How the Trump Administration Innovates the Authoritarian Playbook

I wrote an essay for Project Syndicate, and it was published yesterday as their monthly Long Read. It is paywalled but I am excerpting it for you with their kind permission. They asked me to write about how the Trump administration is innovating the authoritarian playbook.

Every aspiring autocrat who takes power in a free society makes use of time-tested measures and methods to delegitimize and ultimately vanquish democracy. US President Donald Trump is no exception. But the Trump administration is also putting its own twist on the autocratic playbook, with several innovations that have no parallel among contemporary autocrats who have come to power through elections.

The scenes now playing out across the US today recall the history of authoritarian regimes, including military juntas. Troops roam city streets, and masked state security forces round up people and “disappear” them to domestic and foreign prisons. With state National Guard units creating “quick reaction forces” for “crowd control” at the Pentagon’s request, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increasing its annual spending on guns, armor, and chemical weapons by 600%, a domestic “forever war” against US citizens seems likely.

The Blitzkrieg

The speed, scope, and scale of America’s transformation is the first of Trump’s autocratic innovations. In a matter of months, Trump has made abrupt and radical changes to US economic and trade policy; upended longstanding foreign-policy positions, alliances, and intelligence arrangements; and unleashed ICE operations that disrupt the daily lives of US-born citizens and immigrants alike.

Other contemporary autocrats who came to power through elections, including Erdoğan, Orbán, and Putin, created no comparable level of upheaval during their first year in office. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has also observed, Trump’s first year more closely resembles moments of regime change in history, the aftermath of successful coups, or the crackdowns that follow failed coups (such as the 2016 military uprising against Erdoğan).

Trump’s Blitzkrieg was made possible partly by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the project’s architects served as a kind of shadow government, planning the destruction of democratic institutions and the staffing of the federal government with an “army” of carefully vetted operatives who would be “activated” on “Day One” of Trump’s second term. Their task: to shift America’s political and governance cultures toward authoritarianism.

Authoritarians think big, and they think about the long term. The figures who are now shaping US policy – such as Project 2025’s lead organizer Russell Vought (now Director of the Office of Management and Budget) and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller – know that creating a compliant civil service is essential. This explains the Trump administration’s purges of federal employees in the military and civilian sectors, including the Department of Justice. Only by erasing professional experience and institutional memory from the government can they create a civil service amenable to authoritarian practices – a new “deep state” that will remain in place long after Trump has departed.

The Oligarch in Charge

Trump’s assault on US democracy was also enabled by his alliance with Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, and the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), under Musk’s purview. Oligarchs normally operate outside government, buying up media or financial properties that they can leverage in service of the autocrat. But Trump effectively made Musk – who had invested heavily in getting him elected – his co-leader.

During the early weeks of Trump’s presidency, Musk spoke regularly at cabinet meetings and in the Oval Office, including to the press, and met with foreign heads of state, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on White House grounds. So prominent was Musk during this period that Time magazine depicted him sitting behind the presidential desk in the Oval Office on a February 2025 cover.

But Musk’s involvement in the government went beyond spectacle. As the head of DOGE, Musk gained access to US data systems, with his operatives adopting lawless methods that are a feature of regime change. Like soldiers executing a coup, they occupied government buildings, sometimes locking out members of Congress; fired thousands of government employees after barring them from their own computer systems; and physically removed officials who sought to stop them from seizing digital property.

DOGE’s real goal was never to “boost efficiency,” but rather to create a “single centralized database with vast troves of personal information about millions of US citizens and residents,” which could be used for government surveillance and AI training. For Musk, DOGE’s activities also offered an opportunity to dismantle agencies that were threatening his companies with investigations and fines, and to steer domestic and foreign government business toward his products.

Musk publicly apparently left DOGE in May, and the centralized “department” was recently disbanded. But the agency continues to operate clandestinely in hundreds of US government agencies, offices, and departments, and Musk remains very involved with US policy at the highest levels. Each US state has a DOGE task force: in Idaho, more than 70 departments, offices, programs, and commissions are being considered for cuts as of November. Vought, in whom Project 2025 and DOGE converge, is now pledging to make DOGE’s changes permanent.

This combined data heist and state infiltration has no precedent. The world’s incumbent and aspiring tyrants are watching what is happening in America.

Second: Taking Down Your Own Country For the Benefit of Autocrats Abroad

“If you have a smart president, they’re not enemies,” Trump said of Russia, China, and North Korea at a campaign rally in Virginia in June 2024. “You’ll make them do great.” Trump is certainly doing that: by systematically destroying the foundations of US prosperity, prestige, and goodwill in the world, he is contributing to a decline in American power, both hard and soft, that will benefit the foreign autocracies that he so admires. Herein lies Trump’s third autocratic innovation.

Many of the world’s most notorious dictators have carried their countries toward ruin, such as by slashing public assistance (Chile’s Augusto Pinochet), appropriating funds for themselves and their cronies (Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Putin), or engaging in catastrophic wars or revolutionary campaigns (Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong).

But the Trump administration is unusual in its apparent commitment to destroying the pillars of America’s long-term prosperity – education, health, research, and climate policy – and decimating trust in, and goodwill toward, the US abroad.

The destruction of U.S. science and public health is an example. The fanatical resolve shown by Trump officials in this process resembles the mindset of Fascist and Communist functionaries, including those who implemented Mao’s devastation of Chinese science and medicine during the Cultural Revolution. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services – who often advocates quack medicine over legitimate science – engineered the departure of a quarter of his department (20,000 workers) in just four months.

“In rapid bursts,” the Trump administration “has laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plug on thousands of research projects, and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies,” The New York Times reported in August, adding that next year’s proposed $44 billion budget cut would be “the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II.” Science has been “long a key driver of the US’s global pre-eminence,” Guardian journalist Robert Tait writes, and so it has to be destroyed.

This initiative, together with the broader reduction of America’s soft-power footprint and retreat from global leadership, is creating the conditions for the doctrine of “multipolarity” championed by autocrats like Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to succeed. Already, China is stepping in to fill the voids left by the US as a clean-energy manufacturer and trading partner. In this sense, it is China that MAGA is “making great.”

Like Trump’s other innovations, the effort to dismantle US prestige and power is seemingly designed to obtain results as fast as possible, no matter the humanitarian costs. Musk’s destruction of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which saved an estimated 92 million lives over the last two decades, shows just how high those costs can be.

The physician and writer Dhruv Khullar frames the Trump administration’s attacks on medical training and biomedical innovation as “subversion.” That term should be applied more broadly. As the Trump administration, its political supporters, and their ideological apparatus work overtime to destroy US stability and well-being, they are not merely accelerating their country’s transition from a free society to an autocracy. Theirs is a holistic effort to take down a superpower.