The beginning of the end of democracy? How the US is sliding towards authoritarianism

Disclaimer: This transcript has been generated by AI. It is not a fully edited and proofread text.

Host: Since his return to the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump has relied on what many view as authoritarian tactics. He has deployed troops to Los Angeles, Washington, and now also Chicago. Masked ICE agents are carrying out increasingly violent raids on undocumented immigrants on a daily basis. Trump is targeting political opponents, including former government officials, judges, and law firms. He's curtailing free speech by suing or investigating media outlets. He's threatened to withhold funding from major universities if they don't advance conservative ideas. And violent rhetoric from the White House is becoming insidious, such as Trump promising on social media to go to war in Chicago. You're listening to the latest podcast from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP for short, here in Berlin. In today's episode, we're asking to what extent Trump is dismantling America's constitutional order to consolidate executive power, and whether U.S. institutions are resilient enough to withstand his second term. I'm your host, Esme Nicholson, and to assess the state of U.S. democracy, I'm joined today by Johannes Thimm, whose research focuses on the link between U.S. domestic and foreign policy, as well as on transatlantic relations. Johannes also happens to be a senior fellow here at SWP. Johannes, thank you for popping into the studio.

Johannes Thimm: Happy to be here.

Host: Keeping abreast of Trump administration policy isn't easy as we wade through a flooded zone of messaging. But if we stand back and try and gain a little bit of perspective today, it's pretty clear that American democracy is eroding. You heard my litany of tactics at the top of this episode. Could you expand a little bit on what is happening under Trump 2.0, especially with a view to the role of violence and violent rhetoric?

Johannes Thimm: Yeah, so what we can see is that Trump is consolidating his power by all means, leaving aside the substantial issues of his political agenda. We can see that there are several things that he's doing at once. He's cutting down on the government bureaucracy by firing a lot of officials in various departments, organizations, agencies, partly replacing these officials with people who are loyal to him and who are willing to implement his agenda without many objections. But he's also going after his political opponents in government and beyond government. He has also started to encourage the Justice Department to start investigations of people for various reasons, and we can get into those. And he's using the levers of government in all sorts of ways to pressure the private sector, to pressure NGOs, to pressure the media and universities who are critical of his agenda or of his policies. And he's using a violent rhetoric that goes against the rules of civil discourse. He paints his political opponents as his enemies, as evil. And one could say that through his rhetoric,

Host: he also encourages violence against them. Well, Trump recently told military top brass that he wants to use American cities as, quote, training grounds for the military. And he certainly evokes a strong man aesthetic or is attempting to, one that some people would say is rife for satire. But actually,

Johannes Thimm: how serious and how dangerous is this? I think it's very dangerous in the current political climate. So we have these various speeches. And there was the speech that the defense secretary, or as he calls himself now, the war secretary, Pete Hekseff, gave in front of the military leadership in Virginia, where Trump also popped in and made quite ominous threats of using American cities as training grounds for the troops. And he was talking about the enemy from within. And we have what's actually happening on the ground, which is that Trump has now mobilized the National Guard in four cases, mobilized them and sent them to American cities. So first, we had the case of Los Angeles. Then we had the National Guard in Washington, DC. And now currently, we're talking about Portland, Oregon and Chicago, Illinois. The reasoning Trump gives for this is one to combat crime in general, which is a bit problematic because the military is not supposed to take over police functions or do law enforcement in any way. But more immediately, he's using the troops to protect the agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies, ICE, who are conducting these raids against irregular immigrants. So what is happening is ICE agents are sent to cities that are ruled by Democrats, where the population is mostly liberal and doesn't support Trump's agenda of deporting immigrants at the scale that he's doing. Protests break out against these ICE raids. And then Trump uses these protests as a pretext to claim that there's lawlessness, that there is violence, that there are riots, and then mobilizes and sends the National Guard there to protect the ICE agents and quell the protests.

Host: Well, and the governor of Illinois, for instance, has been fighting back and getting the courts involved. We'll come back, I think, a little bit to that in a minute. But this has all been happening. Everything you've described really at breakneck speed, this chipping away at the Constitution and constitutional rights. Why is Trump seemingly able to govern with such little regard for checks and balances? And how long has this been in the making?

