Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension — the direct result of an FCC threat to pull the licenses of networks that aired him — has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America.
I mean this literally. The specific threats that Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr made against networks, involving a little-used doctrine called “news distortion,” show how easy it is to weaponize vaguely worded statutes and the executive’s discretionary powers against the president’s enemies. Such tools can also be used to reward friends — to provide regulatory favors, like merger approvals and exemptions from tariffs — who toe a politically correct line.
This is how authoritarianism has taken root in other democracies, most notably Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. And from the get-go, President Donald Trump’s second term had been moving the United States down this road. But for much of the time his efforts appeared too haphazard and poorly planned to produce a consolidated authoritarian regime — meaning one that could durably compromise the basic ability of its opponents to contest elections under reasonably fair conditions.
But in the past few weeks, a series of developments — most notably, but not exclusively, the authoritarian energies unleashed after Charlie Kirk’s death — have revealed a disturbingly credible policy pathway to power consolidation. We can now see how American Orbánism could take full root before the 2028 elections. We now know what a Trump-led authoritarian state in America would look like — and how we would get there from here.
Such a future would unfold in roughly four parts.
First, using hiring and firing powers to purge career civil servants from key agencies, like the Justice Department, and erode the traditional barriers preventing undue political influence on law enforcement and regulatory decisions. We saw this in the DOGE cuts, in the appointment of political hacks like Carr and Pam Bondi to top positions, and (most recently) Trump’s move to fire a federal prosecutor who refused to file politically motivated charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Second, using the power of these newly Trumpified agencies to target dissent in civil society — a broadening of the assaults on Ivy League universities. This would include following through on threats to use racketeering charges against liberal NGOs and going after other prominent critics the way they went after Kimmel.
Third, bullying and bribing large corporations until significant economic power is concentrated in the hands of regime allies dependent on the president’s goodwill for their survival. To a degree, this is already happening — see Trump’s habits of granted tariff exemptions to connected companies or using the threat of antitrust enforcement to bend CBS to its will. In an authoritarian America, such politicization would be expanded and deepened to the point where any corporation that crossed the White House would expect to pay a crippling financial cost.
Fourth, turn this accumulated power against the political opposition — turning elections into facially free contests where, in fact, Democrats face enormously unfair hurdles (and would likely be unable to govern even if they managed to succeed). This began with a nationwide push for mid-cycle redistricting, but would require further steps (like turning the Justice Department investigation into the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue into actual criminal charges).
At this point in the Trump administration, only the first has been accomplished to any significant degree. The efforts in other areas have been of limited effectiveness, stymied both by the courts and the Trump team’s incompetence.
But recently, and especially in the immediate wake of Kirk’s death, the administration has taken startling new swings in the second and third areas. If these efforts succeed, the fourth will become a live possibility: That is, we could be living in a country whose elections are no longer free and fair in any meaningful sense.
There is still plenty of time to prevent this future. Much depends on whether the Trump administration can get better at the nuts and bolts of lawfare, developing tactics that avoid legal hurdles or provoking a potent backlash. Acts of courage in Congress, the courts, the streets, and even corporate boardrooms could stymie Trump until at least the midterms.
But the risk of authoritarian consolidation is real and growing. Now that the endgame is clear, it’s time for all of us to start thinking about how to stop it.
The anatomy of American authoritarianism
The kind of authoritarianism I fear is emerging in the United States, which political scientists call “competitive authoritarianism,” doesn’t involve the outright criminalization of the opposition or formal martial law. Instead, it depends on perverting the law, modifying and twisting it with the intent of incrementally undermining the opposition’s ability to compete fairly in elections.
Such a government can be constructed along the lines of what Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele calls a “Frankenstate:” that is, “an abusive form of rule, created by combining the bits and pieces of perfectly reasonable democratic institutions in monstrous ways. … No one part is objectionable; the horror emerges from the combinations.”
It is probably necessary, for example, to give the president a degree of discretion when it comes to policy areas that affect national security. It is also true that tariffs are often just taxes, not a tool for authoritarian control.
