Why the United States Has Slipped into Authoritarianism and May Soon Be a Dictatorship, and What Americans and the International Community Can Do About It
Thanks, Graham, for your thorough and careful work here. Writing from within this unfolding crisis, I am grateful for the clarity you bring from the outside. What you are naming resonates deeply with what a number of us have been seeing and documenting from inside the United States.
Distance can illuminate patterns that those within a system sometimes struggle to acknowledge. Your perspective strengthens the case that I have been seeking to make, and I am trying to take advantage of every possible crack. One of the sad things for me is the blindness and complicity of a lot of the white evangelical church. I face attacks often, and so your words bring encouragement to my soul.
Besides trying to sound the alarm for some time now, I have moved to help communities cultivating what I call prophetic discipleship, a form of faithful resistance rooted in truth, courage, and love of neighbor.
The twin cities have been heroes in our story. As I continue to lay out a prophetic discipleship pathway, I will also be seeking to help mobilize communities, so it was super helpful to read through your "what can be done" section. My hunger and thirst for justice is increasing. Thanks for your words and please have people pray for us. Your analysis reinforces my efforts, and I will be pointing people to this post. Thanks my brother.
A quick note of thanks to you both (I'm a New Zealander and grew up in the conservative evangelical church, Open Brethren). This is such a fine essay. I'm no academic but I obsessively follow American politics (since around the time of the insurrection). You've set the issues out so clearly; this is invaluable. Found thanks to JR Woodward's share on Substack Notes. Thanks heaps!
Some of us get it! But many of my fellow American Christians are either MAGA-complicit or so focused on "living quiet and peaceful lives" that they don't want to see and believe what is happening in plain sight.
And the algorithms are bad. Like, really bad. I've had conversations with my pastor where we've realized we are seeing entirely separate and opposite news reporting, and he isn't even a Fox News person.
Your fellow Australians join with many around the world who are deeply troubled by what the current US administration is doing, without fear of recourse.
I agree wholeheartedly with "The first is that elections remain the most powerful tool for reversing authoritarian drift, and protecting the integrity of elections is the single most urgent task."
This is excellent work Graham. I am very pleased to see that you have referenced Katherine Stewart, Althea Butler, Kristen Kobes Du Mez and Matthew Taylor as their important work is often overlooked or downplayed. I don't know if our US friends fully understand the enormity of the challenges they are up against if they are to restore justice and democracy to their nation. They need a few dozen people replicating elsewhere what Stacey Abrams did in Georgia in 2020, and probably many other initiatives as well.
Regarding the threats to the election I strongly recommend folks follow and read Joohn Choe on Facebook and Patreon.
I suppose there is no large scale harm in this type of alarmism unless it becomes endemic and people begin speaking of taking up armed resistance against the government.
Graham speaks as an objective outsider—as though he has no political bias himself—and yet he only seems to find himself citing and agreeing with authors and scholars who share his political perspective. There’s no nuance nor any mention of the rise of MAGA in response to the authoritarian strides of the Progressive Left in the Democrat Party.
For instance, Biden not only spoke of federalizing elections in the United States but he pushed for its legislation (For the People Act & The John Lewis Voting Rights Act) to increase Federal oversight and control over elections and eliminating the filibuster to achieve it. Trump has made no actual push to Federalize elections, he merely made an offhanded comment in response to the processes in blue states that open the possibly for voter fraud. Now I completely understand why that would disturb people who are convinced he is the incarnation of Hitler—and I make no defense of his uncouth character nor the ignorance of his unrehearsed comments—but in reality the only real action he has taken in this regard is to advocate for the Save Act to require Voter ID and prevent illegal immigrants from participating in our elections.
Why not mention that? Did Biden’s comments not concern him at all?
Why didn’t he mention Kamala Harris’s openness to expanding the Supreme Court—a very sure precursor of authoritarian rule?
Why didn’t he mention Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates and using a federal agency to enforce them?
Why didn’t he mention Joe Biden’s egregious quashing of free speech rights that was revealed with the release of the Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation that he was compelled by the government to silence opinions that were afield of the government’s narrative?
