Op-ed | Trump Is Not the Cause of American Authoritarianism; It’s a Systemic Issue

Donald Trump did not invent American authoritarianism. He is not its architect. He is its accelerant. He is its most visible and shameless embodiment—a demagogue who exploits the powers and precedents already embedded in our institutions. To blame Trump alone is to miss the larger story: that American democracy has been eroding for decades, aided by both political parties, fueled by crisis, and legitimated by law. If we want to stop the slide, we have to understand that Trump is not the disease. He is a symptom.

Trump’s rise is best understood as the convergence of three forces: the steady expansion of unaccountable executive power, the corrosion of democratic capitalism, and the political exploitation of national crises. These forces long predate Trump. They were deepened by the War on Terror, the 2008 financial collapse, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As Martin Wolf argues in his book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the breakdown of liberal democracy is not unique to the United States. It is a global phenomenon rooted in widening inequality, elite impunity, and failing institutions.

“Democracy is government by persuasion,” Wolf writes. “It is about discussion, argument, debate, and compromise. Oligarchy is government by influence or control of money. These are not the same.” Yet in the U.S., we have steadily replaced the former with the latter. And we did it long before Trump ever descended the golden escalator.

The post-9/11 period was a critical inflection point. Under George W. Bush, the United States launched a war without end and built an expansive national security apparatus: mass surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, and black sites. The legal arguments used to justify these actions—from the Office of Legal Counsel memos to the Authorization for Use of Military Force—transformed the presidency into a near-monarch. Guantánamo Bay became the symbol of this shift.

But as Jonathan M. Hansen shows in his meticulously researched book Guantánamo: An American History, the naval base’s use as a zone of legal exception did not begin in 2002. It began over a century earlier. “Only to discover that freedom has its conditions,” Hansen writes of Cuba’s supposed independence in 1902. “Cuba would get independence so long as it acknowledged the U.S. right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs and acceded to the leasing of the naval base.”

Guantánamo’s legal ambiguity was then exploited in the 1990s to detain Haitian refugees, many of them HIV-positive, who were denied asylum and confined without legal counsel or basic human rights. In the words of one detainee, Yolande Jean, Camp Bulkeley was “a space cordoned off with barbed wire… rats crawled over us at night… we thought, it’s not possible, it can’t go on like this. We’re humans, just like everybody else.”

This use of Guantánamo as a site for rights denial was a trial run. The legal rationale—that the base was under U.S. control but not U.S. territory, and thus exempt from constitutional protections—was later used by the Bush administration to justify detaining men labeled as terrorists without charge or trial. Obama kept the prison open. Biden still did not close it.

The 2008 financial crisis added another layer. The institutions that engineered economic collapse were bailed out. The public was not. Millions lost homes, jobs, and retirement savings while the architects of disaster walked free. Both parties presided over this betrayal, and the disillusionment it spawned fueled the populist backlash that Trump later rode to power. Trust in government, media, and expertise collapsed not because of conspiracy theories, but because of lived experience.

Wolf connects this breakdown of the social contract to the rise of authoritarianism: “When capitalism no longer delivers shared prosperity and democracy no longer gives people a voice, voters turn to those who promise to smash the system.”

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and with it, an expansion of emergency powers, surveillance, and state control. Trump politicized the crisis, undermined science, and treated democratic norms as obstacles. But the infrastructure he exploited—from executive emergency declarations to border closures and federal policing—was built under earlier administrations.

Authoritarianism in America is not a foreign import. It is homegrown, bipartisan, and legal. The expansion of state power in response to crisis—whether terror, economic collapse, or public health—has created a system where democracy is increasingly subordinated to executive convenience and elite interest.

As Hansen writes, “Guantánamo provided the laboratory and staging area where U.S. imperial ambition could be implemented beyond the scrutiny of the American public and the constraint of U.S. law.” That same logic now permeates domestic politics.

Trump did not invent this system. He exploited it with fewer apologies. He said the quiet part loud. But the policies, precedents, and cultural assumptions were already in place. That is what makes the danger so profound. Because even if Trump disappears from the political stage, the architecture of authoritarianism will remain—ready for the next opportunist to use.

The fight for democracy cannot end with the removal of one man. It must include the dismantling of legal frameworks that allow indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and unchecked executive power. It must include economic reforms that restore dignity and security to working people. And it must include a cultural shift that values transparency, accountability, and the public good over secrecy and elite impunity.

“What is presently at stake,” wrote Justice John Paul Stevens in Rasul v. Bush, “is only whether the federal courts have jurisdiction to determine the legality of the Executive’s potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing.” That was 2004. The question still hangs over us.

Trump is not the beginning, and removing him will not be the end. If we are serious about saving democracy, we must go deeper than resistance. We must dismantle the systems that made him possible—before they make someone worse inevitable.

Categories:

Tags: