Revolutionary Escalation, Semi-Authoritarian “Normalization,” or a Democratic Turnaround?

One year after the election: What we can say with certainty about the state of the Trumpist assault, where uncertainty lies, and where America might go from here

By Thomas Zimmer, November 3, 2025

One year ago, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. I am assuming everyone remembers exactly where, when, and how they realized that the man who had led a multi-month campaign to nullify the result of the previous election and incited a violent insurrection, the man who had campaigned on rage, intimidation, and vengeful violence, was going to return to the most powerful political office in the world.

The anniversary of Trump’s election necessarily sparks a lot of attempts to take stock. I am scheduled to do several “Where does America stand?” events on November 4. And I do believe these exercises, when pursued with sincerity, are useful: They force us to take a step back from the constant onslaught of breaking news and reflect on how everything that has transpired over the past twelve months relates to what we had been expecting – and what that means for how we should calibrate our expectations going forward. I find it helpful to distinguish: What can we say with certainty about the state of American politics today – and what are the open questions that will determine the trajectory of the country?

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What we can assert with certainty

The Trumpist vision

When Donald Trump returned to the presidency, there should not have been any doubt about the intention of the Trumpist Right. Trump himself mostly wants power, impunity, and the ability to plunder. But he is also animated by a spirit of vengefulness and grievance, he has aggressively autocratic instincts and sensibilities. That aligns him very well with the movement that has coalesced behind him. They desire to transform America into some form of plebiscitary autocracy, constantly invoking the true “will of the people” and their “mandate” to restore former national glory while drastically narrowing the boundaries of who gets to belong and purging everyone they declare an “invader” or the “enemy within.” They seek to centralize power and neutralize the opposition, curtail the rights of those who dare to deviate, entrench a tiered system of participation defined by hierarchies of race, gender, and wealth, and restore white male dominance in elite institutions as well as across all spheres of American life. All of this they have been declaring openly and aggressively since long before Trump’s election.

The Right has radicalized

Trumpism didn’t fall from the sky, it’s not simply an accident or a departure from an otherwise noble conservative tradition. Trump’s rise was much more itself the result, rather than the cause, of a long-term radicalization of the Right, of anti-democratic tendencies that have come to dominate the GOP after pulling the party to the right for decades. At the same time, however, the Republican Party and the political Right more broadly have also significantly radicalized further since Trump emerged as their leader about a decade ago. The balance of power within the rightwing coalition has shifted dramatically, leading to a much more extreme threat. The idea that far more drastic action is urgently needed has quickly taken over the power centers of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat and the siege mentality that dominates on the Right: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response. The Right’s most influential intellectuals and activists no longer present their own project in the idiom of “conservatism.” As there is supposedly nothing left to conserve and preserve, “Conservatism is no longer enough” (Opens in a new window) has become their battle cry. Nothing short of a comprehensive counter-revolution will suffice. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts merely expressed the new rightwing consensus when he said, on the Fourth of July last year, that America was in the midst of a “second American Revolution” (Opens in a new window) that may well turn bloody, depending on whether or not “the Left” would accept total defeat and destruction.

No more adults in the room

Remember the infamous “adults in the room” from early on in Trump’s first presidency, people like John Kelly as White House Chief of Staff, Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, James Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and H. R. McMaster as National Security Advisor? There was a great deal of wishful thinking behind the idea that they would keep things from spiraling and prevent anything dangerous from happening. In some ways, they did as much to legitimize and normalize Trump’s start as president as they did to constrain and contain him. And yet, it is also true that they were not Trumpist radicals willing to do whatever necessary to implement authoritarian extremism. They were mostly “normal” Republicans in the sense that they hadn’t poisoned their brains by consuming nothing but rightwing media for years, their perception of the political conflict wasn’t warped by existing entirely within the rightwing information environment for so long that anyone who disagreed looked like an “enemy within” and even the most outlandish conspiracy theory became just another facet of accepted un-reality.

In Trump’s first presidency, hardcore MAGA was much more dependent on seeking compromise with the GOP establishment. The choice of Mike Pence as vice president captured that reality. As a result, many of the people with direct access to Trump in and around the White House were “normal” politicians and political operatives. These aides, advisors, and counsels weren’t “moderates” themselves, but they were much more likely to curb Trump’s worst impulses. This time, Trump is surrounded by bloodhounds and arsonists, by people who are fully subservient to him and by radical ideologues like Stephen Miller. Escalatory rage everywhere.