Johannes Thimm: So in some ways, Trump is not the cause of the political problems of the American political system, but one of its symptoms. But at the same time, he's more than just a symptom because he's really stoking the divisions. And he has very strong authoritarian tendencies. Trump's view of his own power as the president as the chief of the executive is almost unlimited. He once said, I have an article two, I can do whatever I want. Of course, article two of the US Constitution is where the powers of the presidency are defined. And it doesn't say that the president can do whatever he wants. The US has a system of checks and balances. We have three co-equal branches who are supposed to check and control each other. And the problem at the moment is that Republicans hold control of the White House and of both chambers of Congress. And the Republicans in Congress are 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump. So they are not doing their job of checking the executive for excess. They've basically abdicated that role. They're going along with whatever Donald Trump asked them to do. So this co-equal branch, which is actually in Article one of the US Constitution, so it's enumerated before the presidency, doesn't do its job. And then what we are left with are the courts. And the federal courts have been trying to keep up with this flood of executive actions. But first of all, courts are slow. It just takes time. Which is necessary. Which is necessary. Second of all, they have no way to enforce their rulings. So if the administration doesn't engage in good faith, the norm was that if a court ruled something, the executive obeys their ruling and does so in good faith. And we have increasingly have evidence that the White House is trying to get around rulings. The White House does not testify truthfully when in court. And so there are a lot of problems with the courts really putting their foot down. And the third problem is that while most of the federal courts have really been quite critical of Trump overstepping the legal boundaries of his power and have ruled against him repeatedly and in very important cases, the Supreme Court seems to be quite sympathetic to Trump's interpretation of his own power. So far, we've been speaking about Trump. But

Host: this isn't just Trump. To what extent is this his cabinet, his advisers, his deputy chief of staff, his former advisers? To what extent are they pulling the strings here?

Johannes Thimm: So as I said before, Trump has surrounded himself with loyalists. Pretty much everybody who is close to him now supports his agenda 100%. There are a few people that I would point out as particularly important. One, of course, is Vice President J.D. Vance, who also shares these authoritarian tendencies and who also shares this view of political opponents or competitors as enemies. Then the most important person right now in the agenda of restrictive immigration policies deporting illegal immigrants, but also in terms of sending troops to American cities is Stephen Miller. He's a White House advisor. His official title is deputy chief of staff, but that doesn't do his role justice. He's really the person who has Trump's ear. And he's, well, to put it in blunt terms, he's an ideological zealot. But he really, really wants to seal the border and deport as many immigrants as possible, made very provocative comments about soldiers in the cities, about the Democrats, about the American left and so on. So he's very important. And the third person I would name is Russell Vogt, who is the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, which sounds like a very boring title, but is very important when it comes to all the questions concerning the bureaucracy and the executive. So we paid a lot of attention to Doge. And when Elon Musk came in and fired all these people, took a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy, the mastermind behind that was actually not Elon Musk, but was Russell Vogt. And he, unlike Elon Musk at the time, he has an official title. He was a part of Trump's first term administration. And while Trump was out of office while Joe Biden was the president, he organized the re-election of Donald Trump and the agenda for the re-election. He was centrally evolved in Project 2025. And he has a lot of experience in how government bureaucracies work. And he is hellbent on cutting the federal bureaucracy. He's also said that during the government shutdown, which is now in progress, he wants to use that to fire even more bureaucrats and administration

Host: officials. You just mentioned the shutdown. To what extent do you think that could damage Trump?

Johannes Thimm: It's very hard to say at the moment who will come out of this as a winner. It's still early. The blame game is going on. Each party blames the other one for having caused the shutdown. The early polling we have tells us that at the moment, Democrats have a slight edge. So more people blame Republicans and the president for the shutdown than blame Democrats for it. But it's still very early. This can still change a lot. I think with respect to the shutdown, it's important to keep in mind, Democrats say this is about extending subsidies for medical insurance. So at the end of the year, some subsidies for public medical insurance called Obamacare will run out and premiums for a lot of people who have these health insurances will increase. And they want to extend those subsidies. And they also want to take back some of the cuts to Medicare, which is the health insurance for poor people, which have been made under the so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act. But I think the shutdown is about the larger context, which we've been talking about. So Democrats have very little power at the moment because they are in the minority in the Senate, they are in the minority in the House of Representatives, and they can do very little to stop Trump from what he's doing at the moment. And so they're also using this as an opportunity to oppose Trump's authoritarian tendencies, even though this is the quiet part, which they don't say out loud yet.

Host: They've been largely, at least from afar, absent or certainly divided until now. So perhaps this is the first showings of some sort of resistance. But I guess the question, you know, after having heard your description of Trump's America, is the United States still a democracy?

