In an interview on Fresh Air, Robert Kagan — senior fellow at Brookings and author of Rebellion: Donald Trump and the Antiliberal Tradition in America — argued that the United States is already close to, or moving into, authoritarian rule under Donald Trump. Kagan traced personnel and policy shifts at home and abroad and said they follow familiar patterns of authoritarian consolidation.
Kagan’s central concern is that a second Trump term quickly hollowed out independent institutions and repurposed parts of the federal state to serve partisan ends. He says the federal bureaucracy has been weakened, while the Justice Department, FBI and CIA have been turned into instruments of presidential power. He describes ICE’s role shifting from immigration enforcement toward a “brute squad” used to intimidate communities — an example, he argues, of security forces being adapted for political control.
Election control, Kagan warns, is a key lever of consolidation. Trump’s persistent claims that the 2020 election was stolen, his calls to federalize elections in many states and proposals to place Republican overseers in charge of voting are presented as efforts to convert democratic processes into instruments of single‑party rule. Kagan views efforts like seizing ballots or creating national voter files as mechanisms that could be used to intervene in state elections and to delegitimize outcomes unfavorable to the president.
He sees motive in the repeated lie about 2020: it creates a standing justification for federal intervention if results appear to threaten Trump’s hold on power. If Trump fears losing control of Congress and facing impeachment or other reversals, Kagan says he might exploit federal tools to block that outcome — seizing ballots in opposition areas, invoking emergency powers or the Insurrection Act, or employing intimidation and deportation to suppress turnout among nonwhite and immigrant voters. Operations by ICE and other agencies, in Kagan’s reading, are not merely immigration policy but trial runs for politically disruptive actions that could be used to manufacture unrest or justify stronger federal responses.
Kagan is pessimistic about institutional checks. He doubts courts, especially the Supreme Court as recently constituted, would reliably block executive overreach, noting historical examples where courts deferred to national security claims. He also sees little prospect that enough congressional Republicans would resist; a small number of defections could matter, but he finds little cause for optimism.
Placing Trumpism in historical context, Kagan argues it springs from a long American antiliberal current: a strain of white Christian nationalism and exclusionary identity politics that has opposed universalist democratic principles since the country’s founding. He contends this tradition never vanished after Reconstruction or Jim Crow and now largely shapes the Republican Party. Trump’s style — a mix of personal megalomania, contempt for constitutional limits and appetite for power — meshes with an exclusionary political project rooted in race and religion. Kagan stresses this is a domestic phenomenon, not simply an import from abroad.
On foreign policy, Kagan says Trump has eroded the post‑World War II American order without formally abandoning institutions such as NATO. Attacks on allies, tariff conflicts, threats to territories and public questioning of mutual defense commitments have frayed allied trust. Europeans increasingly view the United States as unreliable or even predatory, weakening the alliance system that long amplified U.S. power. The result, he warns, could be a drift toward a multipolar world of competing spheres of influence — a configuration historically more prone to conflict and instability.
Kagan also highlights mixed signals in Trump’s global posture: rhetoric about pulling back from entanglements coexists with meddling in European politics, encouragement of far‑right parties, trade wars and interventions in places like Venezuela or Iran. He interprets this as an attempt both to dominate domestic politics and to project personal supremacy abroad — an incoherent but dangerous blend of authoritarian domestic control and adventurist foreign policy.
What can stop it, Kagan says, is broad resistance from civic institutions and elites. He criticizes corporations, law firms and academic leaders that accommodate or do business with Trump, urging collective courage. While he praises street protests and local acts of resistance, he warns that popular demonstrations alone are insufficient and that restoring institutional norms will require sustained, coordinated action.
Kagan is skeptical that a return to the pre‑Trump status quo would be easy if authoritarian changes consolidate. Rebuilding weakened agencies and reversing personnel and structural shifts would be costly and difficult; even a later electoral victory by Democrats might not restore prior institutional configurations. Democratic gains are not guaranteed to be permanent, he cautions, and reversals driven by political events are possible.
He closes with an urgent warning: the combination of institutional capture, electoral manipulation, racialized politics and international isolation risks ending American pluralism and democratic governance. Kagan frames the moment as a severe emergency that requires immediate, wide‑ranging resistance by citizens, civic leaders and institutions to prevent the consolidation of authoritarian rule.