America: Are we now living in an autocracy?

On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump famously promised to not govern as a dictator, "except for Day One." We're now past Day 200, said David Smith in The Guardian, and the president's authoritarian project is only expanding. These bleak seven months have seen him install partisan loyalists at every level of government and purge dissenters; make chilling public attacks on any "rogue" judge who dares challenge his lawless policies; deploy masked ICE agents to snatch people off the streets; and transform the FBI and Justice Department into his personal police force, launching investigations into his critics and political foes. In July, he sent troops into Democratic-run Los Angeles; now he's doing the same in blue Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, he continues to engage in an Orwellian "rewriting of reality," said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. Officials who accurately report bad economic news have been fired, government websites have been scrubbed of data on climate change and other now-verboten issues, and mentions in a Smithsonian exhibit of Trump's impeachments were removed and reinstated with heavy edits. It's still hard to believe this is happening, but the "authoritarian remaking of U.S. democracy" is almost complete.

We knew Trump would try this, said Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone; the shock has been watching American institutions "play ball." Whether it's universities, law firms, and media companies "settling" Trump's bogus lawsuits for millions of dollars in de facto "protection money," or tech titans showering him with praise and donations, forces that could have resisted Trump's power grab chose instead to roll over and leave us on a "glide path" to fascism. Just as pathetic, if more predictable, has been the abject "acquiescence" of the GOP-controlled Congress, said Aaron Blake in CNN.com. Republicans have looked on silently as Trump has "neutered" their constitutional power to set taxes and duties by slapping tariffs on trading partners. "Lawmakers have the power to rein him in," but don't dare to defy "their party's standard-bearer."

We're in a dark place, said Chris Cillizza in his Substack newsletter, but it's too soon to say "democracy is collapsing." Trump may be unique in the ferocity of his norm breaking, but most presidents have "stretched the rubber band of democracy." And that band has stayed intact and regained something of its former shape after the president leaves office. For Trump, the snapback could start much sooner, said Matt Bai in The Washington Post. The MAGA base will never desert him. But if inflation alienates "centrists and conservatives" who support him despite his strongman posturing, Trump's poll numbers will plummet and our now-spineless institutions could "find their backbones pretty quickly."

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By the laws of "political gravity," that should be how this ends, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. But fascists, by definition, are exempt from those laws. Whatever happens to the economy or Trump's poll numbers, the system he and the GOP are building, "in which all sectors of society ultimately comply with the leader's wishes," is not designed to be handed over to a Democrat. A "critical mass of the American people" supports that project, said Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish. The republic could have survived Trump himself. What we may not survive are those tens of millions of Americans who are "sick of" unpredictable elections, sick of the slowness of the change democracy delivers, and—more than anything—sick of "sharing power with those they despise."