Gleichschaltung of the Republican Party

It is difficult to remember now, but early on in Trump’s reign as the Right’s leader, there was actually some resistance, certainly some reluctance, from within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. But the GOP has been purged of anyone daring to oppose Trump. That doesn’t mean everyone in the rightwing coalition is now exactly on the same page on all issues (more on that later). But there is certainly no more place for voices openly critical of Trump. Elected leaders like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney who publicly held the line that nullifying the results of a democratic election and engaging in a violent insurrection was disqualifying have been ostracized. The Trumpist regime can now count on a fully Trumpified party. And the radical Right is now clearly in control of the power centers of conservatism.

That’s what was so striking about the Right’s unhinged campaign to demonize the “No Kings” protests as a gathering of communists and domestic terrorists: No Republican of any consequence stood up and said: “I actually disagree with this characterization of large swaths of my fellow Americas as enemies.” Instead, people like majority whip Tom Emmer – who Trump didn’t want as Speaker in October 2023 because Emmer was considered too moderate (or, according to Trump, a “Globalist RINO” (Opens in a new window)) were all in. There was no measure of restraint at all. No trace of any residual sense of commitment to something even remotely recognizable as a shared democratic political culture.

As an immediate result of the full-on Trumpification of the Republican Party, the GOP-led Congress has entirely abdicated its role as a check on executive power.

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Ongoing conflicts, remaining obstacles, and open questions

For all these reasons, no one should have ever indulged the idea that a second Trump presidency would merely be a repeat of the first. It was always going to be something qualitatively very different. The real question was: How far would they be able to go? Nine-and-a-half months into Trumpist rule, we can identify areas where there is still conflict, where politics continues, where there is still a gap between the regime’s authoritarian pretensions and the reality of a complex political system, where there is still at least a plausible (though perhaps not very likely) scenario that the Trumpists might run into obstacles they can’t overcome and the Trumpist project might fail.

A judiciary at war with itself (or, rather: A rightwing Supreme Court majority at war with the rest of the judiciary)

What role can the courts play in constraining the Trumpist assault on the constitutional order? The good news first: The federal courts have so far acted as by far the most effective bulwark in defense of democratic self-government and the rule of law. Hundreds of lawsuits (Opens in a new window) have been filed against the administration, and in the vast majority of those, federal district courts have sided against the administration, with federal judges issuing injunctions or restrictions. And there really is no sign of them slowing down, even though it comes at great personal cost for those judges, as everyone who dares to rule against Trump knows they will face an avalanche of violent threat, fueled by high-ranking members of the government declaring all dissident judges to be insurrectionists (Opens in a new window) and domestic terrorists.

Here is the bad news: Not only are the courts inevitably restricted to reacting to the actions of the Trump administration, meaning a lot of damage is being done before any ruling can attempt to reign in the assault; not only is the extent to which the Trumpists are complying with court decisions, or how long they will be complying at all, unclear; the key problem is that once these cases reach the Supreme Court, the rightwing majority overrules most of these injunctions and restrictions and sides with the Trump administration (Opens in a new window) almost as often as the lower courts side against it.

Look, no one should have seriously entertained the idea that the Roberts Court might be meaningfully part of the resistance. Trump being able to count on a 6-3 rightwing majority was always going to be a game changer. Let’s remember this was not the case until Amy Coney Barrett’s ascension in late October 2020, towards the very end of the Trump presidency. Not that we needed more evidence, but the Court’s almost unprecedentedly extreme ruling to declare Trump functionally immune from criminal prosecution should have erased any lingering hope that the Roberts Court “would not go THAT far.”

