Troops in Washington and Fed dismissals: Trump embraces authoritarian drift

U.S. President Donald Trump claims he’s not a dictator, just “a man with great common sense.” But this statement, made Monday to the press in the Oval Office, reinforces previous messages flirting with the idea of an authoritarian leader: during the election campaign, he stated that, if he returned to the White House, he would be an autocrat on day one. His new remark on Monday came immediately after another disturbing comment: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.”

The measures adopted by the president in his seven months in the White House—and particularly those of recent weeks, most recently the attempt to remove a Fed governor appointed by his predecessor, Joe Biden—accentuate the authoritarian and populist bias that Trump is increasingly imposing on his administration at the helm of the world’s largest economy.

Since that first allusion to the idea of becoming a dictator on day one, the president, using anything from an executive order to a social media tweet, has subjected the venerable architecture of the American political system—its separation of powers, its rule of law, its democracy—to a continuous stress test in which the limits of his power are becoming increasingly blurred and his control ever more expansive. Now he’s ratcheting up that pressure even further with an avalanche of measures, ranging from his unprecedented attempt to remove a Federal Reserve governor to his threat to extend the deployment of the National Guard to other Democratic cities besides Washington DC.

The measures are coming at breakneck speed, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that they have accelerated in August, when Congress is on recess and American families are on vacation. The president, who decided not to take a summer break this year, kicked off the month by imposing widespread tariffs on the rest of the world and announcing the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, simply because he disagreed with the data the agency published, which ran counter to his narrative of success at job creation.

Barely a week later, Trump announced his takeover of the Washington police force, invoking a provision in the District of Columbia Home Rule Act that allows him to do so for 30 days if some kind of national emergency occurs. According to Trump, the level of violent crime in the capital—which has been declining for the past two years, according to official figures—constitutes such a crisis. Now, he has ordered the Pentagon to train some of its forces to perform citizen security tasks and quell “civil unrest.”

The Republican leader boasts that his tough measures yield immediate results. He maintains that his immigration policy, consisting of quasi-summary deportations to third countries with terrible human rights records has completely eliminated irregular border crossings. The case of Kilmar Abrego García, the Salvadoran man mistakenly deported to El Salvador and whom the Trump administration has sought to turn into an icon of its hardline policy with his re-arrest on Monday, clearly illustrates the administration’s implacable policy toward migrants.

“Illegal and un-American”

His opponents, however, argue that his tactics are increasingly those of an autocrat. “What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted, said Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat. “It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American,” he said at a press conference.

Over the past week, Trump has doubled down on his warnings that he is preparing to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, one of the largest and most Democratic cities in the country. New York and Baltimore could be next, he has suggested.

Last week, agents from the Federal Police (FBI) raided the home of John Bolton, who served as the White House National Security Advisor during Trump’s first term in office and is now one of his most vocal critics. The motive, reportedly, was an investigation into Bolton’s possible mishandling of classified documents to write his memoir.

Revenge

But his critics claim the real motive is revenge. A revenge that extends to all those whom the president blames for his legal troubles in recent years: also this August, the administration announced an investigation into former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the probes into attempts to alter the outcome of the 2020 election and into Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.

“No one is above the law,” wrote FBI Director Kash Patel, a devoted Trump supporter, in an apparent reference to the search of the former National Security Adviser’s home. Democratic Senator Chris Coons described the incident as “chilling.” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote on the social media platform X: “John Bolton and I have nothing in common politically. But last time I heard, in America, people are allowed to criticize the President of the United States without the FBI showing up on their doorstep.”

Trump’s attempts to expand his control are not limited to the political sphere. The president, who appointed himself head of the board of governors of the Kennedy Center, also wants to take control of cultural life: last week, the White House issued a list of exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums that, in its opinion, have become too woke, and said that the institution must change. Also in Washington, the president is announcing major changes to “beautify” the capital, for which he plans to ask Congress for $2 billion.

But where his reach has extended to unprecedented levels is in the economic sphere. The president has resorted to pressure tactics, including criticism on his social network, Truth, of the way certain companies are being run. He has even gone so far as to name-drop executives, suggesting they should be replaced at the helm of their companies. This has been the case with Lip-Bu Tan at Intel. The tech company, previously reviled by Trump, has agreed to cede 10% control to the U.S. government.

The result is a White House tenant with the greatest capacity to intervene in American companies in decades. This month alone, the Trump administration forced semiconductor manufacturers to cede 15% of their foreign sales revenue. And Apple announced that it is investing $100 billion in the U.S., reversing its strategy of manufacturing in cheaper countries.

White House economic adviser Kevin Hasset announced that things may not end there: “I’m sure that, at some point, there’ll be more transactions — if not in this industry, in other industries.”

The latest step in this interventionist drift is the attempt to remove Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor appointed by Joe Biden and whose term does not expire until 2038. Trump maintains that he is firing her “for cause,” citing alleged discrepancies in a mortgage application years ago—long before the economist joined the Fed—in the most aggressive step he has taken to date to reduce the independence of the U.S. central bank.

Cook has announced that she does not intend to resign nor accept the dismissal, and will file a lawsuit to keep her position. According to her and her lawyers, Trump has no authority to remove her from office. A legal duel to the death is looming.

With each of these steps, Trump seeks to explore how far he can push the limits of his power, ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, which, if the Democrats win, could cut short this expansion of his control. So far, Congress, under the control of the Republican Party, has backed him without a single word of reproach. The task of overseeing Trump’s actions—and deciding what he can and cannot do—has fallen to the courts. The role of the Supreme Court looms larger than ever.

But given the majority of conservative judges (six out of nine) on that bench, and the fact that the Court has so far tended to align its rulings with the president, Trump figures that at least some of his measures to expand his power will be consolidated. And he also has, at least for now, the support of Republican voters who overwhelmingly back measures such as federal control of Washington. He is not a dictator. But, in his own words, “the line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.”

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