The U.S. Is Moving Toward Competitive Authoritarianism

The United States is on a trajectory toward authoritarian rule, according to a new analytical assessment prepared by a group of former officials from American intelligence and national security institutions. The authors warn that the erosion of democratic norms is accelerating under Donald Trump’s administration and could become entrenched unless organized resistance emerges.

The document, titled “Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: An Assessment of Democratic Decline,” was published on Thursday by the Steady State network, which includes more than 340 former employees of the CIA, NSA, State Department, and other agencies.

The report concludes, with “moderately high confidence,” that the U.S. is moving toward a system of “competitive authoritarianism”—one where elections and courts remain formally in place but serve to strengthen executive power and weaken checks and balances. These trends, the authors note, are increasingly visible domestically and form part of Trump’s broader second-term effort to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” within the federal bureaucracy.

The analysis relies on the same methodologies used by U.S. intelligence agencies to assess the resilience of foreign democracies, but this time they were applied to domestic conditions. “We wrote this report because the tools we once used to identify threats to democracy abroad are now flashing warning signs at home,” the authors state.

Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned participants in the January 6 Capitol riot, dismissed independent inspectors general, purged agencies of officials deemed disloyal, publicly urged the attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities, and curtailed press freedom. All this has been accompanied by ongoing efforts to expand executive power—moves that federal courts have repeatedly found illegal and unconstitutional.

Last week, the Justice Department brought criminal charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James—who won a fraud case against Trump—and former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime political adversary of the president. Trump also demanded the arrest of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed the deployment of federal forces.

The authors emphasize that their work replicates the format of an “intelligence assessment” used by official agencies but was conducted privately and based solely on open sources—news reports, public statements, and independent investigations—without access to classified information.

Among the key indicators of democratic decline cited in the report are: the expansion of presidential authority through unilateral decrees and emergency powers; the politicization of the civil service and law enforcement; the erosion of judicial independence through targeted appointments and refusal to comply with court rulings; the weakening and inefficiency of Congress; manipulation of electoral processes; and the systematic undermining of civil society, media freedom, and public trust.

“We assess that the primary driver of rising authoritarianism in the United States is the increasingly frequent overreach of executive power,” the report states. The authors also point to “alarming” shifts in public attitudes: polls show a growing share of Americans now believe that “a strong leader who does not have to deal with parliament or elections” is “a very good or fairly good system.”

The report’s conclusions are consistent with other recent studies. In September, the organization Bright Line Watch recorded the lowest ratings of U.S. democratic performance since 2017. On a scale from 0 to 100, the public rated American democracy at 49 points, while experts gave it 54.

Political scientists and human rights advocates increasingly compare the situation in the United States to that of Hungary and Turkey, where elected leaders preserve democratic institutions only formally, using them to consolidate personal power.

“In the absence of organized resistance from institutions, civil society, and the public at large, the United States is likely to continue on a path of accelerating democratic erosion,” the Steady State report warns, “leading to further concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch and undermining America’s credibility as a model of democracy abroad.”