Trump's Trials - Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Most — but not all — political scientists are deeply troubled by the president's attempts to expand executive power, according to a national survey. NPR's Frank Langfitt reports. Read more here. Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Detrick. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. President Trump has brought back strength to the White House. We can't just ignore the president's desires. This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Each episode, we bring you NPR's coverage of President Trump acting on his own terms. And that means sometimes doing things that no American president has tried before. NPR is covering it all in stories

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Listen to the State of the World podcast. Every weekday we bring you important stories from around the globe. In just a few minutes, you might hear how democracy is holding up in South Korea. Or meet Indian monkeys that have turned to crime. We don't go around the world, we're already there. Listen to the State of the World podcast from NPR. President Trump has upended much of the U.S. government as we've known it. So we reached out to some leading scholars to see what they make of the administration's

first hundred days and where they think American democracy is headed. And Piers Frank Langford reports. Talk to many people who study political systems these days, but not all. And you'll probably hear something new and striking. We've slid into some form of authoritarianism. It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible. But we're no longer living in a liberal democracy.

We are very certain that the United States is moving in the direction of autocratization. So I think we're on a very fast slide into what's called competitive authoritarianism. That was Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard. Shepnam Gamushu, she's a political scientist at Middlebury College, and Kim Lame-Chepley, a Princeton sociologist. When these scholars use the term authoritarianism, they aren't talking about a system like China's, a one-party state with no meaningful elections. They're referring to something called competitive authoritarianism.

So what is that? Gamushu says she's lived in one, her homeland, Turkey. Competitive authoritarian regimes are built with that desire of incumbents who come to power and are willing to abuse their authority, executive authority, to get rid of checks and balances. It's a familiar playbook. The executive fills the civil service and key appointments, including the prosecutor's office and judiciary, with loyalists.

He or she then attacks the media and universities to blunt public criticism and tilt the electoral playing field in the ruling party's favor. Roy Truex teaches at Princeton. The government would still have elections and would nominally be democratic, but those elections they would no longer be free and fair. And so that's sort of the big picture question for the next two years because we do have a midterm coming up. If these concerns sound extreme, John Kerry says they aren't.

Kerry's a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of a thing called Brightline Watch, which has been running a benchmark survey of scholars on threats to American democracy since 2017. Those are very much in the mainstream. That's reflective, I think, of the critical mass of opinion in political science right now. And how many political scientists have you surveyed who think the US is moving from liberal democracy towards some form of autocracy? The short answer there is 78%. That's out of a survey of more than 500 scholars.

And we always ask our respondents to rate the performance of American democracy on a zero to 100 scale. So zero would be complete dictatorship and 100 would be a perfect democracy. In assessing the state of democracy, the professors consider 30 indicators. For instance, whether the government interferes with the press or punishes political opponents or whether the legislature and judiciary checks executive authority. Kerry surveyed scholars soon after Trump won the election and then several weeks after he entered office. The rating that we got in November of 2024 was 67, and it plummeted to 55 in February.

Have you ever seen anything like that? No, not even close. That's a precipitous drop. Not all scholars see Trump pushing the government towards authoritarianism, but many point to tactics by the administration that are similar to those autocrats have used elsewhere. For instance, Trump's Federal Communications Commission is investigating all the major broadcast outlets except for Fox. The FCC is questioning how CBS edited an interview of Trump's rival, Kamala Harris, and whether

NPR and PBS are complying with regulations on corporate underwriting spots. The FCC can revoke local broadcast licenses, which could damage the networks financially. Princeton Sheppley says Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also targeted the business model of Hungarian media. Orbán comes into power and realizes that whole media culture is sustained by state advertising.

Overnight, he cuts all the advertising to the independent and opposition media. They all have a hold-loan in their budget. Nobody expected that would happen. Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, citing concerns about anti-Semitism. Sheppley says Orban took aim at higher education as well. The universities, a bastion of criticism of the government. In the first two years, Orban cut the university budgets by 40 percent. And Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die, says there's another way to measure authoritarianism. Is there a cost to publicly opposing the government?

Levitsky says under Trump, there is. For instance, Trump has issued executive orders barring lawyers with firms he doesn't like from entering government buildings and representing government contractors. There is a widespread perception in our civil society, among CEOs, in the media, among university presidents, among leaders of nonprofits, among politicians of both parties, that there is now a cost, a risk associated with publicly opposing the Trump administration. In fact, a scholar I interviewed for this story later asked me not to quote him.

He said he feared the Trump administration might try to punish him by slashing research grants he's working on. NPR reached out to the White House for a response to this story, but has not heard back. While the vast majority of scholars surveyed say Trump is pushing the country toward some form of autocracy, other professors strongly disagree. I'm James Campbell, a retired political scientist from the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Campbell says Trump is using legitimate presidential powers and taking bold steps like using tariffs

to push companies to bring back work to the U.S. I think they've done an excellent job. They've taken on issues that have been long neglected. Ross Perot, he talked about NAFTA being creating a great sucking sound where jobs would leave the country. And now I think President Trump is trying to correct that. Perot ran as an independent candidate for president in 1992 and 1996. And Campbell says

he has doubts about this survey of scholars. I think most of them are coming from the political left, and that's what they want to believe. There's a comfort in all getting together and say, oh, Trump's a bad guy, you know, he's authoritarian. Even some who say Trump has autocratic tendencies think the American system will likely withstand them. Kurt Wehlin is a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. It's way too early to say the United States

is sliding into competitive authoritarianism. Trump's actions would end up having this effect, but only if they remained uncontested. But Wehlin says so far, the lower courts are checking Trump. Trump's actions would end up having this effect, but only if they remained uncontested. But Whelan says so far, the lower courts are checking Trump. He also says autocratic leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and El Salvador's Naib Bukele needed overwhelming popular support, we're talking approval ratings from 65 to more than 90 percent, to change their country's political systems.

These populist leaders managed to engineer new constitutions that seriously concentrated power. That was the breakpoint that put those countries on the path towards competitive authoritarian rule. But in the United States, that's out of the question. Because, Whelan says, Trump doesn't have the support he'd need to change the constitution. But the president continues to try to radically reshape the government. Another survey goes out to scholars soon. John Kerry expects political scientists to downgrade America's democracy even more. Frank Langford, NPR News.

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