It Couldn’t Happen Here…Until it Did

Authors’ Names Withheld

Photo By Scott Carter/Medium

“When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Sinclair Lewis, 1935

Authoritarianism rarely announces itself. It arrives incrementally—one norm broken, one institution weakened, one opponent demonized, one loyalist installed at a time. The pattern is now manifest in the United States, and the 2026 elections may be one of the last opportunities to interrupt it.

We’re concerned, retired special operators, who saw abroad what we write about here. We love this country and risked our lives defending it. We write anonymously because we still work for the government and fear reprisal for our words. What follows is not said lightly: Our country is sliding toward authoritarian rule.

Ask yourself, is this normal, and what can we do about it?

There’s a strategy underway by the Trump Administration to seize control of the United States Government, unfolding in plain sight. The success of this assault on the Constitution requires more than anything else the belief that such a thing is not possible here, only in other countries. Regrettably, this pattern is familiar to military and intelligence professionals experienced in observing authoritative regimes, insurrections, and coups d’état.

Authoritarianism in America

Authoritarianism follows a formula, and is effective when implemented in a methodical fashion that desensitizes a society by staying below the threshold that might mobilize a population to stop it. The strategy’s effectiveness comes not from a single event, but the combined effects of multiple, simultaneous efforts.

Overstep Authority

First, the chief executive oversteps his authority on a series of minor issues. This establishes the new normal, tests the population’s tolerance, and exposes the opposition in the existing system. If the executive is seen to have overstepped, it’s easy enough to walk it back as a misunderstanding or a misrepresentation by the opposition. This requires sympathetic media outlets and online influencers to demonize opposition voices as “fake news.”

Recent examples here include Trump Administration executive orders attempting to restrict birthright citizenship and voting rights, declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping tariffs, firing officials without complying with statutory requirements, attempts to criminally prosecute sitting senators and congressmen on partisan grounds, and hinting at running for an illegal third term in office. Many of these have been overturned by the courts, but serve to “normalize” the public to his continuing overreach.

Invent and Blame an Enemy

Next, an enemy must be blamed for all problems confronting the country. This works best when aimed against minorities, because they’re inherently in a weak position, unfamiliar to and unpopular with most of the population. Mussolini targeted liberals, democratic politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and dissidents. Hitler expanded on this by adding racial ideology as a key component, going after Jews, especially, and Roma and Sinti groups as well.

Today in the U.S., “communists,” transgender people, and undocumented aliens may be added to the list. Words such as “an invasion” are used to evoke fear and urgency. A state of emergency seeks to justify actions that otherwise might be condemned as abuses of power. The Trump Administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deportations found by courts to be illegal. Enemies are sought abroad, from the plausible, such as Iran and Venezuela, to the implausible, such as Canada and Greenland.

Nationalism, Loyalty, and Conformity = Patriotism

As executive overreach grows, nationalism, loyalty, and conformity are misrepresented as patriotism; DHS recently tweeted a glowering image of Trump asking, “Did you remain loyal?” Opponents will be labeled as radicals, enemies of the true state. The narrative will invoke perceived injustices and a need to restore a lost golden era. If religion can be woven into the narrative, say as a mandate from God, even better. Examples, such as President Trump posting memes of himself as Jesus, are increasingly frequent and harken back to Trump’s second inaugural address, in which he said God saved him from attempted assassins to make America great again.

Purge the Opposition

The executive will purge the perceived opposition from the government. The firings of dozens of senior officials in the Department of Defense by Secretary Pete Hegseth and in the Federal Bureau of Investigation by Director Kash Patel seek to fill as many positions as possible with loyalists. Oaths of loyalty to the executive, a that taken by Attorney General Todd Blanche, will become the norm. Subordinates’ expressions of admiration to the chief executive during all public addresses by officials, as during televised Cabinet meetings, become an expectation. This is an unofficial but overt implementation of the loyalty oath. The independence and even the physical safety of the judiciary is threatened.