When he speaks of attacks on the media and how it portends authoritarian rule, he makes no mention of why Trump would find the coverage of his presidency intolerable and front a counteroffensive against it. No mention of recent revelations where Catherine Herridge’s story regarding forensic evidence that proved the Hunter Biden laptop story was true was scuttled by CBS News because it would negatively affect the outcome of the election. No mention of 60 Minutes editing Kamala Harris’s interviews to make her answers seem more coherent. No mention of the legacy media giving 92% negative coverage of Trump’s presidency and 48% positive coverage of Biden’s during the same period. Why didn’t he let us know about that? Why didn’t he mention that while Trump has been antagonistic towards the legacy media he has been a friend of independent outlets and the new media?
This is not an objective unbalanced analysis where the author presents both sides to make his case. He begins with his conclusion and then proceeds to build his case by citing the people who helped form his opinion.
It’s too bad because there are legitimate concerns to be had with Trump’s presidency. Unfortunately, the people who need to hear those concerns will not be able to hear them because they are either overstated and misrepresented by articles like this, or they are camouflaged by overly biased myopic commentary and omission of facts.
After reading the comments I realized after posting that I was responding to an earlier version of the essay that did not address my complaints. Unfortunately, the responses remain unconvincing as Graham’s approach was to dismiss the concerns of moderate and right-leaning Americans and draw an imaginary line between Trump’s authoritarian autocratic rule and the Progressive Left’s authoritarian bureaucratic rule.
He writes that ‘no Democrat run FBI ever seized election ballots’ but fails to mention why that’s even a concern—if there were no irregularities then the integrity of the election will be upheld. Graham should have searched for an actual analog to the FBI raid if he thinks the raid on these ballots was illegal or politicized. Good examples that he might have considered would have been the raid on Mar-a-Lago, or Rudy Giuliani, or Project Veritas, or Arctic Frost. No mention of surveilling Catholics who practice the Latin Mass because they were “right-wing extremists”. No mention of labeling people voicing their concerns at local school boards “domestic terrorists”.
Why not mention these things? Are they not relevant?
You might respond, “whataboutism”. My point here is not to argue that Trump is completely innocent of overstepping his executive authority and his abuses should be excused because of the bureaucracy’s. My point is to critique the essay as alarmist—overstating the problems—and selectively outraged—ignoring or excusing the abuses of the Left that gave rise to Donald Trump.
Graham ends his essay by explaining how he will be proved wrong. Two things to mention here:
1) He says if the 2026 and 2028 elections go off without a hitch he will accept he was wrong. But he includes the SAVE Act as a poison pill. If the elections go off without a hitch and the Democrats lose then he doesn’t need to apologize. In other words, if people have to prove who they are when they cast a ballot then the election was stolen because of some supposed and asserted disenfranchisement that somehow only affects American citizens with a left-leaning voting record. If the SAVE Act is passed and the Republicans maintain the House and Senate, he was correct.
2) In the biblical story prophets in the Old Testament who prophesied falsely were excommunicated from the assembly and were not be listened to anymore. That same principle applies here. Though forgiveness is freely and graciously offered without equivocation a public apology will not remove reputational harm we experience as a result of what we say and what we predict.
No disrespect to the author. I have no doubt he is convinced of what he writes and is genuinely concerned about the USA and the downstream international consequences. I suspect no malice. But I do see obvious blindspots.
Thank you for this. It's detailed, it's clearly written with care, and it engages seriously with the argument. I want to respond in the same spirit, because you raise points that deserve honest answers, and I think we probably agree on more than either of us might expect.
On the substantive points you raise. You're right that Biden pushed for federal voting rights legislation. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act sought to establish federal baseline standards for ballot access, restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court had struck down, and address gerrymandering. You can agree or disagree with the wisdom of that legislation, and reasonable people do. But there is a meaningful difference between a president proposing legislation through the normal Congressional process, which failed, and which he accepted the failure of, and a president calling for his party to "take over the voting" in opposition-held cities, raiding election offices with federal agents, and repeatedly floating the cancellation of elections. One works through the system. The other seeks to override it. The scholarly frameworks I cite are designed to measure that distinction, and they measure it consistently regardless of which party is in power.
On the SAVE Act, I did mention it in the essay, as a mechanism that experts believe could disenfranchise eligible voters. Voter ID is popular and polls well across party lines. The concern among election scholars is about the specific design of identification requirements and whether they are calibrated to prevent the vanishingly rare problem of noncitizen voting or to create barriers for eligible citizens who lack the required documentation. Those are empirical questions, and I'm happy to be guided by the evidence on them.
