Within days of Donald Trump’s second election as president of the United States, aides were concocting plans for mass deportations that look in many ways to be the spear-tip of a wider assault on liberal democracy. Initially, these deportation plans were backburnered in favor of a focus on staffing and prioritizing the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle large swathes of the federal government. But by April 2025, when I began writing a daily analysis of the human rights implications of the Trump administration’s actions, the deportation machine was in high gear.
The scale, cruelty, and lawlessness of both DOGE and Trump’s deportation campaign have severely undermined the constitutional guardrails that protect our democracy. And one year into this presidency, the shape of our immediate future has become clear: In a reversal of John Adams’s adage, we now have a government of men and not of laws.
This is a period in which the rule of one man, not the rule of law, will predominate.
Here is what a year of writing daily about the second Trump administration has taught me about the prospects for democracy and human rights in the United States.
Is this authoritarianism?
In a word, yes. The actions of the Trump administration—including gutting military leadership and the civil service; impounding funds appropriated by Congress; using federal grants, contracts, and permissions to extort universities, law firms, and the media; and empowering masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to make arrests based on racial profiling—all concentrate power in the presidency and bear the hallmarks of an emerging authoritarian regime.
Not every attempt to subvert our democratic system has been effective. Efforts to deploy troops in US cities have been rejected by the courts and hampered by the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military engagement in domestic policing. Per the Posse Comitatus Act, the National Guard cannot step into a law enforcement role unless called up by the governor of the state in question (a nonstarter when the states targeted are exclusively governed by Democrats) or the president invokes the Insurrection Act (a bridge not yet crossed). And while the Supreme Court remains a frightening wild card, the broader judiciary has largely held the line against military overreach.
An autocratic future is not assured. But it is possible.
What does that mean?
By and large, the administration has followed a “New Authoritarian” playbook. The Heritage Foundation wrote Project 2025, their blueprint for a second Trump presidency, with input from the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank associated with Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz party. In recent decades Orbán and his supporters have successfully undermined democracy in Hungary and created a “hybrid regime”: an autocracy hiding in the shell of a democratic government.
Today’s authoritarianism differs from 20th century versions in its core mechanism for maintaining power. While the despots of yore relied on violence and fear to keep populaces in line, modern autocrats prefer “regulatory repression.” By manipulating electoral systems, nonprofit regulations, the judiciary, and the media, they assure electoral victory and render popular protest largely irrelevant. A cool-headed autocrat can ride out discontent, tweaking the regulatory gears as necessary to hold power.
Trumpism is a version of this project. But there are mixed signals, broadcast mostly by a president unabashed in his admiration for brutally old-school dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un over more subtly shrewd, manipulative figures like Orbán or Nayib Bukele. Stymied in his efforts to provoke and put down violent unrest at home, Trump has turned to a military adventurism that upends the rule-based international order and validates Russian aggression. Trump’s new National Security Strategy is remarkable in its hostility to traditional democratic allies and affection for autocratic former enemies. The recent ungrounded conflict with Venezuela only strengthens the feeling that Trump wants to be like the strongmen he admires.
Will it work?
There are a number of factors that suggest a Trumpian auto-coup will fail. The first is time. History suggests the pliant Republican Congress of 2025 will be short-lived: midterm elections typically flip at least one house to the opposition. Recent gerrymandering to secure more Republican seats may not succeed and could backfire. The president’s idea of “nationalizing” elections faces the daunting reality of our vast, decentralized system, and time is not on Trump’s side.
The administration’s lack of policy coherence is another hurdle. While Russell Vought and others quietly implement an Orbánist playbook behind the scenes, Trump’s attention-seeking behavior and cruelty spotlight the authoritarian threat. The saber-rattling and open crimes of the “Donroe Doctrine” fly in the face of the president’s promise to stay out of unending wars. The destruction of federal agencies and the social safety net, inflationary tariffs and trade wars, and health care cost increases that went into effect this month will have an inescapable effect on voters’ wellbeing. And as Trump’s health fails, factionalism on the right threatens to split his base.
A canny would-be authoritarian would bide their time and wait for quiet changes to take effect, but in the United States, the current administration’s incompetence and incoherence are heightening public fears and alienating supporters. All of this leaves the president’s party even more vulnerable in a must-win election season.
What then?
Failed economic policy, incompetent leadership, lost elections and the president’s physical and cognitive decline all may lead to the collapse of this grand and shocking autocratic experiment. But be that as it may, millions of Americans have witnessed the administration's cruelty and lawlessness—and cheered it on.
Masked bands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, often in paramilitary uniform, have rounded up tens of thousands of migrants—including legal permanent residents, international students, asylum seekers, and desperately ill adults and children—and denied them due process, held them in inhumane conditions, tortured and even left them to die before deporting many, sometimes to countries far from any home they have ever known. Throughout, a solid minority of Americans have strongly approved of Trump’s immigration policy. Masked agents without identification throw people into unmarked cars and deport people denied an opportunity to make their case in court all while Trump supporters claim—wrongly—that constitutional rights apply only to citizens. This base then cheered when people who could have been easily apprehended were instead killed in the boats they crewed—acts that are either extrajudicial killings or war crimes.
In the short term, the threat is to democracy. But we only arrived at this place because too many Americans fail to understand or care about human rights.
Once the immediate crisis is over, we must have a reckoning. We must hold those most responsible for human rights abuses accountable and use public outreach and educational interventions to make good on the proclamation of universal rights that launched the American experiment.
Without these steps—without a post-Trump plan for transitional justice—our democracy may never again be secure.