Our Authoritarian Year: 2025 in Review
I will forever remember 2025 as the year when Americans got a taste of what it is like to live under an authoritarian government.
We saw the President run roughshod over the Constitution, turn the powers of the state on his political enemies, engage in unprecedented levels of corruption, and attack freedom of speech and association.
Yet one of the truisms of modern authoritarianism is that it is “mostly boring and tolerable,” to quote Tom Pepinsky. If you weren’t paying attention; if your citizenship wasn’t precarious; if you didn’t work for the government; and if you weren’t on some enemies list— you may not even notice what the full extent of what Trump has done. That’s precisely how these sorts of transitions work. The rules of the game are changed, one by one, often with little fanfare, until suddenly people wake up and no longer live in a free and fair society with functioning elections and democratic guardrails.
I am convinced, now more than ever, that Trump is an authoritarian political figure. I have felt that way for some time. I am newly convinced that he is not a particularly astute or clever authoritarian figure, and that this authoritarian spell will likely be relatively short because of that. He is unusually corrupt, arrogant, narcissistic, and incompetent, even for the authoritarian world. And that is saying something.
I wanted to take some time to reflect on what we’ve just lived through. So much has happened this year, on so many fronts. This is what political scientists call “thickened history.” It turns out it is exhausting. Rather than go event by event, I’ve found it useful to think about this story in chapters.
Chapter 1: The Authoritarian Onslaught
Chapter 1, roughly from January through August of this year, was the “authoritarian onslaught.” Trump and his MAGA faction employed the standard autocratizing playbook we’ve seen rolled out in places like Turkey, Hungary and El Salvador, adapted and amended to the US context. He packed institutions of accountability with loyalists, he attacked individuals and organizations he viewed as ideologically hostile, he attempted to intimidate and repress civil society, he disregarded laws and existing checks on his power, and he aimed to rewrite the rules of the electoral game in his favor.
The logic behind this strategy was to “flood the zone,” as Steve Bannon has described— to initiate so many attacks on the core institutions of our democracy at once that it would be difficult to coordinate a response, and even for people to keep track. Here’s a figure I made back in May. It seems almost quaint now. I have found it too overwhelming to even try to update it for the last seven months.
What was striking about all of this was the pace and audacity of the authoritarian power grab. It was barely disguised. In February the White House tweeted images of Trump wearing a crown. Bannon talked openly about the possibility of a third term, and his cronies in Congress proposed a bill to change the 22nd amendment.
In August, I interviewed Steven Levitsky, Adam Przeworski, Sue Stokes, and Dan Ziblatt, which was one of the great professional honors of my life. These scholars have quite literally written the book(s) on democratic erosion, and even they were surprised by what Trump was trying to do and the pace he was trying to do it with. Here’s Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die:
Almost everything they’re doing, they said they were going to do, but I did not anticipate just how quickly and, and radically they’d move on so many fronts. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Trump administration has been much more radically authoritarian than the first year of the Chavez government in Venezuela, than the Orban government in Hungary, than the AKP government in Turkey. Even by comparative standards in the 21st century, this is a real authoritarian blitzkrieg.
Trump was basically trying to accomplish in six months what other authoritarian leaders accomplish over 4 to 8 years.
The other unique feature of Trump’s strategy was the use of DOGE to basically destroy whole parts of the federal government, wiping out large numbers of the sort of competent, honest civil servants that would gum up his plans. This is something the great Ruth Ben-Ghiat has emphasized in her writing and in our interview in August.
Chapter 2: The Overreach
All of this came to a head in July, August and September, when Trump was trying to pacify American cities with the National Guard, depict the peaceful pro-democracy opposition as violent un-American terrorists, and take critical voices like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert off the airways. The murder of Charlie Kirk, while tragic, proved to be a convenient distraction from the Epstein files, as well as a tool to fan the flames of polarization that Trump feeds on. At the time I was worried we would descend into tit-for-tat political violence, which would have played into Trump’s hand.
I think we will look back on Trump’s series of summer moves as the moment things turned. He went too far, too fast. The pretexts became thinner, and the gap between rhetoric and reality grew larger. It is difficult to justify repressing people when they are dancing in inflatable frog and unicorn costumes and playing ukuleles.