On court packing: Harris's comments about expanding the Supreme Court were made in a campaign context, and no legislation was introduced or pursued. You're right that court expansion is a serious concern in the comparative literature on democratic backsliding. It is one of the markers scholars watch for. It has not happened. If a Democratic president were to pack the courts, the same scholars would raise the same alarms, and I would write about it with the same concern.
On vaccine mandates, the Twitter Files, and social media censorship: I acknowledged in the essay's "What About the Democrats?" section that the pressure placed on social media companies during the pandemic raised legitimate First Amendment questions. These are real concerns. The FBI's handling of the Carter Page FISA warrant was genuinely troubling. I said so explicitly. These are examples of institutional overreach that deserve scrutiny and accountability.
Here is where I think the core disagreement lies. You describe these examples as equivalent to what the current administration is doing, and you frame my failure to treat them as equivalent as evidence of bias. I understand why it looks that way. But the scholarly frameworks I rely on draw a specific, measurable line between the hardball that both parties play within a democratic system and the systematic dismantling of the mechanisms that make democratic competition possible. The question is whether a president is bending the rules within the system or breaking the system itself.
No previous president of either party sent federal agents to seize ballots from a county election office. No previous president told military commanders to prepare for war against domestic enemies. No previous president defied federal court orders as a matter of routine. No previous president used uniformed soldiers as props for partisan rallies against named political opponents. No previous president had a bystander killed by federal agents during a domestic law enforcement operation and then described the protesters as terrorists. These are qualitative differences, and the research literature treats them as such.
You mention the Mar-a-Lago raid as an analog to the Fulton County raid. The Mar-a-Lago search was conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal magistrate judge based on probable cause that classified documents were being unlawfully retained. It followed months of negotiation and voluntary returns. It was reviewed by the courts at every stage. The Fulton County raid involved federal agents seizing election materials from a state election office, overseen personally by the Director of National Intelligence, in connection with an election that every court and audit had confirmed was conducted lawfully. These are different things, and treating them as equivalent is where the analysis breaks down.
On the question of media bias: you're right that legacy media coverage of Trump has been overwhelmingly negative. I don't dispute that, and I understand why it fuels resentment and distrust. But the question the essay addresses is whether a president responding to negative coverage by threatening media organizations with federal investigation, revoking broadcast licenses, and using the machinery of the state to punish critical reporting constitutes authoritarian behaviour. The comparative evidence says it does. Every authoritarian leader in the modern era has justified attacks on press freedom by pointing to genuine bias in media coverage. The bias may be real. The response is what the scholars measure.
On your final point about the SAVE Act as a "poison pill" in my falsifiability criteria. That's a fair challenge, and I want to be precise. I'm not saying that if the SAVE Act passes and Republicans win, I was right. I'm saying that the test is whether the election is conducted freely, whether eligible voters are able to cast ballots without federal intimidation, and whether the results are accepted and the winners seated. If voter ID is implemented in a way that eligible citizens can readily comply with, and turnout is robust, and the results are honoured, then the system held. I would say so regardless of who wins.
I appreciate the seriousness of your engagement, and I hear you when you say you suspect no malice. I return that respect. I have blind spots, as every writer does, and engagement like yours is how those blind spots get identified. Where I would push back is on the framing that the essay is alarmist. The scholars I cite have spent decades studying how democracies die, and they are converging on the same conclusion with unusual unanimity. If they're wrong, the 2026 elections will demonstrate it, and I will be genuinely glad to say so.
Did you write a similar piece when the Biden and Obama administrations did similar things? Weaponize the DOJ and the FBI against political opponents? Fill the judiciary with their judges?
I will do my best to find time to read it. I just don't know your sources and why they are the experts on discerning corruption of the American experiment. As you rightly point out this kind of battle for power and control is not new in American history. The 2026 elections, midterm elections are never bell weathers for the future. They are mostly reactions and I expect the Republicans to lose control of Congress and two more years of going after Trump. Just one example of worst case assumptions you make and why I am questioning your argument is the assumption that there will be corrupt federal interference in the elections over voter ID's if Republicans lose. I have no doubt that Trump will challenge any election he loses and will push the legal limits to win. That does not mean he will get his way and our system will fall into dictatorship. It is such an alarmist leap you make and scholars and observers from a far are not really connected to what is going on in American kitchens. Ivory towers really give a comprehensive view of the whole picture.