Johannes Thimm: What is clear is that a lot of democratic standards have eroded very quickly over the past eight months. So the U.S. is not a full-fledged democracy anymore. It's not a perfect democracy anymore. Many people at this point already claim that what we are faced with is a form of competitive authoritarianism. So this is a term from political science, which says we are facing some kind of hybrid regime, which still contains elements of democracy, but also authoritarian elements. And this has become the common form of hybrid regimes around the world where they're not clear dictatorships. Formerly, democratic institutions still exist, but the party in power or the person in power uses political power to tilt the system and to have an advantage in the next election. So elections still do take place and they're still competitive, but they're not fair anymore. The people in power go after the opposition and violate their civil rights in doing so. So there are limits on freedom of speech. There are sanctions against people who disagree with the government. One very simple criterion for functioning democracy is that it has to be possible to criticize the government without fearing negative consequences. And what we are experiencing in the U.S. right now is that a lot of people are already facing negative consequences for criticizing the government such as could you give us an example? Yeah. So the clearest, most recent example is the investigation of FBI director James Comey. Trump himself directed the Justice Department to find a reason to indict James Comey. James Comey, of course, was critical when he was still the FBI director in Trump's first term. And so now they've accused him of lying to Congress during a hearing. But the specific charge is almost not that important. But if it's not made up, it's at least Trump up. It seems like an extremely weak case. All the legal experts that are watching it say there's nothing to the charges. And this is a pattern that we're seeing. So they're using all kinds of levers of power from government regulatory bodies to law enforcement to just calling people out and intimidating them in public to basically cow any opposition, intimidate people and

Host: curtailing their free speech. So, Johannes, is that it then? Is it a done deal? Can democracy be saved?

Johannes Thimm: So at this particular moment, I'm really most concerned about what is happening in the cities. It seems like the government is trying to provoke violence, which it then can use as a pretext for cracking down. And at the moment, there are some judicial rulings questioning this. But Trump has turned around and said, well, if this keeps happening, he might draw on the Insurrection Act, which is a law from 1807, which allows the president to use the military to quell rebellions or insurrections. And which is a very vaguely phrased law because it is so old and it gives the president quite a lot of leeway in determining whether a rebellion exists. So Trump is continuing to make these threats. I don't think Trump will just accept it if more judges rule against the deployment of National Guard troops in these cities. And I think this is a ticking time bomb. At some point there will be clashes and this will again lead to an escalation. So that's one thing that I'm particularly worried about. Regarding your question, whether this is a done deal and whether we are basically on an irreversible track towards authoritarianism, full-fledged authoritarianism, I think it's not a done deal yet. Democracy can be saved. Politics never only goes in one direction. The direction can be reversed. And the political science literature tells us that competitive authoritarianism is inherently unstable. It's not easy to consolidate power in a durable way. So a lot depends on how civil society in the US and the Democrats behave from now on. It could very well be that the Democrats win the next midterm elections, even if they're not entirely fair. And it is also possible that Republicans lose the next presidential election. And if the result is clear enough, Donald Trump might even have to accept that outcome. There will still be a lot of work left then to repair the democratic institutions, but it is not impossible.

Host: So all hope is not lost. No. And finally, Johannes, what does this all mean for Europe?

Johannes Thimm: So for Europe, this is a big problem on three levels. The first level is that just there are a lot of disagreements between the Trump administration and European policies. This starts with the tariffs, obviously. It continues with support for Ukraine and support for European security, but also general questions of international order, multilateralism, international law, where there are a lot of disagreements between the European Union and the US at the moment. The second level is the fact that if the US is no longer a democracy, the basis of trust will erode. So our good relationship, the transatlantic relations of the past 80 years since World War II were based on this value community. Some call it pluralistic security community, a community of democracies which share certain interests, but also certain values. And the third aspect is that the Trump administration quite explicitly and directly intervenes in the domestic affairs of other states. And in the case of Europe, the Trump administration has already criticized efforts to regulate big tech companies, for example. J.D. Vance has given the speech at Munich where he criticized that there is supposedly no free speech in Europe. And these kinds of interventions in our domestic systems, sometimes explicitly supporting forces that are against democracy, they are, of course, very problematic for Europe.

Host: Well, and while competition has long been prized in the United States, we're yet to find out whether the political opposition is strong enough to keep Trump's, as I understand it, potentially competitive authoritarian model from winning. All eyes on next year's midterms and everything that happens in between, we'll no doubt be back for more analysis. But in the meantime, I'd like to thank our guest, Johannes Tim, for his insightful analysis today. You can find links to his latest work in the podcast show notes. And if you like what you hear, you can subscribe to us in the usual places, including Spotify and Apple. You can also keep up to date with the latest analyses from SWP on Blue Sky and on LinkedIn. Today's episode was brought to you by our editor, Maya Dähne, by me, your host, and of course, by our guest, Johannes. Until next time, it's goodbye from all of us here in the SWP studio.

Johannes Thimm: Talk to you next time.

Host: Goodbye. Thanks for tuning in.