As 2025 came to a close, mainstream liberal and centrist commentators were boldly declaring, often with visible relief, that Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grab had exhausted itself. The tide, they insisted, had finally turned in favor of American democracy and its resilient institutions.
That relief was premature. One month into 2026, Trump is striking back with the strength of a tsunami. The authoritarian tide is rising again — faster than before.
It began in earnest on Jan. 3 when the U.S. military attacked Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After bringing the couple to New York, where they have been indicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and are awaiting trial in a detention center in Brooklyn, Trump and members of his administration began threatening other countries, including Colombia, Cuba and even Mexico. Then the president once again became fixated on Greenland and threatened to take it by force. (He has since appeared to back away from his military threats.)
Trump’s lawlessness abroad reflects a profound contempt for the rule of law and democratic institutions at home. Despite Wednesday’s announcement that around 700 federal immigration officers would be withdrawn from Minneapolis and St. Paul, the Twin Cities remain effectively under occupation by thousands of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in an effort to enforce the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
In a development largely ignored by the mainstream media, Defense Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has granted the Department of Homeland Security additional space for hundreds of vehicles and personnel at Fort Snelling, which is located next to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The move suggests that the Battle for Minneapolis is far from over.
Meanwhile, DHS is building dozens of detention centers around the country, with a combined capacity of approximately 80,000 people.
On Jan. 28, the FBI raided Fulton County’s election office ostensibly to “prove” the Big Lie conspiracy that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Trump. Many legal scholars suspect the action is part of the president’s plan to nationalize elections ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. On Tuesday’s episode of “War Room,” MAGA influencer and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon said the quiet part out loud: “We‘re gonna have ICE surround the polls… We’ll never again allow an election to be stolen.”
The following day, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested and charged with violating federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest at St. Paul Church where a pastor served as a leader in a local ICE field office. In fact, they were exercising their First Amendment rights by reporting on the protest — a fact the indictments have attempted to criminalize.
Many observers in the news media are fixated on the legality and viability of the charges that have been brought against Lemon and Fort instead of what is undoubtedly the real goal: chilling dissent and silencing the opposition.
Perhaps in an effort to soothe their own fears, too many observers in the news media are fixated on the legality and viability of the charges that have been brought against Lemon and Fort instead of what is undoubtedly the real goal: chilling dissent and silencing the opposition.
The Human Rights Campaign noted another important dimension of the case. Lemon and Fort are both Black, and Lemon is queer, and both work to “amplify perspectives too often excluded from mainstream discourse.” HRC President Kelley Robinson said, “This moment should serve as a wake-up call to every American who cares about civil liberties: when journalists can be detained for covering protests, none of us are safe.”
Trump’s tsunami is not unopposed. From the streets of Minneapolis to nationwide “No Kings” protests and strikes, resistance is growing. Congressional Democrats are trying to cut off funding for ICE and impose restrictions on its conduct. Public opinion has turned sharply against Trump, and increasing numbers of Americans are saying “no more.”
Democrats continue to defeat Republican incumbents in off-year and special elections. Most recently, in Saturday’s special election in North Texas’s 9th District, Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet defeated Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points. A blue wave in the November midterms appears increasingly likely — assuming elections remain reasonably free and fair.
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With the notable exception of the Supreme Court, federal and state courts remain among the few institutions actively attempting to fulfill their constitutional duties. On Saturday, a federal judge ordered the release of a five-year-old child and his father from federal immigration custody. Images of the child, Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack as he was taken by deportation officers in Minneapolis last month, sparked national outrage.
In his scathing opinion ordering Ramos’ release, Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas blasted the Trump administration while invoking the image of the rising authoritarian tide, equating the courts’ increasingly Herculean efforts to slow it as “a judicial finger in the dam.”
Like other autocrats and aspiring dictators, Trump’s escalating behavior reflects not absolute strength and power but a deep-seated fear that he may instead lose it. This makes the president and the MAGA movement all more dangerous.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a noted expert on authoritarianism, explained that he “appears to be testing the depths of the hole into which he can throw himself — and drag America with him… I have seen this brand of strongman megalomania and the adverse effects it can ultimately have on leaders and their governments.”
Like other authoritarian projects, Trumpism is a force not for democratic renewal, but for destruction. As Ben-Ghiat pointed out, “Autocratic backfire can end in a leader’s ouster and a nation’s collective ruin, as it did in Fascist Italy; in a leader clinging to power over a weakened state, as is happening with Putin’s Russia; or in popular resistance and mass mobilizations that help restore democracy in the end — which could yet be the fate of the United States.”
Behind all the recent wish-casting among commentators and the American people is a profound positivity and normalcy bias. Matters are very dire and they desperately want them to get better. Compounding these challenges, as a people, Americans have very short memories — and even less patience.
Trump, his MAGA Republicans and their allies control every organ of state power, and they will continue to use it to their own corrupt ends.
In most serious political fights or other types of battle, the other side usually gets a say in the outcome. Pro-democracy Americans are being reminded of that reality as their hopes for a cowed Trump and an easy victory dissolve.
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