The executive targets traditional civil society leaders: pulling grants from universities such as Harvard and Columbia; criticizing religious figures such as Pope Leo; and threatening the broadcast licenses of entertainment networks such as ABC, CBS and NBC whose comedians lampoon the president, or whose journalists’ reporting he dislikes; and engaging in law enforcement harassment of journalists at outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post. The government will coerce prominent law firms such as Paul Weiss to persuade their partners to refrain from activities not in line with administration policy. Institutions not explicitly favorable to the government, such as the AI firm Anthropic, will face regulatory problems.

Institutions thought immune from politics, such as federal law enforcement, the military, and intelligence community, will become partisan instruments of the administration: the defense secretary, attorney general, and FBI director, for example, now participate in campaign rallies for candidates for office. The Pentagon is reportedly employing online influencers to try to shape domestic political opinion, and quizzing war college students, potential future admirals and generals, about their personal views of the president and defense secretary, while Trump posts images of himself in military uniform. Potential opposition that serves as checks and balances will be purged. Centuries of expertise and talent will be replaced by loyalist sycophants. As an example, the 2026 National Defense Strategy lists Donald Trump’s name forty-seven times in the twenty-four-page document. Previous such documents generally didn’t list the President by name, or if they did, only once or twice. This is not normal.

As the strategy becomes more obvious, it requires adjustment. As discontent among the population grows, measures must ensure continued compliance. Up to this point, large components of the population have not believed what they were seeing. Now, when they can’t deny what they know, compliance requires something more: fear. The threat of retaliation and even extralegal violence becomes real.

Control the Masses – Paramilitary Forces

A key component of authoritarian rule is the establishment of extrajudicial loyalist forces. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was expanded, militarized (it’s now bigger than the Marine Corps), and leveraged to combat the “invasion” of illegals, who are said by Trump to be destroying the country. ICE wears body armor and helmets with mounts for night vision goggles, but apparently cannot afford body cameras. The normalization of human rights violations of both illegal and legal immigrants is unprecedented in the United States. Justification of this abuse comes directly from the President, who claims judicial rulings against his actions are the work of corrupt judges.

We’ve seen American citizens gunned down by the Department of Homeland Security only to be falsely told that the victims were “domestic terrorists.” In both cases, the FBI seized all evidence, concealing it from state law enforcement, despite court orders requiring the information be shared as part of a joint investigation. Eight months after some shootings, the Justice Department has not brought any charges against any of the officers involved. Those unpunished killings were crucial to instilling fear as a tool for deterrence and compliance. Again, this is not normal.

There is another component for inciting violence, even more sinister than ICE. Enter the now super-empowered groups involved in the January 6th riots, the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters. President Trump worked hard to rewrite the January 6th narrative, from issuing pardons to calling the rioters “patriots” to attempting to financially reward them with taxpayer funds. He emboldened these groups and offered assurances of legal protection.

Whether these groups are purely organic or exist with a degree of semi-official guidance is difficult to ascertain. However, it is clear that the degree of politically-inspired violence and intimidation enacted or allowed by the federal government against opponents of the administration is unlike anything in our history. The closest analogue is the use of the Ku Klux Klan by state and local governments in the South to resist first Reconstruction in the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement in the twentieth. This, too, is not normal.

Exhaust the Population; Crises and Chaos

So where does the authoritarian strategy go from here? Authoritarianism needs crisis and chaos to survive. It needs controversies to draw critical attention in all directions other than scrutiny of its own actions and failures. It aims to exhaust the population into a state of survival and self-preservation over seeking the collective well-being of the society. All the while, reinforcing that anyone raising concerns is a radical lunatic. It needs the population to believe that actions of legal resistance would be a waste of time and potentially harmful to themselves and their families. As the authoritarian strategy culminates, defending democracy becomes a race against time. As the executive’s unlawful actions become more concerning, the implementers of the strategy seek to solidify their power to a point where opposition by the population is now too late.

