Legal experts, political advisors and scholars from across the political spectrum are warning that a second term for Donald Trump could mean effectively ending democracy in America, a threat they say calls for voters putting aside their policy differences to defeat the threat of autocracy in November.
The warning came from bipartisan group of experts who gathered at New York University on Tuesday to discuss the impact a second Trump term would have on the country. The event, “Autocracy in America: a Warning and a Response,” was planned before President Joe Biden announced he was stepping down as the Democratic nominee, a decision that speakers said had upended the race for the White HOuse.
“We’ve gone from age vs. autocracy to dictatorship vs. democracy as the theme of the next 119 days,” Norm Eisen, a legal analyst at CNN, said of Biden’s announcement.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism and a history professor at NYU, opened a panel discussion Tuesday by warning that Trump and Project 2025 — the hard-right policy manual drafted by the former president's allies at the Heritage Foundation — are following the model of Hungary’s Victor Orban, even resembling past dictators like Italy’s Benito Mussolini.
Though warning of autocracy in America may seem extreme, the threat is very real, Ben-Ghiat said.
“It is MAGA dictatorship or American democracy," she said. "It is repression — the iron first coming down on us — of freedom. I've seen what happens to societies when corrupt leaders and their allies gain power based on division or hatred and Project 2025 is a recipe for mass chaos, abuses of power and dysfunction in government.” She urged listeners to have open, bipartisan discussions with one another to truly understand “the stakes” of November’s election.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer and vocal Trump critic, expanded on Trump’s authoritarian qualities.
“Everything is about him — the government is about him — [and] pleasing him and his glory and his power at any given moment," Conway said. “People don’t take him seriously because they find the depths of his depravity too difficult to comprehend."
If re-elected, Conway said Trump’s narcissism will likely have greater consequences this time around as he will remove anybody around him who understands and wants to obey the law, a situation exacerbated by the Supreme Court granting him near-absolute immunity. He warned that honest civil servants will resign or be removed, forced to choose between “fighting and succumbing.”
If Trump wins in November, Conway warned that an executive branch unbound by the Constitution will give rise to a notion often seen in authoritarian regimes: that “the law only applies to people we don’t like — it doesn’t apply to us."
“What we will see is corruption on a scale like we’ve never seen before in this country,” Conway added.
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has been vocal about replacing civil servants with Trump loyalists. “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021, according to reporting by Vanity Fair.
Maya Wiley, attorney and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, warned of Trump and Project 2025’s possible impacts on civil rights for anybody who is not a straight, white male.
“If you are LGBTQ, you are not inscribed in the philosophy and the underpinnings of how Project 2025 is looking at how the executive branch will reconsider and utilize its powers, its resources, its obligation to enforce civil rights,” Wiley said, referencing Project 2025’s opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.
This exclusionary vision, coupled with the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling prosecution for “official acts,” is incredibly concerning, Wiley said, eliminating "independent oversight" and preventing prosecutors from even examining the motives of "someone who is an autocrat."
The threat posed by a Trump presidency no longer constrained by the rule of law demands people across the political spectrum working together to defeat a threat to democracy.
"Autocracy only happens when we the people don’t get together and say, 'No you won’t,'” Wiley argued. “Democracy is not a promise, it’s a commitment, so let’s stay committed.”
