Three leading scholars on democracy and tyranny wrote an article for the current issue of Foreign Affairs. They write:
In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
In other words, those scholars now consider the US to no longer be a democracy. Instead the see the US as a conditional authoritarian state that is now close to full-blown authoritarian tyranny with a collapsed rule of law. Two important points the article argues:
1. Trump has corrupted and weaponized the federal justice system. He uses the DoJ and FBI to prosecute and harass opponents for even minor infractions while using it to protect his government officials and supporters from prosecution, even for serious felonies.
2. America’s slide into corrupt tyranny is not inevitable. However, the gravest threat now is not from MAGA repression, but from pro-democracy forces giving up their opposition out of fear or surrendering their defense of democracy because they see opposition as futile. Also, they point out that far too many Americans still falsely see the authoritarian Trump and elite MAGA wealth and power movement as not much different from previous administrations.
Link to non-paywalled article: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/gxhQjvix5dc