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Reluctant Citizen

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History Has Seen This Before: Trump and the Authoritarian Playbook

By The Reluctant Citizen 16 min read

On August 25, 2025, in the Oval Office, the president of the United States responded to critics who called him a dictator. “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator,” Donald Trump said. “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.” The next day, at a Cabinet meeting, he said it again: “So the line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘If that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’ But I’m not a dictator.” Some of his Cabinet members laughed.

Both times he denied being a dictator, and I’ll take him at his word on that. But a president who keeps suggesting Americans might want one is telling us what he thinks we’ll put up with. History has a lot to say about where that leads.

My thesis (this is opinion): Trump’s erratic behavior, his lies and his policies fit patterns that historians of authoritarianism have documented many times: manufactured emergencies, a “big lie,” purges of the military and civil service, war on the press, punishment of critics and a cult of personality. America is not Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union, and below I say exactly where each comparison breaks down. But those regimes didn’t start with camps or gulags. They started with steps like these, and steps can still be stopped.

This post was prompted by John Avlon’s October 30, 2026 Rolling Stone opinion piece, “100 Unhinged Things Trump Did That You May Have Forgotten.” I treated it as a list of leads. Every item I kept, I checked against court records, transcripts, government documents or wire and network reporting, and those are what I cite.

My earlier posts already cover Trump’s praise for Kim, Putin, Xi and Orban, his “except for day one” dictator line, and the “fascist” warnings from John Kelly and Mark Milley. I won’t repeat them here.

Catch up on those here:

1. “Maybe we like a dictator”: trading freedom for order#

The record: On August 11, 2025, Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., took control of its police department and called in the National Guard. AP reported that violent crime in the city was down 26% from the year before and at a 30-year low. When critics called the move dictatorial, he answered with the lines above. His defenders say he was mocking his critics. Notice, though, that in both versions the case for a dictator is put in other people’s mouths.

The historical parallel: On February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, President Hindenburg signed the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State.” In the name of public safety, it suspended freedom of speech, the press and assembly. In “The Anatomy of Fascism,” historian Robert Paxton argues that fascism ran less on ideas than on “mobilizing passions.” Among them were a sense of crisis too big for normal solutions and a hunger for a strong leader who alone could fix it.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: The pitch is the same: the country is in chaos, and only a strong hand can restore order. But no American civil liberties have been suspended by decree, and the D.C. takeover was temporary and limited by law. Still, a leader who suggests crime makes a “dictator” a fair trade is testing a sales pitch history has heard before. (Kelly has said Trump told him Hitler “did some good things, too.” Trump denies it. I covered that in Part 2.)

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2. Ruling by emergency#

The record: Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law meant for national emergencies, to put sweeping tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner without a vote in Congress. On February 20, 2026, in Learning Resources v. Trump, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the law does not let a president impose tariffs.

The historical parallel: Article 48 of Germany’s Weimar Constitution let the president govern by decree in an emergency. From 1930 to 1933, chancellors used it again and again to get around a deadlocked parliament, until decree rule felt normal. Then, on March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act let Hitler’s cabinet make laws without the Reichstag. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the Enabling Act the legal basis of his dictatorship.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: The parallel holds in one way: emergency powers were stretched to cover ordinary policy and cut the legislature out. It breaks down in the way that matters most. Our Supreme Court said no, and the administration did not defy it. Weimar had no court able or willing to stop decree rule. That difference is everything, and it’s why independent courts are worth defending.

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3. The big lie returns#

The record: Courts and state election officials rejected Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In his second term, the government is now putting its power behind the claim. The White House hired Kurt Olsen, a “Stop the Steal” lawyer a federal court sanctioned for “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions,” to reinvestigate 2020, and NBC News reported that Trump told the CIA and other spy agencies to give him intelligence. On January 28, 2026, the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia’s election hub and seized about 700 boxes of 2020 ballots and records. A court affidavit showed the investigation “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen.” Days later, Trump said on a podcast, “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The historical parallel: The phrase “big lie” comes from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The Nazis’ own big lie, that Jews had “stabbed Germany in the back” in World War I, helped prepare the ground for the Holocaust. Yale historian Timothy Snyder told NPR in 2021 that a big lie is one “big enough that it tears the fabric of reality.” He has also written, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: Trump’s election lie is not a racial conspiracy theory, and Snyder himself said, “It doesn’t mean that Trump is quite a fascist himself.” But it works the way a big lie works. A falsehood you can only believe by rejecting every court and recount becomes the excuse to seize ballots and talk about federal control of voting. States still run elections, and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, called the claims behind the raid “baseless.”

