I f this were happening somewhere else – in Latin America, say
– how might it be reported? Having secured his grip on the
capital, the president is now set to send troops to several
rebel-held cities, claiming he is wanted there to restore order.
The move follows raids on the homes of leading dissidents and
comes as armed men seen as loyal to the president, many of them masked, continue to pluck people off the streets …
Except this is happening in the United States of America and so
we don’t quite talk about it that way. That’s not the only reason.
It’s also because Donald Trump’s march towards authoritarianism
is so steady, taking another step or two every day, that it’s easy to
become inured to it: you can’t be in a state of shock permanently.
And, besides, sober-minded people are wary of sounding hyperbolic
or hysterical: their instinct is to play down rather than scream at the
top of their voice.
There’s something else, too. Trump’s dictator-like behaviour is so
brazen, so blatant, that paradoxically, we discount it. It’s like being
woken in the night by a burglar wearing a striped shirt and carrying
a bag marked “Swag”: we would assume it was a joke or a stunt or otherwise unreal, rather than a genuine danger. So it is with Trump. We cannot
quite believe what we are seeing.
But here is what we are seeing. Trump has deployed the national guard
on the streets of Washington DC, so that there are now 2,000 troops,
heavily armed, patrolling the capital. The pretext is fighting crime,
but violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low when he made his move.
The president has warned that Chicago will be next , perhaps
Baltimore too . In June he sent the national guard and the marines
into Los Angeles to put down protests against his immigration
policies, protests which the administration said amounted to
an “insurrection”. Demonstrators were complaining about the
masked men of Ice, the immigration agency that, thanks to Trump,
now has a budget to match that of the world’s largest armies ,
snatching people from street corners or hauling them from their cars.
Those cities are all run by Democrats and, not coincidentally,
have large Black populations. They are potential centres of
opposition to Trump’s rule and he wants them under his control.
The constitution’s insistence that states have powers of their own
and that the reach of the federal government should be limited
– a principle that until recently was sacred to Republicans – can go hang.
Control is the goal, amassing power in the hands of the president and
removing or neutering any institution or person that could stand in his
way. That is the guiding logic that explains Trump’s every action, large
and small, including his wars on the media, the courts, the universities
and the civil servants of the federal government. It helps explain why
FBI agents last week mounted a 7am raid on the home and office of
John Bolton , once Trump’s national security adviser and now one of
his most vocal critics. And why the president hinted darkly that the
former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is in his sights .
Members of the national guard patrol near the White House in Washington DC, 29 August 2025. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPAIt’s why he has broken all convention, and possibly US law, by
attempting to remove Lisa Cook as a member of the board of the
Federal Reserve on unproven charges of mortgage fraud. Those
charges are based on information helpfully supplied by the Trump
loyalist installed as federal housing director and who, according to
the New York Times , has repeatedly leveraged “the powers of his
office … to investigate or attack Mr Trump’s most recognisable
political enemies”. The pattern is clear: Trump is using the institutions
of government to hound his foes in a manner that recalls the worst
of Richard Nixon – though where Nixon skulked in the shadows, Trump’s abuses are in plain sight.
And all in the pursuit of ever more power. Take the firing of Cook.
With falling poll numbers, especially on his handling of the economy ,
he craves the sugar rush of an interest rate cut. The independent
central bank won’t give it to him, so he wants to push the Fed out
of the way and grab the power to set interest rates himself. Note
the justification offered by JD Vance this week, that Trump is
“much better able to make those determinations” than
“unelected bureaucrats” because he embodies the will of the
people. The reasoning is pure authoritarianism, arguing that
a core principle of the US constitution, the separation of powers,
should be swept aside, because all legitimate authority resides in one
man alone.
Of course, the greatest check on Trump would come from the opposition
winning power in a democratic election, specifically Democrats taking
control of the House of Representatives in November 2026. Trump Is
working hard to make that impossible: witness this month’s
unabashed gerrymander in Texas , where at Trump’s command,
Republicans redrew congressional boundaries to give themselves
five more safe seats in the House. Trump wants more states to
follow Texas’s lead, because a Democratic-controlled House would
have powers of scrutiny that he rightly fears.
Meanwhile, apparently prompted by his meeting with Vladimir Putin,
he is once again at war against postal voting , baselessly decrying it
as fraudulent, while also demanding a new census that would exclude undocumented migrants – moves that will either help Republicans win
in 2026 or else enable him to argue that a Democratic victory was
illegitimate and should be overturned.
In that same spirit, the Trump White House now argues that, in effect,
only one party should be allowed to exercise power in the US. How
else to read the words of key Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who this
week told Fox News that “The Democrat party is not a political party;
it is a domestic extremist organisation.”
It’s the same picture on every front, whether it’s plans for a new
military parade in Trump’s honour or the firing of health officials
who insist on putting science ahead of political loyalty. He is bent
on amassing power to himself and being seen to amass power to
himself, even if that means departing from economic conservative
orthodoxy to have the federal government take a stake in hitherto private companies . He wants to rule over every aspect of US life. As Trump
himself said this week , “A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like
a dictator.’” The former Obama adviser David Axelrod is not alone when he says
, “We have gone from zero to Hungary faster than I ever imagined.”
The trouble is, people still don’t talk about it the way they talk about
Hungary, not inside the US and not outside it. That’s partly the
It Can’t Happen Here mindset, partly a reluctance to accept a reality
that would require, of foreign governments especially, a rethink of
almost everything. If the US is on its way to autocracy, in a condition
scholars might call “unconsolidated authoritarianism”, then that
changes Britain’s entire strategic position, its place in the world,
which for 80 years has been predicated on the notion of a west led
by a stable, democratic US. The same goes for the EU. Far easier to
carry on, either pretending that the transformation of the US is not,
in fact, as severe as it is, or that normal service will resume shortly.
But the world’s leaders, like US citizens, cannot ignore the evidence
indefinitely. To adapt the title of that long-ago novel, it can happen
here – and it is.
