The Path to Autocracy

Trump is constantly accused of creating an autocracy or dictatorship. Let's have a look at the conditions necessary to create either of those and which president seemed to favor them.

We are all aware of the constant charges from the political left that President Trump wants to be a dictator. We are also aware of all the academics and intelligentsia who claim he is either laying out a path to that end or has already begun walking the US down it (remember Project 2025?).

The truth is that every US president has or had the power to create an autocracy. Wilson and FDR flirted with it; Wilson believed the presidency was designed to be “as big as the man” who held the office and FDR created massive social programs and the loyal bureaucracies to run them.

I’ve been thinking about the conditions necessary to achieve the goal of autocracy, and in my opinion the things a president needs are, but not limited to, the following:

• A very close group of people in the White House who are willing to do unconstitutional things – like using the Autopen - in a clandestine manner.

• A Svengali or Rasputin of sorts, a key strategic political and philosophical advisor who plots the course and directs the president in skirting the Constitution on the way to destroying it.

• A cadre of people willing to disguise or lie to the American people about policies, their cost, their effect and hide the physical and/or mental condition of senior officials (i.e. Lloyd Austin and Joe Biden).

• A complicit and subservient collection of Cabinet members and senior department officials who were selected for their loyalty to the party or indebtedness to the president for the positions or status they hold (for which they are completely unqualified).

• A compromised judicial system that conspires with prosecutors to punish the opposition and sits on its hands during a favored administration yet turns to judicial activism when an oppositional administration wins elections.

• A willing national political party – including former presidents and senior officials - that has no problem placing their party’s agenda over the national interest and the Constitution.

• A Department of Justice that is willing to prosecute and persecute the political enemies who stand in the way and to reward allies by inviting these allies to file federal lawsuits against various agencies and then settling them with large payouts instead of litigating them (the Obama Administration invented this way of sending funding to groups that Congress would never approve).

• An intel community willing to investigate, exhume, or simply create information harmful to their political enemies, often being used to create the predicate the DOJ needs to go after those enemies.

• Partisan allies at the state level – governors, DA’s, law enforcement, and elected officials - who are willing to use state laws to accomplish what the federal authorities cannot – for example, the use of public health laws, state civil litigation, or the manipulation or invention of laws directed at specific individuals – or simply ignore crimes or protests committed by allies.

• An official agency of the government – in this case, the FBI – willing to execute raids and arrests using unnecessary force as a method of terrorizing and sending a message to the public (like sending a SWAT team to arrest Roger Stone in his pajamas at six in the morning).

• A foreign policy organization that appeases enemies, alienates our allies, opens our borders and prioritizes foreign illegal aliens over American citizens while seeking to remake our national demographics into one that will accept authoritarian control in exchange for three hots and a cot, EBT cards, and “free” healthcare, all at the expense of a shrinking number of citizens forced to pay for all of it.

• Paramilitary allies and shock troops willing to riot and destroy on demand in service of the regime – examples being ANTIFA, La Raza, and BLM.

• A mechanism to fund it all – including legalization of insider trading and the redirection of federal “aid” funds into laundering systems that appeal to America’s altruistic intentions while capturing the majority of the expended taxpayer dollars in NGOs and “donations” to back to their party by officials employed by those organizations.

• A willing, compliant and complicit national media willing to repeat propaganda and agitprop, telling the public they didn’t see what they saw, hear what they heard, felt what they felt, and that the words spoken or written by their allies in the government did not mean what you thought they meant – or weren’t even written or said at all.

• And lastly, a complacent opposition party that lets them get away with all of it.

Now compare those characteristics to the Obama, Biden, and President Trump’s first four-year term and his eighth of a term so far in 2025 and then tell me which team is more likely to present the greatest threat of an autocracy or dictatorship.