'Could be really ugly': Experts explain why they 'expect things to get worse' in Trump’s second term

At a town hall in Pennsylvania in October 2024, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was asked if she considered her GOP rival, Donald Trump, a "fascist" — and her reply was a definite "yes." Harris was hardly alone in that view: Everyone from conservative attorney George Conway to self-described "democratic socialist" Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) attacked Trump as a dangerous authoritarian who openly praised dictators and had no regard for the rule of law.

After Trump narrowly defeated Conway, AOC and countless other Trump critics warned that the United States was in for a rough ride. The Guardian's Robert Tait, in an article published on June 19, emphasizes that Trump, during his second term, is attacking democracy at an even more rapid pace than his detractors predicted.

"It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy," Tait explains. "A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a U.S. senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent. A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest. Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes. The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants."

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Tait continues, "A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus — a vital legal defense for detainees — could be suspended. The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump's administration as the president's sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago."

Eric Rubin, a former U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria, believes that Trump is shredding civil liberties at an even more rapid pace than Russian President Vladimir Putin in the past.

Rubin told The Guardian, "This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms. It took him years. We're not even looking at six months here."

Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, warns that the worst is yet to come during Trump's second term.

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Nyhan told The Guardian, "We're in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia. I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real."

Steven Levitsky, a political science professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told The Guardian, "Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power. But we don't yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond….. Trump's ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions. It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side — and he's taken steps in that direction."

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Read Robert Tait's full article for The Guardian at this link.