During this time, the language of authoritarianism became commonplace and began to spread rightward. I found that really heartening. I remember seeing a clip of Shane Gillis, a working class comedian more popular on the political right, describing the attempt to get Kimmel off the air as fascist. Other manosphere podcasters began to follow suit. Andrew Schulz, another prominent podcaster who originally supported Trump because he just “like[s] the dudes that get pussy and say whatever they want” also reversed course, mostly on policy grounds:
He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars — he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget — he’s increasing it. It’s like everything that he said he’s going to do — except sending immigrants back, and now he’s even flip-flopped on that, which I kind of like.
The MAGA coalition was always unwieldy by design, and Trump’s various policies and plays began to alienate his own base.
Chapter 3: The Popular Backlash
In October, Americans participated in the largest single day protest in our country’s history. No Kings 2 went off with little to no political violence, despite Republican assertions and accusations to the contrary. Trump’s response was to post an AI-generated video of him dumping shit on the American people. Weeks later, Democrats won resounding victories in governor races in New Jersey and Virginia, foreshadowing a potential blue wave in the 2026 midterms. All the while, with the government shut down, Trump proceeded to boast about marble and gold renovations to his White House bathroom as his party attempted to deny Americans access to food stamps and healthcare. He spent December marring building after building in DC with his name, sidestepping questions about the Epstein files, and denigrating Rob Reiner just hours after his murder.
All of this combined to fundamentally change the narrative about Trump. In my interview with Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, he talked about how the goal of No Kings was to puncture the idea that Trump’s consolidation of authoritarian power was inevitable.
Authoritarians want to be feared. They want us to be scared of them. It is totally fine in Trump’s mind for us to accuse of him, of being an autocrat, of him being vicious, of him being a crook.
That’s him being powerful. And he’s fine being feared. He’s fine being hated. He does not want ridicule. He does not want to be seen as ridiculous, and this is because the authoritarian strength comes from the belief that they are powerful, the belief that they are scary, the belief that they have control. Ridicule really busts that bubble.
Mass mobilization, combined with the electoral wins on the Democratic side, have shifted the narrative and momentum. Trump no longer looks the part of a scary future dictator, he looks like a flailing old man at the helm of a sinking political movement.
This brings us to our current chapter.
Chapter 4: Defection and (Hopefully) Electoral Accountability
Like the manosphere influencer class, Republican officials are now beginning to see the writing on the electoral wall. There have already been small hints of meaningful elite defection— Marjorie Taylor Greene’s public turn, the vote on the Epstein files, Ted Cruz pushing back about Jimmy Kimmel, Republicans in Indiana refusing to redistrict. Those in moderate districts could well find themselves out of a job in twelve months. And oddly, the impulse to gerrymander and redistrict in Texas and elsewhere could backfire, as the GOP is effectively spreading its dwindling numbers of voters across more districts.
I suspect we will observe increasing numbers of Republicans breaking with Trump in the weeks and months to come. These things tend to come in waves, complete with tipping points and bandwagon effects. Think of how opposition to Biden’s presidency built in the summer of 2025— slowly at first, and then all at once after people realized it was politically safe.
This also means that the next twelve months or so could very well get ugly. One thing we know about authoritarian leaders is that they tend to cling harder to power in part because of their criminality and wrongdoing. They can’t simply leave office, because that would mean real consequences. Trump has already demonstrated once that he is willing to attempt to overturn an election, and now the circle of corruption and criminality is wider and more experienced. This group of people will not meekly accept electoral defeat and the ensuing accountability, and that means it is on pro-democracy citizens of all ideological stripes to keep the pressure on. That is the job of the next 12 months.
A Note of Gratitude
I wanted to close by thanking you all for reading and sharing this newsletter and supporting my work this year. It has been my way of coping with the moment and trying to make a small contribution in my own way, and I’m grateful that anyone might find it useful.
A special thanks to those who provide financial support even though the newsletter is free. This has allowed me to invest some resources back into my podcast, which will help it grow in the long run.
And thank you for your work protecting our democracy, however you choose to do it.
It is working.
Keep going.
I am optimistic about what 2026 will bring.
Rory
As a scholar looking at Turkey and whose first post on this platform was about how Trump’s America would likely follow Erdoğan’s playbook, I can fully vouch for your assertion that authoritarianization has been MUCH more rapid in the U.S. than it ever was in Turkey.
Great work, Rory. Thanks for doing this. Happy New Year.