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4. Shooting the messenger: “rigged” numbers and a “hoax”#

The record: On August 1, 2025, hours after a weak jobs report, Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he posted, with no evidence. In December 2025, at a rally in Pennsylvania, he called “affordability” a Democratic “hoax.” The nonpartisan FactCheck.org reports that consumer prices are up 5.4% in his first 20 months, and that job growth has averaged just 39,000 a month since the firing.

The historical parallel: The Soviet Union took a census in January 1937. It counted millions fewer people than Stalin had promised, because famine and terror had killed so many. The regime declared the census defective, buried the results and arrested the statisticians in charge, and its director was shot. Historian Catherine Merridale tells the story in The Historical Journal. Dictators go after the people who count things because numbers can contradict the leader.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: Nobody at BLS was arrested, and the agency still publishes data, including bad news. But firing the person in charge of a report because you don’t like what it says is the first step down that road, and it shows every other government statistician what honesty can cost.

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5. Retribution as policy#

The record: Reuters, in reporting that won a 2026 Pulitzer Prize, documented at least 470 people, groups and institutions targeted for retribution in Trump’s first 10 months back in office. They include prosecutors, federal employees, universities and news outlets. His executive orders punishing four major law firms for their clients and past work were all struck down by federal judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, as unconstitutional.

The historical parallel: After a failed coup in 2016, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ruled under a two-year state of emergency. The BBC reported that more than 107,000 people were removed from public-sector jobs by decree and more than 50,000 were jailed awaiting trial. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call systems like Erdogan’s “competitive authoritarianism.” In Foreign Affairs in 2025, they described what happens when the state is turned against the opposition: “Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.”

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: America has nothing like Turkey’s mass jailings, and many of Trump’s targets have won in court. But the model Levitsky and Way describe, punishing critics through investigations, contracts, funding and licenses instead of prison, fits what Reuters documented. (I covered his public demand that prosecutors charge James Comey and Letitia James in Part 2.)

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6. Purging the generals, even in wartime#

The record: In February 2025, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the Navy’s top officer, Adm. Lisa Franchetti. On April 2, 2026, during the war with Iran, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and two other generals without giving a reason. On September 30, 2026, Hegseth said: “The number crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force.” He added: “Now the media calls that a purge. I call it accountability.” Officers who “seem to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion,” he said, “no longer work here.”

The historical parallel: In 1937 and 1938, Stalin purged the Red Army. Research summarized by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute found that more than half of its 1,844 general-grade officers were repressed and at least 780 were executed. Historians widely see the purge as a major reason the Red Army collapsed when Hitler invaded in 1941.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: Civilian control of the military is a core American principle, and presidents can legally replace commanders. No one has been arrested or shot, and that is an enormous difference. But the lesson of 1941 is that pushing out experienced officers for political reasons leaves a country weaker when war comes. That’s why firing the Army’s top general in the middle of a war should worry everyone.

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7. Remaking the civil service#

The record: About 317,000 people left the federal workforce in 2025, according to Trump’s own personnel chief, and FactCheck.org puts federal employment down 10.9% since he took office. In February 2026, the Office of Personnel Management finalized “Schedule Policy/Career,” which lets agencies fire career employees in “policy-influencing” jobs without the usual appeal rights. OPM says the rule “explicitly prohibits political patronage, loyalty tests.” Critics answer that a worker who can be fired at will learns quickly what the boss wants to hear.

The historical parallel: On April 7, 1933, Nazi Germany passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. The Holocaust Memorial Museum notes it removed Jews and political opponents from government jobs, schools and universities. It was one of the regime’s first laws. Levitsky and Way point out that Orban and Erdogan also purged professional civil servants and replaced them with loyalists.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: This is the comparison I’d push back on hardest. The Nazi law was openly racial and political. Trump’s rule isn’t, and on paper it bans loyalty tests. The honest comparison is with Hungary and Turkey, not 1933. The real question is whether “accountability” turns into “loyalty” in practice, and Reuters’ list of fired prosecutors and officials says we should be watching.

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8. The press: obeying in advance#

The record: In October 2025, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps, Fox News included, turned in their badges rather than sign Hegseth’s new rules restricting their reporting. In September 2025, FCC chairman Brendan Carr warned ABC over remarks by Jimmy Kimmel: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours, ABC pulled Kimmel off the air. After a public backlash, he was back six days later. In 2026, Reporters Without Borders ranked the United States 64th in the world for press freedom, its lowest ever.

