If and when you live in a dictatorship, how will you know?

Trump's power is far from absolute, but he's always trying to see what he can get away with.

There hasn’t been any particularly catastrophic economic news for over a week now, so I’ve been taking a bit of a break from bashing the Trump administration. But that doesn’t mean the administration wasn’t doing anything awful during that time. There was! It just wasn’t in the economic sphere. Instead, it was a bunch of human rights abuses and assertions of unchecked executive power.

So although officially this is an economics blog, I guess I might as well take a little detour and talk about whether Trump is about to become a dictator.

The word “dictatorship” is a fraught one, a bit like “terrorism”, or “tyranny” back in the 18th century. Officially, a dictator is just a ruler with unchecked power, not subject to things like elections, the rule of law, or oversight by a legislature. But in practice, almost no ruler has absolutely zero checks on his power, and there’s no hard and fast rule for where to draw the line. As a result, there tend to be a lot of arguments over whether particular rulers — Turkey’s Erdogan, Hungary’s Orban, or even Ukraine’s Zelensky — is a “dictator”.

These debates over whether a leader is a “dictator” can be fierce, because the word carries a powerful pejorative implication. Very few people will admit to liking the idea of a dictator, even if many people want a dictator in practice. In addition to unchecked power, “dictator” carries the implication of illiberalism and oppression — the word invokes things like secret torture dungeons, disappearances of political enemies, pervasive censorship of speech, vast networks of prisons, and so on. (An all-powerful benevolent liberal philosopher-king would technically be a dictator, but few people would think of him as such.)

Only Trump’s most florid and hyperbolic opponents would claim that as of March 2025, our President is a dictator. But over the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration has done or said a number of things that sort of pattern-match to the stuff dictators usually do. And this is causing reasonable people to worry that Trump is slowly, carefully trying to push in the direction of a dictatorship.

To take just one small example, Trump claimed that it’s illegal for news outlets to report stories that influence the opinions of judges:

President Trump railed against the media…suggesting some of the actions of the press be deemed illegal and should be investigated…[He] said he views CNN and MSNBC as corrupt.

“I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6 percent bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what do they do is illegal,” Trump said…He also claimed the media outlets work in coordination and that their reporting is able to influence the opinions of judges…“And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other,” he added.

Some Trump defenders might say this is just empty bluster; Some Trump opponents will probably say that this rhetoric means the press is no longer free in America. But it’s hard to dispute that if Trump really did manage to punish news outlets for criticizing him, it would be pretty dictatorial.

Trump has also issued executive orders targeting specific law firms that he doesn’t like:

The administration has stripped security clearances at a trio of firms…The orders for Perkins Coie and Paul, Weiss additionally barred their attorneys from entering federal buildings, which could include places like courthouses…The chair of Paul, Weiss said the move “could easily have destroyed our firm,”…

President Trump [also] signed another executive order critics say will have a chilling effect on those taking on litigation against the administration — encouraging the attorney general to refer attorneys for disciplinary action if it is determined they have filed “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation”.

Although it’s likely that the law firms could sue and stop these executive orders, they could still be hurt by the perception that the administration is out to get them. Since these firms deal with cases involving the government, that could be fatal to their businesses. Law firms have already started refusing to represent Trump’s opponents, fearing executive retaliation.

Once again, Trump defenders will claim that this is just playing hardball, while Trump opponents will say that fundamental freedoms have been abrogated. But what’s unambiguous is that Trump’s action goes in the direction of greater executive power and fewer institutional checks and balances. It’s notable that no American President has ever targeted lawyers in this fashion, but the presidents of Russia, Turkey, and Hungary have done similar things.

A third example is when Trump may or may not have defied a court order to halt a deportation flight:

The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn't apply…A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course: "Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders."

Again, notice the ambiguity. Trump’s people have been very careful to stick to the gray zone of legality and leave room for multiple interpretations of the President’s actions.

But these are not the scariest or most dictatorial things Trump has done. I saved the two worst examples for last.

The Trump administration has been trying to deport people for participating in Palestine protests. The first high-profile case was that of Mahmoud Khalil:

Five things to remember as the Mahmoud Khalil case develops

Khalil is a Syrian exchange student who led a bunch of Palestine protests at Columbia University. Some of those protests turned violent, possibly with Khalil’s encouragement. And Khalil almost certainly participated in illegal behavior, like taking over campus buildings.

