We’re a week short now of the six-month mark of Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, and while a lot remains to be seen (gulp), we should have a pretty clear idea of how a democracy becomes an authoritarian police state. The five key ingredients: lies, corruption, idiocy, loyalty, and most important, a blanket of sedating propaganda swaddling the first four and protecting the administration from any remote hint of democratic consequences or accountability.
The lies are big and small, consequential and petty. And that’s the point. Authoritarians know that you’re not really lying unless you’re lying with absolute and unconditional impunity. They started on day one, with Trump’s inaugural address, when he said the voters gave him a “massive mandate ... like hasn’t been seen in many years” (he won by 1.5 percent). The lies have proliferated ever since, about Elon Musk’s DOGE and so much else.
And these aren’t just lies. They’re complete and intentional inversions of the truth. Iran’s nuclear capability was “obliterated.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up only “the worst of the worst.” The Medicaid cuts are just “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acted swiftly this week in response to the Texas flooding. In case you missed that one, Noem’s edict that she personally had to approve every FEMA contract worth more than $100,000 slowed down the federal response by three days, which is a long time when flood waters are rising and eight-year-old girls are drowning.
The corruption is essential to authoritarian and fascist regimes. Through it, they send a vital message about the extent and nature of their power: We can do whatever we please. Elon Musk is amusingly on the outs now, but think about what Musk and Trump did to this country over the past year. The richest man in the world spent hundreds of millions to elect a corrupt president and was then given the job of destroying government agencies according to a plan (Project 2025) about which the corrupt candidate lied repeatedly while campaigning. Other manifestations have mostly to do with Trump’s unquenchable greed, his infinite need to profit personally from whatever situation he finds himself in. But it’s the First World (if I may use that now-antiquated term) equivalent of small-state dictators of the past surrounding themselves in luxury while their people lacked potable water.
As for idiocy: Some authoritarian leaders in history were intelligent men, but that doesn’t matter. Anyone with an army and police force and propaganda network behind him can be made to look smart. But intelligence is hardly a prerequisite. In fact, it’s kind of better if the Dear Leader is dumb, because then his plain idiocy can be molded by the propaganda team to make him seem like an esoteric genius.
So Trump makes a complete ass of himself on the world stage on tariffs. He obviously has no idea what he’s doing. Canada, Brazil, copper! Liberation Day. Oops, not Liberation Day! A July 9 deadline becomes August 1 (and of course, he never said July 9!). Yet out trot press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Treasurer Scott Bessent to assure us that it’s all going to plan, and Trump is playing a game of multi-dimensional chess we mere mortals can’t begin to follow.
Leavitt, Bessent, and so many others exemplify the loyalty, which must be total and cover everything from embarrassing rhetorical genuflection to the “random” choosing, by his male Cabinet members, to wear a red tie to work today and let it dangle below the belt just a bit lower than usual. At the FBI, employees are being pressured to take polygraph tests, sometimes being asked if they’re loyal to Kash Patel (side note: polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and federal law even prohibits most private employers from using them on employees). In a move that didn’t get much attention at the time, on May 29, Trump released a federal hiring plan requiring all applicants above the GS-5 level (that’s entry level, folks) to write an essay describing the new policies they were eager to implement.
Finally, none of it would work without the propaganda network. It ensures that a significant chunk of the population believes the opposite of the truth at all times. It’s Trump’s enemies who lie relentlessly. It’s the Democrats who are corrupt (and of course a few are, but not as a matter of principle, like Trump). Trump is in fact a genius. And loyalty is not demanded but is in fact a natural consequence of the reality that Trump is the most truthful, honest, upright, and brilliant leader in American history. Probably world history.
This will get much worse. Just one example: Noem, thanks to the Republicans’ recently passed budget bill, is about to go on a nearly limitless hiring spree of ICE agents, empowering them to wear masks and badges and drive around in cars without license plates and round up people by the hundreds of thousands, who’ll be deposited in a string of concentration camps that red states will be eager to build. On this front alone, we’re going to descend into a darkness most of us couldn’t have imagined for the United States. But there’s so much more to come.
Public opinion is against this madness, though not as much as it should be. That’s partly a reflection of the opposition’s confused ineffectiveness, but mostly of the power of the MAGA propaganda network, which will only get more and more frantic and dishonest the more public opposition hardens.
The silver lining is that the United States is still enough of a democracy, for now, that public opinion matters. Trump can try to change that: He can use the Insurrection Act to create a secret police force to round people up. That would be an extraordinary step, in the world’s oldest democracy. Until then, we’re not frogs in pots of heating water (which is a myth anyway). We see what’s happening. We are all well aware that we’re losing our democracy day by day. And millions of us are doing something about it—bringing lawsuits, protesting, whistleblowing, writing columns, making videos of ICE agents, what have you. There is still time to stop this.
