April 2025

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines autocracy as government in which one person possesses unlimited power; a community or state governed by autocracy.

Most would agree that our founding fathers attempted to set up a government structure that was capable of preventing autocratic rule, which is exactly what drove the early settlers of our nation to travel across seas to establish what is often called our experiment in democracy.

That is why we have a system of governance that provides checks and balances between the legislature, the courts and the administration of the president.

The challenge is that for the experiment of democracy to work, we must pay attention to what is happening with our elected representatives and their appointed underlings. A tall order, I know, and I say that as someone who, since the most recent election of Donald Trump, would rather watch 20-year-old reruns of Law and Order than the daily news. Frankly, it’s depressing. But then again, that is exactly what those surrounding Trump are counting on.

Either by happenstance (doubtful) or by design, the firehose of changes occurring daily can wear down the best of us. But history should have taught us that is exactly how we slide into autocratic rule – not paying attention.

My concern is that the transformation of our government into an autocracy is rapidly taking place. Once lost, it will take added effort to regain the democratic government we once knew.

We can find a litany of examples from around the world where a steady erosion of democracy has made way for autocratic rule. But we can now take a look at what has transpired in our own country with the Donald Trump administration – both years ago and in his current term.

First, autocrats always follow the same textbook by challenging what we can broadly call the truth.

American historian Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, tells us in On Tyranny: “To abandon truth is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding light.”

That’s the groundwork laid by Trump in his first term. Critics in the media were called “enemies of the people” and their work was “fake news.” Efforts to diminish the reputation of journalists, like other falsehoods from Trump, repeated often enough simply take on the appearance as an “alternative” truth which serves as red meat for his base of supporters.

Now in his second term, Trump has gone a step further by suing the media, for example, when he doesn’t like the way a television interview is edited, a print story or an election poll casts him in a negative light. He now decides to prevent legacy media from having a place at his press meetings and has banned long-established access for the Associated Press because that treasured international media group refuses to call the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Suppression of speech at its finest.

The work of journalists is often referred to as the first take on history. If he can get the media to cower – they haven’t yet – then there is no one to challenge what is taking place.

Within the government itself, Trump is seeking to remove what he calls the “deep state” which seems to include anyone who, as part of their job, in the past dared to delve into what laws the president may have broken. Hence his request for a list of any lawyers in the Department of Justice who may have worked on cases involving Trump in past years. Or the removal of senior career officials whose charge was to investigate ethical violations in the government. Then there is the banning from government buildings any private law firms which may have defended critics of Trump now and in the past. Modern-day McCarthyism.

To complete the autocracy, the Trump administration is attempting to dismantle the education department while at the same time mandating that DEI be abolished at the K-12 and college level, using the cudgel of cancelled funding as the penalty for not adhering to his executive order on this topic, although fortunately the courts have ruled that this is a violation of free speech. Some major private companies have likewise eliminated DEI policies to appease the autocrat.

Trump has also issued an executive order to reinstate his 1776 Commission to push “patriotic” education in the K-12 system. The president now talks of how schools should be teaching the wonders of America, no doubt at the expense of teaching complete history of our country. Suppression of thought that we have seen in other autocracies.

To further control what the populace knows, some 400 online pages of information on topics like the environment and climate change, law, abuse by police authorities, and health have been purged from federal websites.

The government under Trump is using the military within our borders, something expressly prohibited in our Constitution, and now has turned to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that provides during time of war that he can remove visitors to our country, a law that was used decades ago to block Jewish people from entering America and allowed for the creation of camps to house Japanese Americans during World War II.

As for the courts, some 126 lawsuits have been filed against either Trump’s executive orders or actions the administration has taken. But even then, Trump ignores those decisions with which he disagrees, as evidenced by the flaunting of a court order to not deport prisoners to El Salvador in recent weeks.

We should all be concerned, even more so that most members of Congress have failed to object when the executive branch threw the separation of powers aside by freezing funding approved by the legislative branch, with the administration flatly refusing to abide by some lower court decisions on this issue.

For a couple hundred years the country has withstood challenges to our democracy, only to have an autocrat unravel the basics of our government in a two-month period. A not so promising future unless the populace organizes an unrelenting pushback, which can be a lonely position to maintain in today’s environment. But as historian Timothy Snyder tells us: “Stand out. Some has to.”

David Hohendorf

Publisher

DavidHohendorf@DowntownPublications.com