'Classic dictator': Experts sound alarm over Trump's 'performative authoritarianism'

01 September

Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo

Critics warn that recent actions by President Donald Trump reflect a troubling drift toward authoritarianism, despite his own insistence to the contrary.

On Tuesday, Trump declared during a cabinet meeting, “I’m not a dictator. I don’t like a dictator.” Previously, during a campaign town hall in December 2023, he quipped that he would be a dictator “except for Day One,” referring to his intention to immediately close the border and “drill, drill, drill” on energy policy before returning to a more traditional leadership style.

In a report published Monday, The Guardian interviewed experts and asked them if Trump could be called a dictator.

Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard and co-author of How Democracies Die, told the outlet: “Technically in political science terms, no, he’s not a dictator. The United States… is collapsing into some form of authoritarianism. But it has not consolidated into an outright dictatorship.”

He continued: “Dictators everywhere, first of all, claim that they’re not dictators. And second of all… claim that the people want a dictator. Those are classic dictator lines.”

“There is a real performative side to this government’s authoritarianism… I really haven’t seen anything like this sort of performative authoritarianism… since the ’30s in Europe," Levitsky added.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology professor at Princeton, initially hesitated to call Trump's behavior dictatorial, but says the heavy military presence combined with suppression of dissent leaves no room for doubt.

“If I was hesitating before, it’s this mobilization of the national guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we’re in it," he told the Guardian.

“[He’s] really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force," the professor added.

He continued: “If you think of dictators as… tanks in the streets… and big posters of the leader… all that stuff… does remind everybody of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia… and Mussolini’s Italy.”

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