But when you combine those two things — creating a situation where the president has wide latitude to raise tariffs and provide exemptions to them on vague national security grounds — you create a situation where it’s all too easy for the president to weaponize his powers against corporations that cross his administration politically.
The Frankenstate targets opposition parties through burdensome tax audits, dubious criminal investigations, and uneven application of campaign finance regulations. It also focuses on attacking the civil foundations of the opposition — meaning attacking the donors who might fund them, the activist groups who might stand up for their rights, and the free media they depend on to get their message out.
Silence or coopt enough of these voices, and the ruling party doesn’t actually have to outlaw political opposition or stuff ballot boxes. The opposition will simply be weak enough that letting them compete poses little threat.
So what would this look like in the United States?
In this America, corporations depend on the goodwill of the White House to remain profitable — depending on White House tariff exemptions and staying in the good graces of policitized regulators to avoid crippling punishments. Liberal billionaires like George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Mark Cuban would be made into examples: their corporate interests targeted by antitrust regulators and tax enforcement, while corrupt Justice Department attorneys would launch selective civil and even criminal charges against them personally. The rest of the billionaire class, getting the message, would largely avoid funding liberal causes, let alone the Democratic Party.
In this America, the press would be owned — in large part, though not entirely — by the regime’s favored and trusted oligarchs. These individuals would be able to control what enough Americans see to swing several percentage points of marginal voters from the “persuadable” to “solid R” column, putting Democrats at a severe disadvantage.
And in this America, what remains of the independent media and liberal activist class would be subject to the same kind of harassment directed at left-leaning billionaires. Fighting back would drain valuable resources Democrats would require to overcome their other financial and attentional disadvantages, creating near-insurmountable barriers to national viability.
Such a future may sound impossible. But recently, the Trump administration has taken specific actions that could — left unchecked — would bring us far too close to comfort.
How we get there from here
First is a pursuit of media control, which goes well beyond censoring Kimmel. Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced that it had struck a deal with China that would spin off TikTok USA as a separate entity. Eighty percent would be owned by three US firms — two of which, Andreessen Horowitz and Oracle, are themselves controlled by Trump-aligned billionaires.
Oracle’s owner, Larry Ellison, is partnering with his son David to build a broader media empire. David owns CBS; he is reportedly about to buy Bari Weiss’ the Free Press and put the anti-woke conservative in charge of CBS as well. The Ellisons are also in serious discussion to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery — which operates, among other properties, CNN and HBO.
“Two independent journalistic voices, CBS News and CNN, could soon be combined into something potentially almost unrecognizable, something way too close to what is served up on a daily basis by the Murdochs,” the business journalist William D. Cohan writes in the New York Times.
Imagine all of this together not just with the Murdoch network, but Jeff Bezos’ right-wing remaking of the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-Trump turn, and Elon Musk’s control over X.
The government and its allies would have control over a massive portion of the informational landscape for young and old Americans — encompassing unprecedented portions of television, digital, and social media, plus what remains of print. The vast nature of their empires would make them dependent on the goodwill of increasingly politicized regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department, meaning that they would have powerful incentives to ensure their audiences were getting Trump-friendly content.
This would matter a great deal. High-quality political science research has repeatedly demonstrated that Fox News significantly increased the GOP’s vote share, the effect large enough to swing presidential elections. Now imagine not one Fox, but several — spreading regime-friendly propaganda across new and old media.
Democrats might try to compensate by leaning on activists and donors. But the Trump administration has long signaled an intent to attack those: In April, the Justice Department opened an sketchy investigation into ActBlue, by far the most important Democratic platform for political donations in the country. The investigation will issue a report next month; it is possible some attempt at charges will follow.
The ActBlue investigation began before Kirk’s death. Since then, the Trump administration has engaged in a campaign of incitement against liberal activists and donors — alleging, with absolutely no evidence, that they played some role in radicalizing Kirk’s killer. Now Stephen Miller, perhaps the most important White House policy official, is vowing to wield the power of the state to crush them.