Thanks, Graham, for your thorough and careful work here. Writing from within this unfolding crisis, I am grateful for the clarity you bring from the outside. What you are naming resonates deeply with what a number of us have been seeing and documenting from inside the United States.
Distance can illuminate patterns that those within a system sometimes struggle to acknowledge. Your perspective strengthens the case that I have been seeking to make, and I am trying to take advantage of every possible crack. One of the sad things for me is the blindness and complicity of a lot of the white evangelical church. I face attacks often, and so your words bring encouragement to my soul.
Besides trying to sound the alarm for some time now, I have moved to help communities cultivating what I call prophetic discipleship, a form of faithful resistance rooted in truth, courage, and love of neighbor.
The twin cities have been heroes in our story. As I continue to lay out a prophetic discipleship pathway, I will also be seeking to help mobilize communities, so it was super helpful to read through your "what can be done" section. My hunger and thirst for justice is increasing. Thanks for your words and please have people pray for us. Your analysis reinforces my efforts, and I will be pointing people to this post. Thanks my brother.
Thanks JR. I’ve just added three more sections to it. 1. Is this a leftist concern? 2. What about the Democrats? 3. How would I know if I’m wrong?
A quick note of thanks to you both (I'm a New Zealander and grew up in the conservative evangelical church, Open Brethren). This is such a fine essay. I'm no academic but I obsessively follow American politics (since around the time of the insurrection). You've set the issues out so clearly; this is invaluable. Found thanks to JR Woodward's share on Substack Notes. Thanks heaps!
Some of us get it! But many of my fellow American Christians are either MAGA-complicit or so focused on "living quiet and peaceful lives" that they don't want to see and believe what is happening in plain sight.
And the algorithms are bad. Like, really bad. I've had conversations with my pastor where we've realized we are seeing entirely separate and opposite news reporting, and he isn't even a Fox News person.
Brilliant essay.
Your fellow Australians join with many around the world who are deeply troubled by what the current US administration is doing, without fear of recourse.
I agree wholeheartedly with "The first is that elections remain the most powerful tool for reversing authoritarian drift, and protecting the integrity of elections is the single most urgent task."
This is excellent work Graham. I am very pleased to see that you have referenced Katherine Stewart, Althea Butler, Kristen Kobes Du Mez and Matthew Taylor as their important work is often overlooked or downplayed. I don't know if our US friends fully understand the enormity of the challenges they are up against if they are to restore justice and democracy to their nation. They need a few dozen people replicating elsewhere what Stacey Abrams did in Georgia in 2020, and probably many other initiatives as well.
Regarding the threats to the election I strongly recommend folks follow and read Joohn Choe on Facebook and Patreon.
I suppose there is no large scale harm in this type of alarmism unless it becomes endemic and people begin speaking of taking up armed resistance against the government.
Graham speaks as an objective outsider—as though he has no political bias himself—and yet he only seems to find himself citing and agreeing with authors and scholars who share his political perspective. There’s no nuance nor any mention of the rise of MAGA in response to the authoritarian strides of the Progressive Left in the Democrat Party.
For instance, Biden not only spoke of federalizing elections in the United States but he pushed for its legislation (For the People Act & The John Lewis Voting Rights Act) to increase Federal oversight and control over elections and eliminating the filibuster to achieve it. Trump has made no actual push to Federalize elections, he merely made an offhanded comment in response to the processes in blue states that open the possibly for voter fraud. Now I completely understand why that would disturb people who are convinced he is the incarnation of Hitler—and I make no defense of his uncouth character nor the ignorance of his unrehearsed comments—but in reality the only real action he has taken in this regard is to advocate for the Save Act to require Voter ID and prevent illegal immigrants from participating in our elections.
Why not mention that? Did Biden’s comments not concern him at all?
Why didn’t he mention Kamala Harris’s openness to expanding the Supreme Court—a very sure precursor of authoritarian rule?
Why didn’t he mention Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates and using a federal agency to enforce them?
Why didn’t he mention Joe Biden’s egregious quashing of free speech rights that was revealed with the release of the Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation that he was compelled by the government to silence opinions that were afield of the government’s narrative?
