Can Donald Trump turn the US into an autocracy?

There are the classic autocracies that we know well, like China and Russia. But what would it take to morph a democracy like the United States into an authoritarian country?

It’s a question that’s not so far-fetched for the US, a month out from its presidential election. And it’s one that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David E. Sanger has been grappling with.

So with a second Donald Trump presidency looming large, what are the chances that Trump could turn the United States into an autocracy, or something close to it?

Sanger, the national security correspondent for The New York Times, speaks to Samantha Selinger-Morris, host of The Morning Edition podcast, about what he has learned about autocrats in his more than 40 years of reporting.

Samantha Selinger-Morris: So, David, I was hoping you could take us through what are, generally speaking, the steps that turn a democracy into an autocracy.

David E. Sanger: Well, the first is greater assertion of power by the executive. The second is getting elected and then using that power to try to tear down an electoral process that you might not survive again. So the election denialism is classic, right?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David E. Sanger spoke about the rise of China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra in August this year.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The importance to Trump of never admitting that Biden won is to basically say, ‘The system is fixed, and when re-elected, I will tear that system down.’ So that makes people fear that you wouldn’t see fair elections again, once somebody who basically uses the election system to get in power and then uses those powers to dismantle the system, so his challengers can’t get there. The third is charging and imprisoning your enemies. Exactly what he charges the Justice Department is doing now. This is why he calls the January 6 defendants – many of whom have been convicted – ... ‘the heroes of January 6’ that he suggests he will free by pardoning them.

So these are all classic signs over the years. And then there’s language he uses. Nobody’s quite figured out what he meant when he said he only had to be dictator for a day. Did that mean that he would use that day to dismantle organisations that might oppose him, including on the government?

OK, so you’ve just stepped us through some of the classic signs of what an autocratic leader would do and what it would take, I guess, for America’s democracy to evolve into an autocracy. So how many steps on from what it currently is are we talking about?

It’s not as much the number of steps. It’s the velocity and the degree to which you get away with them, right? I mean, who opposes you? So, you know many of these steps; there are legal groups that are getting ready to challenge in the courts right away. But supposing they win those challenges and Trump ignores them? Supposing he does, what’s here is, you know, this described … plan to get rid of a whole raft of non-political appointees in the federal government who he believes are the deep state and instead replace them with political appointees. Does that require congressional approval? If they’re political, do they require confirmation in the Senate, which would be a long process? So each of these is likely to get contested in the courts. And the question is, would he respect the court rulings?

David E. Sanger, left, and White House National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, at a Council of Foreign Relations symposium on geopolitics and cybersecurity, in Washington, DC, in April, 2022.Credit: Getty

I mean, that’s a huge question, though. Sitting even here, quite from afar, that sounds sort of terrifying; so is this the closest that the United States has ever come to veering into autocratic territory? If that’s not taking things too far?

Well, the Alien [and] Sedition Acts, which passed during the Adams administration – John Adams’ administration – were an effort to prohibit speech that opposed the president. We saw Abraham Lincoln, the great hero of the American story, impose martial law, in some cases. We saw Franklin Roosevelt sweep up Japanese Americans and put them in what were essentially detention camps. So we’ve had moments. But I don’t think that I can recall, at least in modern times, somebody who has outright [who has] seemed to declare that the fundamental institutions of the government should be suspended to get out of his way. And at one point he did tweet, a number of years ago, that some activities require that he suspend the Constitution. Something he has never repeated but never explained.

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