The Rise of Trumpism and Authoritarianism: A Personal Reckoning

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

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I once believed our institutions could contain Trumpism. I no longer think the question is whether the institutions will save democracy. The question is whether we will.

I have spent much of my life as a teacher, writer, and student of how people learn to understand the world around them. I have believed deeply in education, evidence, inquiry, and the democratic possibilities that emerge when people are encouraged to think for themselves.

That is part of what makes writing the second edition of The Trump Files so personal.

This book is not a look back from the safety of historical distance. It is my attempt to bear witness to the country in which I am living.

When I wrote the first edition, I still wanted to believe that America’s democratic institutions—its courts, press, schools, universities, scientific agencies, civil service, and electoral system—were sturdy enough to withstand one presidency that repeatedly challenged established norms.

I am less confident now.

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency did not simply revive the political movement that carried him to power the first time. His second administration has pursued significant changes to the structure of the executive branch itself. The administration established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) inside the Executive Office of the President and created DOGE teams across federal agencies. It also revived and later implemented the Schedule Policy/Career classification for policy-influencing federal employees, changing employment protections for those positions. The administration describes these changes as necessary measures of efficiency and presidential accountability. Critics see them as part of a broader concentration of executive power.

That disagreement matters.

Because the central question confronting us is larger than Donald Trump.

What happens to a democracy when more and more political authority becomes centered on a single leader?

When Grievance Becomes Government

Trump understood grievance long before many of his opponents understood its political power.

People were angry.

They felt ignored, displaced, mocked, economically insecure, culturally threatened, or simply furious at institutions they believed had failed them.

Trump gave those feelings names and enemies.

Immigrants. Journalists. Scientists. Universities. Bureaucrats. Prosecutors. Democrats. Political opponents.

During his first presidency, I thought of grievance primarily as a political strategy. It energized rallies, generated television coverage, and mobilized voters.

Now I see something more consequential.

Grievance can become a philosophy of government.

Once that happens, government no longer merely disagrees with opponents. It begins dividing the country into people who belong and people who threaten the nation.

That distinction frightens me.

A democracy depends upon the idea that political opponents remain citizens. We may defeat them in elections. We may criticize them. And we may organize against them.

But they remain part of the republic.

Authoritarian politics offers another possibility: opponents become enemies.

Trump himself has repeatedly spoken about political enemies and retribution. In a March 2025 appearance at the Justice Department, he attacked prosecutors who had investigated him and pledged to expose people he described as corrupt. Supporters argue that Trump is responding to what they regard as earlier politicization of federal law enforcement; critics argue that such rhetoric threatens the traditional separation between presidential politics and criminal justice.

That dispute goes to the heart of the Trump era.

Is government enforcing democratic accountability?

Or is government being transformed into an instrument of political loyalty? Is the appointment of Todd Blanche an appointment of political loyalty? Blanche worked as a defense attorney, including representing President Donald Trump in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024. He was Trump’s personal attourney, now he is U.S. Attorney General. The Attorney General represents the United States in legal matters generally and gives advice and opinions to the President and to the heads of the executive.

Democracy Usually Disappears Slowly

We tend to imagine the death of democracy dramatically.

Soldiers in the streets.

A parliament dissolved.

A dictator announcing that elections have been canceled.

But democratic erosion can be much quieter.

A rule changes.

A civil servant disappears from an agency.

An independent institution becomes a little less independent. This happened to the National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the most prestigious organizations in the Federal Government. In my opinion, fhe NSF has become a captive agency. The 2025 capture of NSF was not sudden. The rehearsal began in 2017. That was when Trump turned his fire on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other science-based departments.

Budgets were slashed. Climate offices were dismantled. Scientists at Interior, Agriculture, and Energy resigned or retired early. The message was unmistakable: evidence mattered less than ideology.

A president claims another power.

Something previously considered outrageous becomes debatable, then acceptable, then normal.

And people adjust.

That last part may be the most dangerous.

Human beings Can Become Accustomed to Almost Anything

The Trump administration says its restructuring of the federal workforce makes government more accountable to the elected president. Its January 2025 order explicitly says policy-influencing employees need not personally or politically support the president, but must faithfully implement lawful administration policies; a June 2026 order transferred designated policy-influencing positions into Schedule Policy/Career and reduced some traditional removal protections.

There is a legitimate constitutional debate here about presidential authority and bureaucratic accountability.

But there is also a democratic question that troubles me:

How much independence can institutions lose before they cease functioning as institutions and begin functioning primarily as extensions of presidential power? Here is a case study of the NSF.

The Battle Over Reality

As an educator, this may be the part of Trumpism I find most disturbing.

Democracy requires disagreement.

But disagreement requires something underneath it: a shared reality.