“The last message that Charlie sent me was…that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country. And I will write those words on my heart and I will carry them out,” Miller said during a podcast taping with Vice President JD Vance. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have to [at] the DOJ, DHS, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
During that taping, Vance specifically named two large liberal organizations — the Open Society Foundation, funded by billionaire George Soros, and the Ford Foundation — as potential targets of Trump’s wrath. Now, the administration is preparing specific plans to go after these organizations. The Wall Street Journal reports that they are planning to strip liberal groups of their tax-exempt status; Trump is openly talking about prosecuting Soros under the RICO Act, an anti-racketeering law primarily used against organized crime.
The Trump administration does not need to win in court for such cases to end up as strategic victories. If they can impose steep litigation costs, or successfully inhibit the operation of liberal groups during the process of litigation, they will have already weakened the opposition. They would then put their opponents in a no-win situation: either have their resources tied up in court while trying to vindicate their rights, or else choose to fold and negotiate a surrender package.
This is the playbook that they ran against universities, with real and continuing success.
Harvard, the principal institution fighting back, suffered severely even though it keeps winning in court. Despite its pushback, the school has still given the White House some of what it wants and has been widely reported to be negotiating a broader settlement. Meanwhile, the first institution to capitulate — Columbia — has surrendered both money and institutional autonomy.
This “heads I win, tails you lose” dynamic shows how Trumpian lawfare could, if applied as aggressively as the administration has been threatening since Kirk’s death, end up starving the Democratic Party of vital resources ahead of the 2028 presidential election. The tactic could even be used to punish the independent press, as we’ve seen with Trump’s recent lawsuits targeting the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Whether all this would be enough to tip America over into a full-blown competitive authoritarian regime like Hungary’s is tough to say. But that’s by design: In such a Frankenstate, the entire government system is built such that each individual action can seem democratic (at least, on a surface level). The Trump regime would need this to give room for GOP partisans, who do not see themselves as authoritarian, to rationalize what’s happening in democratic terms.
Without clear benchmarks like the abolition of elections, it’s impossible to tell precisely when democracy has been lost.
How to fight back
It’s easy to read all this and think the fight for democracy is already lost. The Supreme Court is controlled by a 6-3 conservative majority in thrall to Trump, and Democrats are a minority in both houses of Congress until at least the 2026 midterms. Aren’t we just cooked?
To which I say: No! This attitude is part of the problem.
The slide toward competitive authoritarianism in America depends, crucially, on acquiescence — on the idea that people are unwilling to bear the costs of standing up to each individual attack on liberty before they can combine into true authoritarian control over society.
Even the most pessimistic assessments would say we’re not there yet: that Trump can’t pull something like what he did with Kimmel and expect to avoid mass pushback. That doesn’t mean a wave of popular and media protest will soon win Kimmel back his job. But Trump is immensely unpopular, and Republicans are likely to lose at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which could significantly limit his ability to silence other prominent voices.
Trump’s approach also depends on a tactic that political scientists call “salami slicing”: cutting off one little bit of democracy at a time by targeting one specific person or group, thus avoiding a sense that the collective needs to stand up for shared rights. That’s why we’ve seen not an attempt to criminalize dissent per se, but a series of discrete individual efforts like the Kimmel threats and the New York Times lawsuit.
Defiance, collective defiance, can make a big difference. The more that people across sectors take public and coordinated action — Congress, the media, the business world, even ordinary civil society — the more they can puncture Trump’s sense of inevitability, by fighting against and delaying his power grabs until 2027, when Democrats could hold real power to stop and hold him accountable for them.
This means, specifically, that we need more senators talking about democracy the way Chris Murphy does. It means more business organizations refusing to implement Trump’s directives and working with pro-democracy organizations like Leadership Now to demand nonpartisan regulatory policy. It means donors making a show of putting more money, not less, toward anti-Trump causes in general and toward the legal funds of targeted institutions in particular. It means media refusing to cow to Trump, and providing relentless coverage of situations like Kimmel’s.
And it means individual citizens attending protests and volunteering with the organizations under threat, as well as with political campaigns that could change things in 2026.
We are where Hungarians were in 2010, where Russians were in 2000, and where Germans were in 1933. Those places’ futures were not inevitable; had elites and even ordinary people made different choices, catastrophes could have been avoided.
Ours still can be too.
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