Thus, Khalil’s case seems like a gray zone. The legality of the deportation is questionable; we’ll see if it ends up going through. The morality is also pretty murky. Khalil seems like a fairly bad guy, who abused the privilege of studying in the United States to attack his institution and intimidate innocent Americans. But it’s also a bad look for the President to single out and deport people for protesting.

But if the Khalil case is ambiguous, the case of Yunseo Chung is not. Chung is a U.S. permanent resident, who has lived in America since age 7. She took part in the Palestine protests at Columbia and was arrested, but wasn’t a protest leader. Now, Trump’s immigration enforcers have been tracking her down and trying to kick her out of the country. A judge has blocked her deportation for now, but if Trump eventually succeeds in banishing her from the country, Chung will be forced to move to a country where she hasn’t lived since she was a small child.

As readers of this blog know, I’m no fan of the Palestine protests — I think they support a fundamentally irredentist and illiberal ideology, and are often antisemitic. But freedom of speech doesn’t only apply to U.S. citizens; it applies to anyone in the country. Fundamentally, the President shouldn’t be able to dictate the speech of anyone in the country. And if the President can threaten to deport someone to a country they haven’t lived in since age 7 if they say something he doesn’t like, that’s a serious degradation of the American freedom we grew up with. The mere fact that Trump is trying to deport Yunseo Chung is bad news.

But the worst human rights abuse by the Trump administration so far is almost certainly the deportation of hundreds of men to prisons in El Salvador. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798, to deport people that he suspected of being members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. Some were in the country illegally, but some were refugees that had been admitted to America legally. Most were under Temporary Protected Status, a form of legal immigration that Biden granted and Trump revoked.

That’s questionable enough already. But instead of holding hearings or any other due process to determine if any of these guys was actually a member of Tren de Aragua, the Trump administration simply checked to see if they had tattoos. If they did, the administration declared they were members of Tren de Aragua, and immediately sent them to El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, promptly threw them in prison.

As you might expect, simply grabbing any Venezuelan-looking guy with a tattoo turned out not to be a very good way of identifying members of a foreign gang. Lots of people have tattoos for other reasons, and the Trump administration probably deported lots of total innocents, with zero due process.

And when these random innocent people arrived in El Salvador, this was the treatment that was waiting for them:

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

The men were pulled from the buses…Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward…The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again…After being shaved, the detainees were stripped naked. More of them began to whimper…

They entered their cold cells, 80 men per cell, with steel planks for bunks, no mats, no sheets, no pillow. No television. No books. No talking. No phone calls and no visitors.

So to sum up: Trump rounded up a bunch of random Hispanic guys with tattoos, and with zero due process, put them on a plane and shipped them to a hellish dungeon in El Salvador.

That is certainly not the worst thing a U.S. President has ever done. In fact, that sort of thing used to be a lot more common — consider the Trail of Tears, the Japanese internment, or the deportation of a vast number of Mexican Americans in the Depression. But the motivation seems different. Trump seems to be doing these things in order to deliberately test his limits — to see how far he can push the bounds of the law and of public opinion.

In fact, this deliberate caution has been a hallmark of Trump’s battles with American institutions since his first term. When Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election result, he did it with lawsuits and with pressure campaigns on GOP officials; he didn’t simply declare that he was still President. Even the January 6th rioters who stormed Congress in an attempt to prevent the certification of Biden’s election did so without guns.

Trump’s authoritarianism is like a liquid, pressing slowly at the cracks in America’s institutions, always searching for weak points. The pressure is higher in his second term than in his first, but the basic approach is the same.

During Trump’s first term, his opponents were fond of saying “The cruelty is the point”, meaning they thought Trump was motivated mainly by a desire to make liberals angry. This time, however, I think it’s more accurate to say that “The power is the point” — Trump’s actions all seem geared toward finding out what he can get away with, pushing the boundaries of institutional constraints in order to give himself a more free hand in the future.

There are a couple of ways you can interpret this. If you’re a Trump supporter, you probably think that America’s problems — wokeness, immigration, etc. — are so severe and pressing that we need a President who’s a little bit more like a dictator in order to fight them, and Trump is just being cautious because he wants to strike the right balance.