The historical parallel: The Nazis attacked independent newspapers as the “Lugenpresse,” the “lying press,” before shutting them down or taking them over. Hungary’s version was quieter. In 2018, owners friendly to Viktor Orban gave hundreds of outlets to a single pro-government foundation, and his government exempted the deal from competition review. The first lesson in Snyder’s “On Tyranny” is “Do not obey in advance.” As he writes, “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: No American reporter has been jailed for reporting, and the Kimmel backlash showed the public can push back. But the Hungarian model never needed jails. It needed owners who decided that staying on the government’s good side was good for business. When a regulator says “the easy way or the hard way” and a network complies within hours, that is obeying in advance. (Part 1 covers the AP ban and the NPR and PBS funding cuts.)

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9. Two kinds of law: the “dual state”#

The record: On March 15, 2025, the government deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man, to a notorious prison in El Salvador. It violated a 2019 immigration court protection, and the government admitted in court that it was an “administrative error.” On April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court, with no noted dissents, required the government to “facilitate” his release. It took two months to bring him back, and then to face criminal charges. In Minneapolis in January 2026, federal immigration agents shot and killed two residents, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Minnesota officials say the federal government stopped sharing evidence about the killings in September, and the state has sued.

The historical parallel: Ernst Fraenkel was a German-Jewish lawyer who practiced in Nazi Berlin before he fled. In 1941 he published “The Dual State” (Oxford University Press), which described two systems running side by side. In the “normative state,” courts, contracts and ordinary law still worked. In the “prerogative state,” the regime acted outside the law whenever it wanted. For most people, life seemed normal. For anyone the regime targeted, the law offered no protection.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: Unlike Fraenkel’s Germany, American courts are still pushing back hard, and states are suing. That’s the normative state doing its job. The warning is in the gap. A government that drags its feet on court orders and keeps evidence about killings by its own agents from local investigators is testing whether some people can be put outside the law.

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10. “LONG LIVE THE KING!”: the cult of personality#

The record: On February 19, 2025, Trump posted: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House then shared a fake magazine cover of him wearing a crown. In October 2025, after “No Kings” protests that organizers said drew nearly 7 million people, he posted an AI video of himself in a crown, flying a jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping what looks like sewage on protesters. He told Fox News, “they’re referring to me as a king. I’m not.” Since then, his hand-picked board voted to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center,” and the U.S. Institute of Peace was renamed for him. ABC News reported that $1 coins with his face entered circulation in September 2026, making him the first living president on a U.S. coin since Calvin Coolidge in 1926.

The historical parallel: In “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” (W.W. Norton, 2020), historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat shows the personality cult as a central tool of authoritarian rule, from Mussolini, whose face was everywhere in 1930s Italy, to Gaddafi and Putin. The cult casts the leader as the nation’s savior, so loyalty to him becomes loyalty to the country and criticism feels like betrayal.

Where it holds, and where it breaks down: Some of this is trolling, and his supporters say so. The courts are pushing back too: in September 2026, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s name can’t go on the Kennedy Center building. Millions of people protested freely. Still, his name on another president’s memorial, his face on money and the running “king” joke add up. Ben-Ghiat’s point is that personality cults are built one small, easy-to-laugh-off step at a time.

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Where the comparison ends, and why it still matters#

This section is my analysis and opinion.

Careless Nazi comparisons make serious warnings easier to dismiss, so let me be clear about what is not happening here. There are no death camps and no mass atrocities. There’s no single-party state and no party militia beating opponents in the streets. Elections are still being held, and the midterms are days away. Courts keep ruling against the president, on tariffs, on law firms and on the Kennedy Center. Reporters walked out of the Pentagon instead of giving in, and millions of people protested without being arrested.

Most scholars who study this don’t expect a Hitler. Levitsky and Way wrote in 2025: “What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism - a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.” Their main example was Orban’s Hungary, which also shows how such systems can end. In April 2026, Hungarian voters threw Orban out after 16 years and gave Peter Magyar’s party a two-thirds majority.

So why bring up history at all? Because the great tragedies of the 20th century didn’t begin with the tragedy. They began with a leader who said the country was in chaos and only he could fix it, and a lie repeated until doubting it looked disloyal. They began with purges of generals and civil servants sold as reform, a press bullied into censoring itself, and courts that still worked for most people but not for the regime’s targets. Each step was legal, or close to it, and each one was explained away.

Every item in this post is a step history warns us about, and every one can still be reversed: by courts, by Congress, by journalists who refuse to obey in advance and by voters. Our institutions are stronger than Hungary’s were, and Hungarians still voted their way out. Studying history isn’t about predicting the worst. It’s about recognizing the early steps while there’s still time to stop them.

When a president says “maybe we like a dictator,” the answer isn’t panic, and it isn’t a shrug. It’s showing up to vote.

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Filed under PoliticsDemocracyHistoryAuthoritarianismTrump