Experts in authoritarian regimes warn 'the system has been captured' in US

09 May

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Experts speaking to the Christian Science Monitor say President Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from elected autocrats — and friends — who used the tools of their respective democracies to undo them.

“If we were slipping into an authoritarian situation, step by step, it would pretty much look like what’s happening right now,” said Larry Diamond, a Hoover Institution senior fellow who spent four decades studying how and why democracies fail.

The Monitor interviewed dozens of experts who have spent their careers studying and defending democratic institutions in fallen democracies like Hungary, Colombia and El Salvador. They were “nearly unanimous” that Trump is following a familiar authoritarian game plan.

The Monitor reports 760 political scientists now “rank the U.S. below Poland and Mexico for its democratic performance,” particularly regarding free speech and whether government agencies are being used to punish political opponents, freedom of the press, the impartiality of criminal investigations, and judicial independence.

Trump’s team shows all the signs, including trying to eliminate structural checks on their power, intimidating opposition parties, threatening potential dissenters within their own ranks and defying the courts. Similarly, autocrats punish and bully the news media and “protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists.”

Two surveys during Trump’s short second term also reflect a plunge in confidence for the strength of American democracy. Democracy monitoring networks Freedom House no longer list the U.S. among the world’s most stable democracies in its 2025 annual report, and Germany-based Democracy Matrix classified the U.S. as a “deficient democracy,” ranking behind Chile and Latvia.

Steven Levitsky, senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations warned the U.S. is moving faster toward autocracy than any other fully democratic government that has backslid in the 21st century besides El Salvador – “faster even than Hungary, Poland, or Venezuela.”

“If you compare [Trump to] the behavior of those governments in their first months – all of them, all of them – this is much worse,” he says.

In May, Trump said, “I don’t know” when NBC News asked if he had to uphold the Constitution, and his surrogates over the FBI and the justice department do not care — or they are too afraid to say otherwise. Consider the recent exchange during a hearing between FBI Director Kash Patel and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) over whether the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right of due process for legal residents the administration has rounded up and shot to international prisons with neither judge nor hearing.

“Your position is that every one of those individuals is by constitutional right afforded due process. I don’t know the answer to that,” Patel told Merkley during questioning.

“You haven’t read the Constitution?” asked Merkley.

“I’ve got it right here. But what you’re saying is that every single one of the illegals that was sent down to El Salvador is supposed to be given due process pursuant to —" Patel began.

“That’s what the Constitution says,” Merkley pointed out.

“It doesn’t say that," Patel argued.

“It does say ‘no person.’ I’ll encourage you to read it,” Merkley prodded, adding that same point has “also been affirmed by the Supreme Court repeatedly.”

Meanwhile, aided by a complicit political party in Congress, Trump and his team continue to fire top law enforcement officials and replace them with allies. And while consolidating power, Trump’s circle often cite the model used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who describes his approach to governing as “illiberal democracy.”

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is a Peruvian who watched President Alberto Fujimori attack the press, dissolve the Peruvian Congress and Supreme Court, grant amnesty to military and police convicted or accused of human rights abuses and rewrite the constitution to stay in power. She told the Monitor she’s seen it all before.

“You hold elections, you still give press briefings and talk to journalists, and you still have courts that make rulings. ... But underneath that surface, the system has been captured,” she said.

Read the full Christian Science Monitor report here.

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