When he speaks of attacks on the media and how it portends authoritarian rule, he makes no mention of why Trump would find the coverage of his presidency intolerable and front a counteroffensive against it. No mention of recent revelations where Catherine Herridge’s story regarding forensic evidence that proved the Hunter Biden laptop story was true was scuttled by CBS News because it would negatively affect the outcome of the election. No mention of 60 Minutes editing Kamala Harris’s interviews to make her answers seem more coherent. No mention of the legacy media giving 92% negative coverage of Trump’s presidency and 48% positive coverage of Biden’s during the same period. Why didn’t he let us know about that? Why didn’t he mention that while Trump has been antagonistic towards the legacy media he has been a friend of independent outlets and the new media?
This is not an objective unbalanced analysis where the author presents both sides to make his case. He begins with his conclusion and then proceeds to build his case by citing the people who helped form his opinion.
It’s too bad because there are legitimate concerns to be had with Trump’s presidency. Unfortunately, the people who need to hear those concerns will not be able to hear them because they are either overstated and misrepresented by articles like this, or they are camouflaged by overly biased myopic commentary and omission of facts.
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond. Greatly appreciated
After reading the comments I realized after posting that I was responding to an earlier version of the essay that did not address my complaints. Unfortunately, the responses remain unconvincing as Graham’s approach was to dismiss the concerns of moderate and right-leaning Americans and draw an imaginary line between Trump’s authoritarian autocratic rule and the Progressive Left’s authoritarian bureaucratic rule.
He writes that ‘no Democrat run FBI ever seized election ballots’ but fails to mention why that’s even a concern—if there were no irregularities then the integrity of the election will be upheld. Graham should have searched for an actual analog to the FBI raid if he thinks the raid on these ballots was illegal or politicized. Good examples that he might have considered would have been the raid on Mar-a-Lago, or Rudy Giuliani, or Project Veritas, or Arctic Frost. No mention of surveilling Catholics who practice the Latin Mass because they were “right-wing extremists”. No mention of labeling people voicing their concerns at local school boards “domestic terrorists”.
Why not mention these things? Are they not relevant?
You might respond, “whataboutism”. My point here is not to argue that Trump is completely innocent of overstepping his executive authority and his abuses should be excused because of the bureaucracy’s. My point is to critique the essay as alarmist—overstating the problems—and selectively outraged—ignoring or excusing the abuses of the Left that gave rise to Donald Trump.
Graham ends his essay by explaining how he will be proved wrong. Two things to mention here:
1) He says if the 2026 and 2028 elections go off without a hitch he will accept he was wrong. But he includes the SAVE Act as a poison pill. If the elections go off without a hitch and the Democrats lose then he doesn’t need to apologize. In other words, if people have to prove who they are when they cast a ballot then the election was stolen because of some supposed and asserted disenfranchisement that somehow only affects American citizens with a left-leaning voting record. If the SAVE Act is passed and the Republicans maintain the House and Senate, he was correct.
2) In the biblical story prophets in the Old Testament who prophesied falsely were excommunicated from the assembly and were not be listened to anymore. That same principle applies here. Though forgiveness is freely and graciously offered without equivocation a public apology will not remove reputational harm we experience as a result of what we say and what we predict.
No disrespect to the author. I have no doubt he is convinced of what he writes and is genuinely concerned about the USA and the downstream international consequences. I suspect no malice. But I do see obvious blindspots.
Thank you for this. It's detailed, it's clearly written with care, and it engages seriously with the argument. I want to respond in the same spirit, because you raise points that deserve honest answers, and I think we probably agree on more than either of us might expect.
On the substantive points you raise. You're right that Biden pushed for federal voting rights legislation. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act sought to establish federal baseline standards for ballot access, restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court had struck down, and address gerrymandering. You can agree or disagree with the wisdom of that legislation, and reasonable people do. But there is a meaningful difference between a president proposing legislation through the normal Congressional process, which failed, and which he accepted the failure of, and a president calling for his party to "take over the voting" in opposition-held cities, raiding election offices with federal agents, and repeatedly floating the cancellation of elections. One works through the system. The other seeks to override it. The scholarly frameworks I cite are designed to measure that distinction, and they measure it consistently regardless of which party is in power.
On the SAVE Act, I did mention it in the essay, as a mechanism that experts believe could disenfranchise eligible voters. Voter ID is popular and polls well across party lines. The concern among election scholars is about the specific design of identification requirements and whether they are calibrated to prevent the vanishingly rare problem of noncitizen voting or to create barriers for eligible citizens who lack the required documentation. Those are empirical questions, and I'm happy to be guided by the evidence on them.
