Following my post on Friday about Trump consolidating his power base, an article in The Atlantic by a Venezuelan woman, Gisela Salim-Peyer, an associate editor at the American magazine, brought to life a fear I have seen expressed by many moderates living under Trump's second term. The fear that America is slowly descending into authoritarianism. A few days ago, I read somewhere that the country isn’t sliding towards authoritarianism; it’s already there. And this is the essential point of the article. When do you accept that democracy has been irreversibly damaged and you are living an autocratic nightmare? Things happen, and at first you're shocked, but you come to accept it. It’s akin to boiling the frog.
The authoritarian is emboldened to go a bit further, and things ratchet up until you daren't protest even if you feel inclined to.
The author of the Atlantic piece talks of how Venezuela slowly drifted into its present state after Hugo Chávez became president in 1999. Chávez had been an army officer who, like Trump in 2021, led an unsuccessful coup against the elected government. This was in 1992, and he was imprisoned for it but released after just two years, pardoned by President Rafael Caldera. Venezuelans were then persuaded to democratically vote for Chávez seven years later, again like Trump, but they came to regret it.
His Wikipedia entry includes this paragraph:
“Under Chávez, Venezuela experienced democratic backsliding, as he suppressed the press, manipulated electoral laws, and arrested and exiled government critics. His use of enabling acts and his government's use of propaganda were controversial. Chávez's presidency saw significant increases in the country's murder rate and continued corruption within the police force and the government.”
You could imagine some historian in a few years, perhaps decades, writing exactly the same words about Donald Trump. Chávez died of cancer in 2013, but Venezuela is still paying the price of his reign of terror, which saw hyperinflation, increasing levels of starvation, disease, crime, and mortality rates, resulting in massive emigration.
Nobody expects anything quite that bad in the USA, but you can see things getting pretty bad.
Chatting to someone the other day, we both thought that multiple, serious, anti-democratic events were coming on a daily, even an hourly basis. So much so that it as hard to keep up. This is just one recent example:
Trump is sending troops to "war-ravaged Portland," a city of 630,000 in Oregon. By 'war-ravaged' he means a few protesters exercising their rights to show what they think of Trump's ICE henchmen snatching people off the street and from immigration facilities to detain and deport them without any legal redress or opportunity to prove their innocence. It is certainly not war-ravaged, although Trump would like it to be.
He is also trying to seize control of the Federal Reserve’s interest rate-setting committee. It’s well known he wants to get rid of the central bank’s chair, Jerome Powell. Look at this post by the president on his Truth Social platform:
Yet, the financial markets barely moved, if they moved at all. Had a European leader even hinted at removing the governor of the European Central Bank, or if Starmer had suggested Andrew Bailey at the Bank of England should step down because he wasn't lowering interest rates quickly enough, the euro or the pound would be in free fall the next day. But in America, his increasingly erratic behaviour has become normalised and accepted.
Some people have likened him to Richard Nixon, the Republican president who was impeached and resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal, but point out that what Trump is doing far more, far worse and more frequently than Nixon ever did:
@gtconway.bsky.social was a schoolboy when Nixon was around. I was starting out at @washingtonmonthly.com then. GC is absolutely right. Any random three hours of offenses by Trump equal the whole Saturday Night Massacre. Difference: GOP in Senate/House were not all stooges/tools back then.— James Fallows (@jfallows.bsky.social) 26 September 2025 at 21:42
Trump makes Richard Nixon look like a choirboy. The Saturday night massacre refers to 20 October 1973 when Nixon's Attorney General resigned rather than fire the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate affair. When the AG's deputy also refused and resigned, Nixon had the third most senior official at the Department of Justice fire the prosecutor, but he too resigned after doing so. It was the turning point in the whole scandal, and in August 1974, Nixon himself was forced to resign.
Yet, what Nixon did is a mere fraction of what Trump is doing.
Trump is already in control of Congress and the Supreme Court. He has most of the media and social media running scared. His corruption is brazen and out in the open. He doesn't even try to conceal his attempts to use the Justice Department to persecute his enemies. Why, he even gives press conferences and tweets about it. He is actually proud of what he's doing, and his party does nothing to restrain him.
At least Nixon tried to cover it up!! Trump revels in the corruption.
The US government will shut down completely unless Congress can reach an agreement on a budget by next Wednesday. Trump needs some Democratic votes because many in his own party are fiscal hawks who think he's spending too much, but he refuses to meet with senior Democrats to negotiate a settlement. He can't even contemplate not getting his own way and could be tempted to use the whole thing to provoke a crisis, who knows?
Does anyone really now believe this administration would voluntarily step down in 2028? California Governor Gavin Newsom has said publicly he does not expect a presidential election in 2028. If Trump engineered a crisis and suspended the 2026 midterms, who would stop him? I can’t see anyone on the Republican side who would dare. They all live in fear of retribution.
Dictators don’t stand down after building an authoritarian system that can be used against them. That is the big lesson of history.