The Midterms: Trump’s Last Impediment?

In our system, the midterm elections represent a significant impediment to the administration’s securing their authoritarian gains. Under normal circumstances, it would seem reasonable to place faith in our democratic institutions to represent the desires of the majority and rebalance the system. But we are not living in such times. It would be naïve to assume that any autocrat who put this much effort into his strategy would allow the system of checks and balances to organically self-correct.

For Trump’s plan to succeed, the midterm elections must fail to take place, or be seen as illegitimate, rather than risk the opposition party gaining power in Congress and investigating abuses by the executive. This delay in the peaceful transfer of legislative power will allow the executive more time to erode traditional institutions and solidify authoritarian rule. We saw a concerted campaign by the President to undermine the credibility of our elections, albeit with no evidence provided, as found in sixty-two court cases regarding the 2020 election. We see a campaign to subvert the authority of state governments in states such as Minnesota, alleging massive fraud and corruption that could be used to attempt to justify the deployment of federal troops.

Consider the recent cyber-attacks against critical infrastructure in Minnesota. The President, with access to all classified intelligence, said without any evidence that he believed the attack was likely the fault of the Democratic state governor and not Iran, a country with significant cyber capabilities with whom we are at war. That more than any other recent statement demonstrates how far the line has moved regarding what we accept as normal behavior.

It seems highly probable that between now and the midterms, there will be a continued misinformation campaign highlighting the nexus of the corrupt state governments and the undocumented community, specifically to try to steal the elections. We see ongoing litigation attempting to legitimize dubious executive orders purporting to restrict mail-in voting. Few will be surprised if some manufactured emergency is declared, and ICE is deployed to provide security at polling sites: an illegal order for which they are equally unwelcomed by the states and untrained to conduct. Alleged threats from left wing “antifa” groups could trigger a federalization of the state’s National Guard to protect ICE agents. Unsubstantiated stories of state level corruption could encourage Trump and his FBI to intervene and seize ballots and vote tabulation machines. Conflicts between federal, state, and local law enforcement could be used as a pretext for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy federal troops to conduct law enforcement operations.

This will minimize voter turnout, delay the results for weeks or months, or possibly even invalidate the entire state’s process. This will become a narrative of how states wouldn’t have authority to cooperate, and require federal intervention. The FBI, DHS, DOJ, and Director of National Intelligence will purport to corroborate these stories on the basis of classified intelligence. Congressional Republicans, at the direction of the executive, could use these allegations as grounds to refuse to seat newly-elected Democratic senators and representatives. This is how the authoritarian strategy could gain the time required to circumvent unwelcome election results.

What Can We Do While We Still Can?

We end where we started. This authoritarian strategy requires the population to believe it couldn’t happen here. Eventually, this is followed by a sense of hopelessness (sure it’s bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it), and then reluctant acceptance (of course I don’t like the way things are, but it’s too late to do anything about it, it’s safest to accept them as the new reality).

This attempted seizure of power is happening right now. There are dozens of societies that thought the same over the course of the last ninety years, that it couldn’t happen there. The biggest threat to authoritarian rule is informed citizens who exercise their legal rights while they still possess them, to speak out, peaceably assemble, and vote in large numbers. We need unity of effort. Our country is more polarized than at any point in living memory, and this plays into the authoritarian playbook. We need to put aside our political differences and unite to stop the takeover of our nation’s democratic processes by authoritarians.

Our dividing line should now be democratic versus anti-democratic behavior, not left versus right. Conservatives, liberals, independents, veterans, business leaders, religious organizations, labor unions, civic groups, academics, and former officials can disagree profoundly on policy while agreeing on constitutional processes, peaceful political competition, and legitimate elections.

The current abnormal situation is not what the United States was intended to be, nor who we are at our fundamental core. As Edmund Burke reminds us, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Photo By Scott Carter/Medium

“When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Sinclair Lewis, 1935

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