Graff: It's Already Happened -- America Has Tipped into Fascism

Trump's push to dominate, not only the government, but every element of public life - and to back up his domestic demands with the power of the military - is the historic essence of authoritarian rule

By Garrett Graff Doomsday Scenario

The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism.

In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here.

The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

August 25, 2025, when Trump threatened to expand his unilateral dispatch of troops to other blue cities, was that morning.

Something was materially different in our country.

Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.

Saying it plainly. I debated in recent days whether this column should be written by our fearless foreign correspondent William Boot, who started satirically chronicling the backsliding of American democracy in January and the willful destruction of the federal government, but it seems more important to write plainly.

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is.

They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation's capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment.

They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on U.S. soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections.

The invasion of D.C. The president’s military occupation of the capital has escalated in recent days into something not seen since British troops marched the streets of colonial Boston — even though precisely nothing has happened to warrant it.

The Pentagon has now armed the National Guard patrolling D.C. and armored vehicles, designed for the worst of combat, are patrolling the capital, where they’re colliding with civilian vehicles because war transports are not supposed to be on civilian streets. (Why a 14-ton MRAP is in any way necessary for a domestic police mission is its own worthy line of questioning!)

Word came recently that the president is now drawing up plans and explicitly threatening domestic political opponents like the governors of California and Illinois with similar military occupations — exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power.

Civilians who try lawfully to exercise their right to document the abuses of the regime are themselves arrested and charged with felonies through trumped-up charges teeming with official lies.

The fact that this military takeover and federal occupation is being done to the city’s residents — and not on their behalf — is evident in how deserted D.C. has become as residents refuse to enter public spaces where they might have to interact with agents of the state.

The face of fascism. America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout “Papers please!” on the street at men and women heading home from work, a vision we associate with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany or the KGB in Soviet Russia, and where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.

It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting U.S. companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.

It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.

It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration.

It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.

It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.

It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.

High speed abuses of power. Just months short of the nation’s 250^th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar?

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments

• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world

• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent

• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury

• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

And so on.

A supine Congress and Court. One could say that Trump has blown through the nation’s constitutional and political guardrails, but a more accurate assessment is that both Congress and the Supreme Court — who have, as I wrote earlier this spring, effectively rolled over and played dead when it comes to their constitutional duty to exert checks and balances — removed those guardrails helpfully in advance.

In a dissent last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson compared the Court’s current approach, which has allowed Trump to streamroll past the normal constraints of the presidency through one procedural sleight-of-hand after another, to the game Calvinball, played by Calvin & Hobbes:

“Today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. ‘[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,’ the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible,” she writes. “This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

Feckless Democrats. The response, meanwhile, by Democrats has been unconscionably weak.

It’s no coincidence that governors like Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker have been the leaders of recent days; they are clear-eyed about what is happening. As Greg Sargent writes, “Newsom shapes everything around the brute fact that Trump is serially breaking the law and using government sponsored violence and intimidation to entrench authoritarian power. He accepts this as the core fact of our moment.”

By contrast, I challenge you to find even a moderately tepid and clear-eyed statement from any national Democrat.

National Democrats seem all invisible as the military takes over policing the streets of the capital and prosecuting its crimes. This should be a lay-up to oppose — the most basic duty of any congressional figure, and yet, “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with other senior Democrats, have not been a part of any concerted effort to voice opposition to the occupation.”

It’s still a party paralyzed by their own creaking gerontocracy; DC’s own nearly ninety-year-old congressional delegate hasn’t been seen in public since the occupation of her city — and her statement protesting it was accompanied by a photo of her at a different, previous, unrelated protest.

Leting it burn. There’s a story that I think a lot about — on September 29, 2008, I went to one of those friendly background lunches that reporters in D.C. do all the time with newsmakers.

It was the heart of the financial crisis and a group of us were meeting with Rep. Eric Cantor, a rising star in the GOP and party whip. The House was about to vote on a bailout for Wall Street that effectively everyone agreed was necessary to hold together the global economy — President Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Fed chair Ben Bernanke, GOP presidential nominee John McCain (who had even suspended his campaign to focus on the crisis) and Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

Cantor casually told us over lunch that his caucus was going to vote it down. We reporters, many of them far more experienced Hill veterans than me, were incredulous — all of his party’s leaders, the ones in the roles who knew the stake, the ones the party was supposed to listen to and follow, said this was critical — and yet the House GOP was going to let it burn?

Cantor was right — the House voted down the bailout and the stock market dropped 800 points. The end seemed nigh.

Bottom line. I remember walking out of that luncheon feeling like I had glimpsed something important.

The beating heart of the GOP no longer cared about principles or policy. There was a nihilist wing in control that scared me; they were happy to let it all burn.

For years in covering the rise (and return) of Trump and Trumpism, I imagined there was some line that the GOP would not be willing to compromise for greed and power — some incident that would bring party leaders to their senses, some principle or red-line would be unwilling to trade or cross in pursuit of furthering Trump’s agenda.

Even after January 6th, I held hope that might be the end. But then Eric Cantor’s buddy Kevin McCarthy showed up at Mar-a-Lago and the rehabilitation tour began.

It has led here, to this moment, where all three branches of the GOP-controlled government have been willing to torch the republic and democracy that generations of elected officials and citizens have tended for 249 years simply to please Donald Trump and avoid running afoul of his temper.

Where America goes from here is a story yet to be written.

It will surely get worse — Trump’s push now is clearly focused on locking in an illegitimate claim to power. Whether we can come back from this moment is a story yet unknown. But it’s clear today America is different and, even if we fight our way back, it will never be the same again.

Garrett Graff, the author of “Watergate: A New History” and other volumes, is an historian who teaches at Georgetown University. Subscribe to the “Doomsday Scenario” newsletter here.