Let’s be clear: Nothing Donald Trump proposes to do in his incoming administration is a threat to American democracy.
Some of his cabinet appointments, like Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state or former Rep. Lee Zeldin for EPA administrator, are basically what you’d expect from Republicans. You may agree with their principles, but you cannot seriously argue that they represent a threat to the rule of law or democratic norms. Others, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, are troublingly incompetent and even downright dangerous — but not particularly immediate five-alarm fires for American democracy.
Yet at the same time, there are already clear and undeniable reasons for caution.
Around the world, there are steps a leader can take to destroy a country’s democracy, such as putting loyalists in charge of law enforcement and politicizing the armed forces. Many of Trump’s early decisions fit this pattern.
The biggest red flag is the choice of arch-loyalist Matt Gaetz as attorney general. The Justice Department is arguably the single most powerful domestic policy agency, handling civil rights cases from the FBI to federal criminal prosecutors. Gaetz has few, if any, qualifications to handle all of this — except for his vendetta against the department, because it once investigated him on suspicion of sex crimes. (Getz denies the allegations and the DOJ The investigation was dropped between them in 2023.). His pitch for work, a Trump insider told Bulwarkwas to “go there and start chopping heads”.
Trump’s plans for the military are equally ominous. The report is between two groups The Wall Street Journal And Reuters In turn, the brass unveiled plans for a political purge — potentially including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump’s proposed defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, a Fox News commentator and MAGA diehard who called Precisely such a pure In a recent book.
And then there’s Trump’s plan to get his cabinet into office. If the Republican Senate actually blocks any of those picks, Trump has claimed the power to install them through recess appointments while the chamber is out of session. If enough senators object, Trump is said to have combined A complex backup plan That boils down to the House, giving him the power to bypass the Senate entirely — effectively removing his constitutional consult-and-consent role in appointments.
Of course, we don’t know how well these bad ideas will materialize. Trump is famous for saying things and failing to follow through. But the enormity of the tail risk — the erosion of American democracy — is important to take seriously given what’s happening right now.
And that means keeping a clear eye on Trump’s agenda: both what’s not so scary about it and what.
The “authoritarian checklist” that can guide us through Trump 2.0
The United States is not the only democracy to elect an authoritarian of late. Voters in a series of other countries, including Hungary, Turkey, Israel, India, Poland, Venezuela, Brazil and the Philippines, have upheld similarly dangerous leaders in recent elections. None of these countries are exactly like the United States, but all have some things in common that can give us a guide to what to expect.
One of the most important similarities is that none of the country’s leaders has openly advocated the abolition of democracy. The idea was too popular among both citizens and elites to act like Hitler and abolish direct elections.
Instead, they made incremental changes that would slowly-but-surely increase their own power and neutralize opponents both inside and outside the government. No single step marks the end of democracy, but each progressively weakens it somewhat. If this process reaches its end point, elections become effectively meaningless – theoretically free contests that are practically impossible for the ruling party to lose.
A few key steps are required to execute this strategy.
First, authoritarians need loyalists in key government positions. No one can hollow out an entire government by themselves; It’s too big a job to micro-manage. So they empower individuals to restructure key government institutions along unwavering loyalty and authoritarian lines. In India, for example, the second-most powerful post in the government – the home minister – is occupied by a man named Amit Shah, one Close friends and comrades Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 1982.
Second, it requires those appointees to dismantle the legal and political protectors over their power. Independent prosecutors, government accountability offices, courts, legislative prerogatives — all these need to be either co-opted or eliminated. Israel’s failed judicial reform of 2023, which effectively stripped its courts of the power to check the power of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is an unusually glaring example of such a move.
After these first two moves succeed in consolidating power over the state, authoritarians then pursue it to weaken dissidents outside the government—the ultimate goal of which is the playing field in which elections are held.
This means not just the obvious, such as formally restricting free speech rights, but more subtle tools – such as manipulating tax agencies and false legal investigations against critics and potential private sector rivals. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is a pioneer here, using something as seemingly benign as government advertising spending to bring Hungary’s media under his control.
Through it all, they need to be able to rely on the loyalty of security services as a last resort. Between elections, dictators fear nothing more than popular coups and military coups. Stacking the intelligence community and armed forces with loyalists is the best way to ensure that coups fail (as happened in Turkey in 2016) or, if necessary, violently suppress street protests (as happened). Following the rigging of Venezuela’s elections earlier this year)
These four points — recruiting loyalists, guarding, attacking dissent, subordinating armed forces — should be used as a key benchmark for evaluating Trump’s policies.
Is what he is proposing really one of those purposes? If so, by how much? How likely is it to happen? And how does the threat level rank relative to other things that he’s doing?
Grading Trump’s Primary Decisions by Checklist
Trying to evaluate Trump’s policies on these metrics is not some kind of academic game.
Those of us who care about democracy, in the press and elsewhere, need to maintain our credibility with potentially persuasive third parties—such as swing voters or moderate Republican senators. Seeing any Republican appointee as a threat to democracy as a liberal hack is a problem; So Trump is building a track record of crying wolf by labeling everything he does as anti-democratic.
In this spirit, it’s clear what emerged as the most dangerous step in Trump’s initial transition: picking Gaetz.
Hard to imagine anyone More loyal to Trump than Gaetz. It’s hard to imagine anyone with a more serious vendetta against the nonpartisan administration of the law, since Gaetz was once the target of a federal investigation. And it’s hard to imagine a more important position than that of attorney general—one with immense power to crack down on guards and punish private sector dissidents. Fake crime investigation (among other tools).
Defense Department plans are not far behind. Purging the Joint Chiefs on the basis of political allegiance — excuse me, Accused “awakening” — removes one of the main obstacles to Trump’s alleged will Invoking the Sedition Act And deploy troops against protesters at home. Hegseth isn’t as serious as Cabinet picks like Gaetz, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who has proposed such a purge and routinely praised Trump on TV for standing in the way of his boss’s plans.
We can go down the list.
The plan to circumvent the Senate’s advice-and-consent powers would be extremely threatening to Gardel if it happened, but it’s unclear how likely it would be. As director of national intelligence, Gabbard raises some troubling questions about the politicization of intelligence, but she’s not a Trump like a Gaetz or even a Hegseth. Kennedy is almost certainly a disaster for public health, but not a clear threat to democracy, narrowly speaking. The presidential staff office is small potatoes compared to cabinet positions, but Trump’s decision His book publisher is responsible for this To seed the entire government with loyalists will facilitate his plan.
By contrast, there’s no reason to even think about appointments like Rubio or Zeldin registering on this scale. These are the kinds of appointments you’d expect from any Republican, and while their policies may be appalling, they’re not an attack on our system of government. As for protecting our democracy, the question for them is not whether they themselves are signs of autocratic decay, but whether they will have the courage to resist it while in power (skeptic color me).
Ranking these topics for credibility only. Defenders of democracy have limited resources and power, especially when both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court are controlled by Republicans. They must prioritize which Trump appointments and policies to fight, a task made more difficult by the daily deluge of outrage we all remember from Trump’s first term.
This requires a clear-eyed view of what is truly a threat and what is not. And currently, an objective assessment of Trump’s initial proposals would give Americans a hell of a lot to worry about.
