Full-Blown Authoritarianism: Censorship, corruption, and violence

From Mary Trump:

 In the past few weeks, Donald, with the assist of other members of the Trump regime and the corrupt illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court, has pushed America towards full-blown authoritarianism, from using the power of the state to censor his critics and using the national guard to take over American cities.

Although Donald is erratic, giving unhinged speeches at Charlie Kirk’s pseudo-memorial and in front of the U.N. delegation, he and his inner circle are working their way methodically through an authoritarian playbook.

Li Yuan, in The New York Times, did a deep dive into the ways in which Donald is directly taking his cues from Chinese president Xi Jinping, writes:

To many Chinese who have endured the relentless erosion of speech by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, it felt ominous. Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.

Yuan spoke with Zhang Wenbin, a former investigative journalist in China, better known by her pen name Jiang Zue.

Zhang was repeatedly harassed and threatened for what Chinese state security agents called her “negative reporting” on China. She now lives in the United States.

Zhang said:

Coming from a dictatorship, people like me are sharply attuned to these things. We can sense how freedoms are chipped away little by little.

That’s exactly what happened in China—the censorship started slowly until it was simply too late to pull things back from the brink.

Years ago, investigative journalists like Zhang helped expose corrupt officials of the Chinese government at a time when public debate was still allowed and people were able to voice their concerns.

That permissiveness started to change slowly after Xi took power in late 2012. The Times chronicles how the Chinese government first muzzled newspapers’ editorial freedom, then granted a government official authority to control the internet declaring all media must “love, protect, and serve the Communist Party.”

There was resistance: strikes by journalists; protest by members of the public; and displays of solidarity from entertainers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs. The government responded with arrests, penalties, and prohibitions. Within a few years, critical journalism in China and investigative reporters became extinct. Sound familiar?

This is precisely the road the United States of America is currently on. We learned last week that head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, one of Donald’s most loyal sycophants, has an agenda to silence any voices in media that criticize Donald Trump. And then we learned that Donald himself is responsible for Disney’s decision to suspend “indefinitely” Jimmy Kimmel’s show. He actually admitted that Disney had “promised” him that Kimmel was going to be canceled. Now that ABC, had least according to him, has gone back on its word, Donald is threatening to sue them again, and this suit will be more “lucrative” than another suit he brought which result in a 16 million dollar payout.

Fascism scholars have warned that Donald is simply following in the steps of authoritarians before him. The censorship and crackdown on critics is just the beginning of worse. Jason Stanley, an expert in authoritarianism, who left Yale University for Canada earlier this year over fears of the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, spoke on MSNBC to explain just how Donald’s behavior mimics that of dictators who came before him:

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[S]cholars of authoritarianism have been warning about this for years. Every authoritarian ever waits for an atrocity to happen, a terrorist attack, and they have planned how they’re going to use it. They’re going to use it to target the political opposition. Stephen Miller is now talking about Democrats the way he talks about immigrants. So, this is just what we expected. It’s exactly what happens in any authoritarian regime. It’s what you would do if you were scripting this. You would wait for some atrocity to happen that shocks the nation, and then you would blame it on the political opposition and use the levers of the state to target the political opposition. This is the next phase. This is the US citizen phase, the targeting of US citizens.

There is no doubt that Donald and others in his regime are waiting for some horrific event they can exploit. We saw them do this in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder. But we also need to keep our eyes on the ways in which Donald and people like Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Stephen Miller are creating the conditions in which the horrible event is going to occur.

As Donald escalates his assaults on our constitutional rights and civil liberties, experts are clear: this is only the beginning of worse. Stanley predicts there will be further attacks on the media, and any individuals in the media who are critical of Donald. He also warns of the possibility that a billionaire ally of Donald’s will start buying up more media outlets, which is exactly what happened with Paramount and Skydance.

Other organizations, he says, “will be targeted by the arm of the state and connected with crime;” and non-governmental organizations are “obviously next.”

This begs the question, where is this headed?

Donald is using something called the “salami tactic” a phrase, coined by the Hungarian communist leader Matyos Rakosi as a way to describe his technique of dividing and isolating opposition parties during the 1940s. This phrase was also used a few decades later in what was then-Czechoslovakia to describe the gradual process of chipping away at the opposition and positive reforms.

Protect Democracy, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about the authoritarianism, writes:

By using ‘salami tactics,’ slicing away a democracy, a sliver at a time, modern authoritarians still cement themselves in power, but they do so incrementally and gradually. Sometimes their actions are deliberate and calculated, but sometimes they’re opportunistic myopic or even bumbling. There is no longer a singular bright line that countries cross between democracy and authoritarianism. But the outcome is still the same.

They break down the playbook as follows:

Scapegoating vulnerable communities, corrupting elections, stoking violence, politicizing independent institutions, spreading disinformation, aggrandizing executive power, and quashing dissent.

At this point, Donald has done all of these things and, in many, cases simultaneously. But if you ask me what his next target might be in order to accrue even more power to himself, I would look squarely at the upcoming midterms in 2026. I think we’re past the point at which we don’t have to take Donald seriously. Yes, he’s an idiot. He’s ignorant, he’s uneducated. But he’s very, very good at keeping people angry and confused. He’s expert at creating chaos and stoking rage among his base.

With the help of the fascist Republican party and the corrupt illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court, he has become the most powerful executive in United States history.

The fact that he’s an idiot actually makes this all worse. Under the circumstances, it’s important that we remember that democracy, or at least the trappings of it, will not protect us from descending into fascist authoritarianism. In fact, countries like Hungary actually democratically elected the strong men who are now destroying their democracies.

Eyes open, heads up, and pay attention. Let’s make sure that the 2026 elections are actually free and fair. We underestimate the other side at our peril.