We had never seen this Court operate with Trump in the White House and a Republican trifecta. Early on, in the first few weeks after Trump took power, it seemed they might – for tactical reasons or to preserve their own power, perhaps – keep a little more distance. But then they opted to be more aggressively aligned. I do think that if John Robert could choose, he would like the administration to pursue a strategy of autocratic legalism, moving within the boundaries of the law and the constitution at least on paper, rather than forcing the Court to greenlight blatantly illegal, unconstitutional stuff all the time. But ultimately, the rightwing justices want Trump to win because they are aligned on the fundamental claims on which the Trumpist project is built: They consider Trump the sovereign, an embodiment of the will of the people; only Republican power is legitimate; and they are fundamentally opposed to egalitarian pluralism. On that basis, the Court will go to great lengths to facilitate Trumpist rule, advancing the same rationale over and over again: That any “burden” placed upon the regime by insisting the constitution is still in effect, the separation of powers is still a thing, and the law is still the law, causes the government “irreparable harm.” The rightwing justices simply will not allow the lower courts to rein in this unprecedentedly lawless regime.

Malevolencve vs Incompetence

“Malevolence tempered by incompetence” was a prominent dictum in the early months of Trump’s first presidency, and there was definitely something to that. This was a genuinely open question going into the second Trump presidency: How much would they be shooting themselves in the foot, to what extent would their own incompetence hamper the realization of the Trumpist project?

I’d say the record so far has been decidedly mixed. On the one hand: Trump is still Trump – a lazy, undisciplined narcissist who insists on elevating people to positions of great power who have zero qualification other than that he liked them on Fox News, they are personally subservient to him, and they hate the same people he hates. That doesn’t mean people like Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel aren’t dangerous – they most definitely are. But they are also manifestly incompetent. We really shouldn’t pretend that there isn’t a clown show element to a lot of what this regime is attempting to do.

On the other hand, the problem is that there is no law of nature that says democratic self-government can’t be destroyed by a bunch of malevolent buffoons in power. And, crucially, they aren’t all clowns. Overall, this second Trump regime can count on a better prepared, more fully mobilized conservative movement. Trump world was definitely not ready in 2017. No one understood this more clearly than the extreme Right. The conservative machine had been late to endorse Trumpism and hadn’t been fully mobilized in time to provide the personnel or policy plans. They didn’t have any concrete strategies, not a clue how government worked. And the extremists didn’t have the personnel to bend the vast and powerful machine we call the state to their will and harness its powers. That is why they, during the Biden interregnum, they engaged in several far-reaching planning operations, Project 2025 most (in)famous among them. There is no doubt that a lot of what the Trumpists are doing – especially the assault on the modern state, the attempt to weaponize the parts of the state they don’t want to dismantle to go after their enemies, the purging of the civil service, the use of presidential executive orders to bypass Congress – follows the parameters outlined in Project 2025. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House and himself one of the key architects behind Project 2025, is probably the main driving force behind this authoritarian takeover of the state. Vought combines ideological zeal and operative competence. He is singularly focused on bending the entire government machine to Trump’s will – a fully committed extremist causing massive harm to millions of people. 

Then again, sometimes people talk about Project 2025 as if it is some mythical cheat code the Trumpists now possess that will inevitably allow them to win. But that is just not how things work in practice. Take the Trumpist attempt to use the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as a weapon to bring media institutions into line. It captures both why we are facing a different level of threat than in Trump I, but also how it’s not determined the Trumpists will succeed. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt after 2017 to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.

But the Jimmy Kimmel affair also demonstrated the limits of the Trumpist reach, at least for now: On September 17, Carr openly threatened to come after broadcaster ABC unless it canceled Jimmy Kimmel Live after the late-night host had criticized the Trumpist attempts to use the murder of Charlie Kirk as pretext to oppress “the Left.” In an interview on a rightwing podcast, Carr said (Opens in a new window): “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take actions, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Initially, that seemed to work – Kimmel was taken off the air. But the public backlash was swift. Already the next day, September 18, polling (Opens in a new window) suggested that most people vehemently disagreed with the decision to cancel Kimmel and sharply rejected the threats ushered by the FCC chairman. By the weekend, it had become clear that Disney, which owns ABC, was paying a steep price for not standing with Kimmel, as a record-number of people decided to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions (Opens in a new window). On Monday, September 22, Disney/ABC announced Kimmel would be back the next night. 

