I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.
Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last.
That’s the judgment of Garrett Graff. Whether or not we agree with his argument (which I’ll return to in future posts), he makes a compelling case for the conclusion he draws. He continues:
Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.
He points out (what many have noticed) that the mainstream media, doing its best to avoid stating this conclusion straightforwardly, softens its coverage of Trump with euphemisms. (He noted back in February this reluctance to report plainly and clearly what we have been seeing.)
The most powerful argument he offers for the loss of our democracy is a simple recitation of what we’ve all witnessed:
American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.
American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections.
As the armed occupation of the District of Columbia continues, Trump, “exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power,” has mused about sending troops to Chicago and other blue cities.
Civilians who try lawfully to exercise their right to document the abuses of the regime are themselves arrested and charged with felonies through trumped-up charges teeming with official lies. The fact that this military takeover and federal occupation is being done to the city’s residents — and not on their behalf — is evident in how deserted DC has become as residents refuse to enter public spaces where they might have to interact with agents of the state.
America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.
There’s much more in Graff’s commentary. Corporate overlords paying tribute to Trump; the kidnapped and disappeared exiled to overseas prisons, while concentration camps are reopened at home; purges of folks with fidelity to the rule of law.
“It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.”
It has been abundantly clear for a while that the democracy we had on January 19 is long gone.
“We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. “It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.”
That was April. The evidence is much stronger now and Trumpist authoritarianism appears much less mild than it did a mere four months ago.
Political scientists who study democratic backsliding and authoritarianism may prefer competitive authoritarianism or personalist autocracy to straight up authoritarianism or fascism to describe the U.S.A in August 2025. But for small-d democrats, the direction we’re headed in and much of the damage we’ve already witnessed are unmistakable. Unlike the elite mainstream media, we need to be clear-eyed about it.
And as Graff concludes, though our success is hardly guaranteed, we must be prepared to fight back.
[August 28: mangled word choice in penultimate paragraph revised for clarity.]