We can argue about taxes, immigration, climate policy, education, war, abortion, health care, or the proper size of government.

But democratic argument becomes nearly impossible when citizens cannot agree about what constitutes evidence.

Trump did not invent misinformation.

He did, however, demonstrate the extraordinary political power of relentless repetition.

• Say something often enough and evidence begins to seem beside the point.
• Attack the people who produce inconvenient information.
• Call journalists dishonest.
• Call scientists political.
• Call judges corrupt.
• Call elections rigged.

Eventually the argument is no longer about whether a particular statement is true.

The argument becomes:

Whom do you trust?

And when trust in every independent source of knowledge has been destroyed, only one source remains.

The leader.

That is why the struggle over truth is not an academic argument. It is a struggle over political power.

The Seduction of Loyalty

There is another change I have watched with growing concern.

Politics has always required loyalty. Every president wants officials who will carry out an administration’s policies.

But democratic government also requires another kind of loyalty: loyalty to institutions, laws, professional standards, evidence, and ultimately the Constitution.

Those loyalties can collide.

• What happens when a prosecutor believes the president is wrong?
• What happens when a scientist’s evidence contradicts administration policy?
• What happens when an intelligence officer discovers information the White House does not want to hear?
• What happens when a civil servant concludes that an order violates the law?

Those are not bureaucratic questions.

They are democratic questions.

A healthy government needs people capable of saying no.

But There is a Counterargument I Cannot Dismiss

There is another way to interpret what is happening in America, and I think anyone writing seriously about this moment should confront it.

Perhaps we are not witnessing democracy’s death.

Perhaps we are witnessing democracy under extraordinary stress.

Trump’s supporters argue that presidents are elected to govern, that unelected bureaucracies should not be permitted to frustrate an elected administration’s policies, and that executive-branch employees ultimately operate under presidential authority. The White House itself presents its civil-service changes in precisely those terms: accountability to an elected president rather than political loyalty to an individual.

Meanwhile, resistance continues.

• Courts still rule against presidential actions.
• Journalists continue investigating the government.
• Whistleblowers still come forward.
• Citizens still organize.
• Elections still occur.
• Political opponents still hold office.
• The administration’s actions continue to be challenged in court, sometimes successfully.
• Even in 2026, federal judges have continued blocking or limiting presidential initiatives while litigation proceeds.
• Those facts matter too.

Perhaps the American system is doing exactly what a constitutional democracy is supposed to do:

absorb conflict, resist excessive power, adapt, and eventually correct itself.

I want that counterargument to be right. I am simply no longer willing to assume that it is.

Democracy survives through people

Writing The Trump Files has changed the way I think about democracy.

I once thought primarily about institutions.

• Congress.
• Courts.
• Elections.
• The press.
• Schools.
• Universities.
• Government agencies.

I still believe in all of them.

But institutions are abstractions until human beings inhabit them.

• A court depends upon judges willing to exercise independent judgment.
• A newspaper depends upon reporters willing to investigate.
• A university depends upon scholars willing to pursue uncomfortable questions.
• A government agency depends upon civil servants willing to defend professional standards.
• A school depends upon teachers willing to teach students how to distinguish evidence from propaganda.
• And democracy depends upon citizens willing to refuse the seductive idea that freedom can safely be entrusted to one person.

That is where I now locate my hope.

Not in the certainty that America’s institutions will save us.

In the people inside and outside those institutions who still believe democracy is worth the trouble.

Why I am writing this

I sometimes wonder what a historian fifty years from now will make of this period.

The historian will have documents, court decisions, executive orders, speeches, election results, news reports, photographs, videos, and millions upon millions of social-media posts.

But history will ask another question too.

What did people understand while it was happening?

• Did they recognize the changes around them?
• Did they dismiss them?
• And did they accommodate them?
• Did they resist them?

That question has become deeply personal for me.

• I cannot control what Donald Trump does.
• I cannot control Congress.
• And I cannot control the Supreme Court.
• I cannot control what millions of my fellow citizens believe.

But I can observe.

• I can document.
• I can question.
• And I can teach.
• I can protest.
• And I can write.

That is what the future edition of The Trump Files has become for me.

Not simply a book about Donald Trump.

A record of an American experiment being tested in real time.

Perhaps the institutions will prove stronger than I fear.

Perhaps this period will eventually be remembered as another turbulent chapter in a democracy that bent dramatically but did not break.

I hope so.

But hope is not the same thing as certainty.

Democracy has never been something Americans simply possess.

It is something every generation has to decide whether to preserve.

And history will not only judge the people who sought power during this period.

It will judge the rest of us as well. It will ask what we saw.

What we accepted.

What we resisted.

And what we did while it was happening.

This book is part of my answer.