on crime in major cities and illegal immigration.
The president made the comments as he addressed top military generals gathered at Quantico for a last-minute meeting called by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who separately blasted what he described as “fat generals” and an out-of-shape military).
Trump said previous presidents “used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace,” lamenting “now they say you aren’t allowed to use the military.”
The remarks build on Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to cities including Memphis, Portland and Washington, D.C., in what he says is an effort to reduce crime there. (Dorn, n.d.)
Observers of politics in the western democracies are raising alarms about the descent of the Great Republic into dictatorship. The public actions and plans of the figurehead of this movement, when analysed scientifically, support our need for concern and collective opposition to dictatorship that will make “the land of the free” a footnote in history.
References
Coyne, A., & Drolet, G. (2025, August 29). Opinion: Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped? The Globe and Mail. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trump-brink-of-dictatorship-can-he-be-stopped/?
Dorn, S. (n.d.). Invasion From Within. Forbes. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/30/invasion-from-within-trump-tells-generals-military-needed-to-straighten-out-major-cities/
Vergano, D. (2025, May 14). Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. Scientific American. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-tells-us-the-u-s-is-heading-toward-a-dictatorship/