On court packing: Harris's comments about expanding the Supreme Court were made in a campaign context, and no legislation was introduced or pursued. You're right that court expansion is a serious concern in the comparative literature on democratic backsliding. It is one of the markers scholars watch for. It has not happened. If a Democratic president were to pack the courts, the same scholars would raise the same alarms, and I would write about it with the same concern.
On vaccine mandates, the Twitter Files, and social media censorship: I acknowledged in the essay's "What About the Democrats?" section that the pressure placed on social media companies during the pandemic raised legitimate First Amendment questions. These are real concerns. The FBI's handling of the Carter Page FISA warrant was genuinely troubling. I said so explicitly. These are examples of institutional overreach that deserve scrutiny and accountability.
Here is where I think the core disagreement lies. You describe these examples as equivalent to what the current administration is doing, and you frame my failure to treat them as equivalent as evidence of bias. I understand why it looks that way. But the scholarly frameworks I rely on draw a specific, measurable line between the hardball that both parties play within a democratic system and the systematic dismantling of the mechanisms that make democratic competition possible. The question is whether a president is bending the rules within the system or breaking the system itself.
No previous president of either party sent federal agents to seize ballots from a county election office. No previous president told military commanders to prepare for war against domestic enemies. No previous president defied federal court orders as a matter of routine. No previous president used uniformed soldiers as props for partisan rallies against named political opponents. No previous president had a bystander killed by federal agents during a domestic law enforcement operation and then described the protesters as terrorists. These are qualitative differences, and the research literature treats them as such.
You mention the Mar-a-Lago raid as an analog to the Fulton County raid. The Mar-a-Lago search was conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal magistrate judge based on probable cause that classified documents were being unlawfully retained. It followed months of negotiation and voluntary returns. It was reviewed by the courts at every stage. The Fulton County raid involved federal agents seizing election materials from a state election office, overseen personally by the Director of National Intelligence, in connection with an election that every court and audit had confirmed was conducted lawfully. These are different things, and treating them as equivalent is where the analysis breaks down.
On the question of media bias: you're right that legacy media coverage of Trump has been overwhelmingly negative. I don't dispute that, and I understand why it fuels resentment and distrust. But the question the essay addresses is whether a president responding to negative coverage by threatening media organizations with federal investigation, revoking broadcast licenses, and using the machinery of the state to punish critical reporting constitutes authoritarian behaviour. The comparative evidence says it does. Every authoritarian leader in the modern era has justified attacks on press freedom by pointing to genuine bias in media coverage. The bias may be real. The response is what the scholars measure.
On your final point about the SAVE Act as a "poison pill" in my falsifiability criteria. That's a fair challenge, and I want to be precise. I'm not saying that if the SAVE Act passes and Republicans win, I was right. I'm saying that the test is whether the election is conducted freely, whether eligible voters are able to cast ballots without federal intimidation, and whether the results are accepted and the winners seated. If voter ID is implemented in a way that eligible citizens can readily comply with, and turnout is robust, and the results are honoured, then the system held. I would say so regardless of who wins.
I appreciate the seriousness of your engagement, and I hear you when you say you suspect no malice. I return that respect. I have blind spots, as every writer does, and engagement like yours is how those blind spots get identified. Where I would push back is on the framing that the essay is alarmist. The scholars I cite have spent decades studying how democracies die, and they are converging on the same conclusion with unusual unanimity. If they're wrong, the 2026 elections will demonstrate it, and I will be genuinely glad to say so.
Did you write a similar piece when the Biden and Obama administrations did similar things? Weaponize the DOJ and the FBI against political opponents? Fill the judiciary with their judges?
I’ve just added a section called “what about the Democrats?” Have a look and see what you think.
I will do my best to find time to read it. I just don't know your sources and why they are the experts on discerning corruption of the American experiment. As you rightly point out this kind of battle for power and control is not new in American history. The 2026 elections, midterm elections are never bell weathers for the future. They are mostly reactions and I expect the Republicans to lose control of Congress and two more years of going after Trump. Just one example of worst case assumptions you make and why I am questioning your argument is the assumption that there will be corrupt federal interference in the elections over voter ID's if Republicans lose. I have no doubt that Trump will challenge any election he loses and will push the legal limits to win. That does not mean he will get his way and our system will fall into dictatorship. It is such an alarmist leap you make and scholars and observers from a far are not really connected to what is going on in American kitchens. Ivory towers really give a comprehensive view of the whole picture.