Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused U.S. President Donald Trump of behaving like a dictator after he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration raids. Trump has raged against Newsom for opposing the deployment and expressed support for arresting him—without pointing to any specific crimes committed.
“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes—the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” Newsom said in a public address on June 10.
Newsom, a Democrat, has clashed with Trump several times before, including during the president’s first term, over issues like the climate crisis, COVID-19, and immigration. As someone widely seen as a possible 2028 presidential contender, there is certainly a political element to Newsom’s rhetoric, in which he frames his opposition to Trump’s actions as an act of resistance against the moves of a would-be authoritarian. His condemnation of Trump is already being viewed by many through the lens of the upcoming 2028 presidential race.
But Foreign Policy spoke with experts on democracy and authoritarianism, as well as a retired U.S. Army general, who echoed Newsom’s concerns. They pointed to unsettling parallels between authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world and Trump’s recent behavior and rhetoric surrounding the situation in Los Angeles, among other steps he has taken since returning to office in January.
The United States has “crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University. Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, which have largely pertained to allegations of antisemitism in relation to campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza, Harvard has emerged as one of the White House’s biggest targets. The administration froze billions in funding after the university refused to capitulate to its demands and has since moved to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. Harvard sued the federal government twice in response.
“[Trump] thinks the state belongs to him—that every institution in the government should be at his personal and political beck and call,” Levitsky said. “Even many world-class dictators—[former Chilean leader Augusto] Pinochet, for example—didn’t believe that every lever of every state institution in the country belonged to him personally.”
Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles against the will of Newsom and other local leaders. This isn’t unprecedented in U.S. history, but the last time that a president deployed federal troops to a state without the consent of its governor was under far different circumstances. In 1965, then-President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the National Guard to Alabama to protect civil rights activists.
The situation in Los Angeles “does not warrant or meet the standard for calling up the Guard without the governor’s request,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. Hodges also questioned the deployment of the Marines, who were sent in to protect federal property. “Federal property was not under such a threat that local law enforcement couldn’t do it,” he said.
Hodges said that the Trump administration is engaged in an effort to “to demonstrate strength against Americans, not against our adversaries,” pointing to the Los Angeles deployment and other recent steps taken by Trump, including the military parade in Washington on June 14 and a controversial, politically charged speech the president gave before troops at Fort Bragg on June 10.
“All of this strikes me as a concerted effort to create a situation that is tailor-made for an authoritarian-type government,” Hodges said. The troop deployment in Los Angeles is likely to “feed the perception that the military is politicized,” he said.
That’s a dangerous sign for democracy, experts warn.
“A professionalized military, a military that cannot and will not be deployed on behalf of incumbents against opposition” is a “major bulwark” against a “consolidated autocracy,” Levitsky said.
“You can only really kill and bury a democracy if you’ve got the military at your side,” Levitsky said. “We haven’t faced, and hopefully we never will, the moment of truth where the military is asked to engage in repression against the opposition. But Trump has taken steps in that direction.”
Trump is unlikely to establish a military dictatorship like Pinochet or massacre thousands of people like the Guatemalan dictatorship in the 1980s, Levitsky said, but his behavior still mirrors the instincts and priorities of other authoritarians.
California sued the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard. On June 12, a San Francisco-based U.S. district court judge ruled that the deployment was unlawful; however, a U.S. appeals court subsequently put a temporary pause on the ruling, allowing the deployment to continue.
Trump has characterized the protests in Los Angeles as a “rebellion” to provide legal justification for the move, leaning on a rarely used law, though demonstrations up to the point of the deployment were largely peaceful and limited to the downtown section of the sprawling city. Some critics of the deployment have contended that even if it is found to be legal, it’s still unnecessary, incendiary, and corrosive to democracy.
“[Trump’s] desire to use the National Guard to quell disturbances, in the abstract, is not problematic. It has happened in the past, although not for many decades. But what he’s done, as he’s done in other kinds of situations, is bypass all of the protections that are supposed to be put in place to allow those kinds of rules, those laws, not to be abused,” said Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard College and expert on democracy and fascism.
“Procedures matter in democracy,” Berman said. The problem with the Trump administration is that even when it has the legal authority to do something, it runs “rough shot over the procedures.”
Trump claims that his administration “saved LA” by sending troops in, but local leaders—including the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department—have said the deployment was unnecessary. The president has been accused of manufacturing a crisis, which experts say is a classic tactic used by dictators.
