FILE PHOTO: Police officers, DEA agents and members of South Carolina National Guard patrol the National Mall, weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and ordered an increased presence of federal law enforcement to assist in crime prevention, in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 1, 2025. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez/File Photo
Authoritarianism has been a prominent theme in journalist/author Katherine Stewart's books, including "The Good News Club: The Christian Right's Stealth Assault on America's Children" in 2012, "The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism" in 2020, and "Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" in 2025. Stewart is a vehement critic of Christian nationalism and the religious right, and she views President Donald Trump's second administration as a major threat to liberal democracy in the United States.
In an article published on October 2, Stewart lays out seven ways in which Trump is ramping up his push for authoritarianism.
"It is well past time to connect the dots," Stewart warms. "The Trump Administration's assault on democracy has entered a new and dangerous phase. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do, and what many of us warned was coming. He is at the head of a political movement that has long aimed to demolish American democracy, and he and his inner circle of supporters are now backed into a corner where they have few options but to double down."
Stewart goes on to list seven "dots" she says need to be connected.
They include: (1) Dot #1, "the conversion of federal law enforcement and the system of justice into an instrument for punishing enemies of the regime and its leader," (2) Dot #2, "the executive order declaring 'Antifa' a 'domestic terrorist organization,'" (3) Dot #3, "the deployment of the U.S. military against so-called domestic enemies, (4) Dot #4, "the conversion of mainstream media into regime-compliant propaganda and disinformation providers," and (5) Dot #5, "the capture of the corporate sector."
The others are: (6) Dot #6, "the reduction of the legislature to a plate of Jello," and (7) Trump's push "to remove any opposition in the form of expertise by decimating the federal government."
"While we have arrived at a dire moment, make no mistake: Now is not the time to curl up in despair," Stewart cautions. "We have work to do — institutions to defend, pro-democracy organizations to support, lawsuits to pursue, corruption to expose, and midterm elections next year. The same forces that have brought us an anti-democratic movement have succeeded in undermining key institutions: the judiciary, the integrity of religious institutions, and the guardrails of one of our two political parties."
Stewart adds, "If we want better outcomes, we can start by learning how those institutions have been undermined and commit ourselves to the process of restoring them."
Katherine Stewart's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.