One reason why the American public reacted so strongly to the Kimmel cancellation is that the Trumpists went about this in the most ham-fisted way. Here is a concrete example of how a more sophisticated, insidious approach might have gotten them a very different result. The FCC could have threatened ABC / Disney executives behind the scenes – yet Brendan Carr just had to play big, bad man on a rightwing podcast, likely because he thought it would endear him to the MAGA base. Trump could have used backdoor channels to make it known to Kimmel’s bosses what he wanted; yet he is Donald Trump, and so he went straight to talking into a microphone how the networks should have their licenses revoked (Opens in a new window) if they were mean to him, and how he wanted to see two more late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers (Opens in a new window), fired too. It all added up to a spectacle that was so obvious, so easily recognizable as state repression; an assault that looked so much like “dictator stuff” to even casual observers that it sparked a rather basic response in people: That’s not ok.

Internal dissent

One of the biggest questions about the MAGA movement has been: Who would be in charge once they take power? Would the different factions – the “America First” nativists, the Christian nationalists, the pseudo-populist National Conservatives, the feudal tech right – get along and be able to cooperate within the regime? Or would their infighting and rivalries constitute a serious impediment to Trumpist rule?

The latter assumption got a big boost just weeks before Trump was set to take power when two of the defining Trumpist factions got into what was quickly dubbed the “MAGA civil war.” Remember Steve Bannon going after Musk (Opens in a new window) and MAGA activists like Laura Loomer raging against the tech oligarchs? In a narrow sense, they quarreled over work visas (Opens in a new window). It was an interesting window into two different conceptions of the future: America First white Christian ethno-nationalism vs tech feudalism. The rightwing tech lords maintained they should have unfettered access to cheap labor – if that brings a few brown people into the country, who cares? The tech right, to be clear, aren’t any less racist than the MAGA nativists. They are eugenicists who strongly believe in racialized and gendered hierarchies. But they aren’t quite as focused on the nation as the container for their eugenicist dystopia – at the very least, they believe the nation must make allowances for their business interests. Musk is not generally opposed to foreigners being here working for him for little money and with little rights; he is opposed to any political project of egalitarianism.

In that sense, the MAGA civil war was the public manifestation of real differences and friction. It was therefore reasonable to assume the Trump regime wouldn’t be able to keep everyone happy. Who would get their way? Who would have to take a step back? Who would be sidelined?

But since Trump took power, the answer, for the most part, has been: They all get to enact their agenda and act out their fever dreams. All at the same time. To some extent, this is a dynamic that often characterizes authoritarian regimes: They integrate different factions via escalation – by ramping up the fearmongering against a real or perceived enemy, for instance, and by channeling all internal discontent into aggression towards that enemy. We are seeing a version of that now. How do you keep the different factions on the MAGA right from turning on each other? You give them all the green light to go berserk on the system. So far, this has worked – in the sense that is has resulted in a sometimes chaotic, but overall comprehensive assault on the constitutional order. I don’t think, however, any of this is sustainable as a governing strategy – or even as a long-term strategy to integrate the different MAGA factions. It works only as long as they all feel a sense of radical excitement and euphoria. But the insurgency will inevitably slow down, there already are setbacks. MAGA is not a monolith, the differences between the different factions are real. The more the revolutionary zeal tires out, the more they will be reminded of those differences. 

There is, moreover, internal dissent in the MAGA camp not only between different ideological factions – but also within and across the factions: Between those who believe a certain level of restraint is still necessary, even in the face of resistance vs those who would rather move to openly tearing down whatever is left of the system immediately. If you listen to Stephen Miller ranting, you know he wants to ignore the courts entirely and is frustrated the administration is still participating in the judicial process at all: Sending lawyers to argue in court, appealing to the Supreme Court… thereby acknowledging some legitimacy of the process. The administration has certainly flirted with ignoring the courts entirely, they have argued they would have the right to do so because of what they call their “mandate” to implement the “will of the people.” But they haven’t really pulled the trigger yet.

Or take the government shutdown. Wouldn’t it be the “smart” move to assume the role of the benevolent dictator: Dissolve Congress, address the people directly to tell them the system is failing them, but Trump, the tribune of the people, will take care of their needs? Why not print the money necessary to buy the people’s affection? I am perhaps being facetious a little bit. But the fact is that the administration is playing what might be called constitutional hardball in the shutdown fight (just as the opposition is); it is not, however, moving entirely past the constitutional system.

The realities of the political system

The shutdown fight is a good example of how something resembling the rules of “normal” politics still applies in certain areas. Conventional wisdom and previous experience would have predicted that the government takes the bulk of the blame in case of a shutdown. And that is exactly how this has played out so far, with most people blaming Republicans (Opens in a new window) rather than Democrats. 