“Autocrats use crises,” Levitsky said, adding that they manufacture, exaggerate, and exploit chaos to justify taking extreme steps and to help consolidate power.
“Trump, in his approach to governance, is almost identical to a tin-pot mid-20th century Latin American dictator,” Levitsky said, comparing the president’s leadership style to dictatorships like the Somoza family in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The Somoza and Trujillo dictatorships—which received support from the U.S. government for years—both used the military as a means of rising to power and maintaining political control.
But, in some ways, Levitsky said that Trump has gone even further than many of the authoritarians he’s studied. “Trump is looking for a fight,” Levitsky said. “The [Trump] administration is looking for an excuse to repress people. Now, that sounds very authoritarian, and it is, but it’s not the way most authoritarians behave.” Even in some of the cruelest dictatorships, repression is a “last resort” because it’s risky and costly, Levitsky said.
“You don’t go looking for a fight against a few hundred protesters in LA five or six months into your presidency,” he said. “That’s pretty unusual, and I hate to make this comparison, but you have to go back to the [19]30s, to the fascists, to find autocrats that were really salivating for a fight in this way.”
Though there hasn’t been any deadly violence involving troops and protesters in Los Angeles so far, the prospect of lethal force being used against demonstrators is a serious concern to critics of the deployment—who also contend it’s yet another example of the dangerous ways in which Trump is politicizing the U.S. military.
“American soldiers killing American citizens would be about as bad as it gets,” Hodges said. “I hope to hell that that never happens. It doesn’t have to happen, especially if soldiers are disciplined, if their leaders are disciplined, and they are able to make sure that nobody ever makes that mistake.”
The potential for the use of lethal force by the National Guard or Marines against protesters is what makes this a “very, very dangerous situation,” Berman said. “Once you start using force against citizens, you really are traveling down a very dark road.” And if Trump actually had Newsom arrested, then the United States would be moving into “Erdogan territory,” Berman added.
The leading political rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ekrem Imamoglu, was arrested in March—prompting mass protests in Turkey. Imamoglu was expected to run for president, and his arrest and ongoing detention are widely seen as politically motivated.
The Trump administration has not taken any concrete steps toward arresting Newsom, but the president openly endorsing the idea of such a move still pushes the United States into uncharted territory.
“Arresting a governor because the governor doesn’t like what you’re doing—there’s no potential world in which that could be OK. That he’s even threatened, it is also not OK,” Berman said.
In a democracy, it shouldn’t be “risky or costly” to “legally oppose the government,” Levitsky said, but people in the United States are now thinking twice about it because they know there’s a “credible risk of government retribution.”
Since Trump reentered the White House, there have been a series of controversial, high-profile arrests involving opposition figures or people perceived by the new administration as obstacles to its agenda. A Wisconsin judge was arrested in April for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant evade immigration authorities. The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested in May near a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for alleged trespassing. A union leader in Los Angeles was recently arrested for allegedly obstructing federal officers during a protest against immigration raids.
Pointing to such arrests, Levitsky said that the first five months of Trump’s second term have been “more authoritarian” than the “initial periods” of the governments of repressive rulers like Erdogan, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
“Can you think of a democracy in which judges, mayors, opposition Congress people, and union leaders are arrested?” he said.
Levitsky’s comments to FP on this came a day before California Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and handcuffed after being shoved to the ground by federal agents. Democrats in Congress have decried the incident as yet another example of the ways in which Trump is assaulting democracy, while Republicans have accused Padilla of being out of order.
On June 17, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by federal agents at a Manhattan immigration courthouse as he was accompanying an individual from the courtroom; Lander was arrested for allegedly “assaulting law enforcement” while they were trying to detain the person he was with. Zohran Mamdani, a lawmaker and another mayoral candidate, posted on X that Lander’s arrest “is fascism.”
Though Trump’s “deeply authoritarian instincts” were evident as far back as the 2016 presidential campaign season, what’s changed is that pushback to these anti-democratic tendencies has gradually disappeared, especially from his own party, Levitsky said.
Unless Republicans in Congress begin speaking out more, Levitsky said it’s difficult to predict where this all goes. “Every single Republican leader, with a couple of partial, haphazard exceptions, are allowing it to happen. They’re opening the door,” he said. “They’ve abdicated their constitutional responsibility to check government abuse.”
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