If you’re a Trump opponent, on the other hand, you may think that Trump’s goal is a true dictatorship — he basically wants to dismantle American democracy as quickly as he can, like Hitler did to the Weimar Republic — and that he’s only going slow because America’s institutions and democratic traditions are so strong that Trump can only erode them gradually over time.

One rather disturbing piece of evidence for the latter interpretation is that many of the MAGA movement people are openly advocating for Trump to assert truly dictatorial powers. For example, Sebastian Gorka claims that Trump has personal power over all immigration:

And Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, when asked if deportees should get due process, basically said no. His justification was that Laken Riley, a woman murdered by an illegal immigrant, didn’t get due process:

Obviously this is a ridiculous justification — of course crime victims don’t get due process, that’s one reason it’s called “crime” — but the more important point here is that Homan is calling for collective group punishment. In his eyes, any immigrant he would rather not be in the country is personally responsible for Laken Riley’s death and should be punished as such.

Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, meanwhile, is calling for Trump to declare a national emergency and assume truly dictatorial powers.¹ And Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, thinks Trump should simply openly defy judicial rulings and do whatever he wants:

These cowardly morons don’t seem to understand that all their power and authority is little more than a figment of the political imagination—once the desire to believe in the judicial tooth fairy is gone, it is gone forever, and nothing will bring it back.

Wiser men with far stronger backbones understood this for centuries—they knew their power as an institution was entirely one of perception, given the institution’s lack of any real power to enforce its rulings against the two far more powerful branches of the federal government. The Supreme Court controls no army and no bank account. Its police can barely keep people out of its own building or away from the homes of its members. How on earth will it enforce rulings without the force of money or arms?

The simple truth is it cannot, and its smarter members—until recently, at least—understood the court’s unique challenge: how to enforce rulings against two institutions despite any real power to do so. Those with brains and no fear of their own shadows knew this was only possible if the politicians and the people believed the courts had the necessary credibility and reputation to produce long-term deference to its decisions.

We are rapidly approaching the point where that is no longer the case.

That’s not encouraging. It means that if Trump doesn’t push to become a true dictator, it’ll only be because he and his subordinates choose to defy the desires of their activist base. And that’s not something I’m particularly comfortable betting the future of the country on.

Another important question here is: Why? To what end are Trump and his subordinates relentlessly trying to arrogate executive power to themselves? What do they want to do with that power?

Trump himself is near the end of his life, and he’s reached the top; there’s no real scope for further personal ambition. Instead, he seems to be motivated by a combination of rage and nostalgia. He wants revenge on the people who insult him in the media, and who worked to stop his attempted coup in 2020. And he genuinely wants to return America to the 1920s version of the nation that exists in myth and memory, mixed with an isolationist Lindberghian America that never was — pattern-matching to an era when America felt truly great.

As for Trump’s subordinates, that topic deserves a longer post. But the short version is that I think their motivation is ideological — they see themselves as defending Western Civilization from overthrow by an alliance of Islam and a quasi-communist woke movement.

Both of those visions require a deep remaking of America, involving major demographic, economic, institutional, and cultural changes. It’s a task to which Trump’s movement is particularly unsuited — it’s not a true mass movement like communism or Nazism, but more of an online fandom. That means the deep changes Trump and his people envision can’t be accomplished from the bottom up; they’ll have to be imposed from the top down. Which means Trump himself will have to amass ever more power in order to make it work.

This sort of arrogant ideological project is one of the main reasons dictatorships tend to fail (the others being rash decision-making, and internal power struggles). It’s very hard to pull off, and most people don’t really like it, and it requires you to ignore a lot of important stuff like economics. So no matter how much power Trump manages to seize, I don’t see him achieving his big goals; the main question is how much chaos he’ll produce in the attempt.

Trump is not a dictator yet. In his first term, his opponents often warned that he was trying to become one; when he didn’t, it seemed like they had been crying wolf. But one thing people seem to forget about that story is that at the end, the wolf actually comes.

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1. In fact, the original meaning of the word “dictator”, from Roman times, was a leader who assumed absolute power in a time of war or emergency.