The shutdown fight has also demonstrated where the limits of the authoritarian assault on the modern state, at least for now, lie in financial terms. You’ll recall that in late October, Trump announced he was using a $130 million donation (Opens in a new window) from a supporter to pay the troops during the shutdown. I don’t want to downplay how illegal and dangerous this is: It would be exactly the type of dictator-bypasses-the-system move that I discussed earlier. But the reality is that $130 million simply isn’t going to get them very far. For the fiscal year 2025, the Department of Defense requested a budget of almost $850 billion. In the last fiscal year, the federal government spent over $7 trillion dollars in total. No amount of private donor wealth can replace this type of public funding.

Civil society between protest and acquiescence

How has U.S. civic society responded to the authoritarian assault? Once again, the picture is not fully conclusive, but worrisome. The good news first: No matter how many times you’ll hear people ask: “Why are there no protests?”, no matter how much the New York Times may want to downplay (Opens in a new window) mass mobilization against Trump, there are protests, and they are more numerous and more sustained than during the first Trump presidency. The latest “No Kings” was the largest single-day protest in recent U.S. history! There is this myth of widespread lethargy in the population (Opens in a new window): It was propagated very early on in Trump’s second term, and it was mostly a narrative intended to indict the liberal “resistance” which had supposedly amounted to nothing in Trump’s first presidency and had therefore exhausted itself before he even got back into the White House.

But the really concerning tendencies are to be found elsewhere. A major factor why most academic observers who study authoritarianism (Opens in a new window) in an internationally comparative perspective assumed that US democracy would prove resilient, relatively speaking, was the idea that American civic institutions had more time to develop and civil society actors have a lot more resources at their disposal than, for instance, in post-communist Eastern Europe. But if the elites in charge of those institutions aren’t willing to even put up a proper fight, then how much does it really take to bring the system down? No, not all universities have surrendered like Columbia, not all media institutions have chosen complicity like the Washington Post or CBS. But the accommodationist mindset has been pervasive, making it dangerously easy for the Trumpists to get closer to consolidating authoritarian rule.

Pathways towards dictatorship

What does all this add up to? Unfortunately, I find it easier to chart a concrete path towards a complete breakdown of the constitutional order than to envision a democratic turnaround. The Trumpists have shown their hands – we already know the strategy they want to pursue. First of all: Escalate the conflict in the streets, create pretext to declare ever more emergencies, use emergency powers to move against the opposition. That is one major goal of the militarization of American cities: Create situations that are likely to result in violent escalation sooner or later. When those who are controlling the levers of state power are itching for violence, how long until mass violence follows? Secondly: Escalate the attack on the election system (Opens in a new window), making the Big Lie the law of the land in time for the 2026 midterms and especially the 2028 presidential election. Finally: Follow through with the criminalization of all political opposition and societal dissent for which the Trumpists have already given themselves the pseudo-legal basis with the presidential executive order (Opens in a new window) declaring Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” and the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (Opens in a new window) (NSPM-7) on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” – both instruments widening the definition of leftwing “domestic terrorism” so much that it would potentially allow the state to persecute any act of resistance or disobedience as such.

And yet, as acutely dangerous as the situation is, the outcome remains undetermined. Let’s not forget that the unprecedentedly unpopular president is currently mired in a government shutdown that the majority of the population blames on his party; MAGA’s leaders have so far not been able to bridge the gap between their authoritarian assertions and the complicated political and societal reality they are facing. We don’t know what will happen next. I agree that assessment is frustrating, but it is, to me, the most adequate diagnosis for the current situation. An authoritarian, fascistic movement controls the government; they are trying – and to some extent succeeding – to build an authoritarian state; but they have not been able to extend authoritarian rule across society. A system that is democratic no more, but also not a consolidated autocratic regime yet.

The political conflict isn’t over, nor is democracy’s fate sealed for good. It is the openness of the current situation with which we need to grapple in earnest. In a stable democracy, the range of plausible outcomes for the near future should be narrow. But in America, it now includes, on one end of the spectrum, a democratic turnaround – and on the other, a complete democratic breakdown and full-blown authoritarian rule.