Experts paint grim portrait of a second Trump presidency: 'Authoritarian autocrat on steroids'

Donald Trump winning re-election could spell the end of American democracy and accelerate the breakup of the United States, according to a panel of experts.

The Washington Postspoke to nearly two dozen experts in political science, the military, foreign affairs and economics, and they agreed a second Trump presidency posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, and they speculated on what the twice-impeached former president do with another term in the White House.

“I think it would be the end of the republic,” said Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz. “It would be a kind of overthrow from within. … It would be a coup of the way we’ve always understood America.”

The experts warned that Trump would install loyalists at all levels of government and use them as a weapon against political enemies.

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“This is a guy for whom political revenge is pretty front and center,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University. “He’s going to come in and use the state to go after his enemies. He has a long list of grievances against people. … He’s going to come in like an authoritarian autocrat on steroids.”

Trump's re-election would likely embolden his militant allies, including violent white supremacists, and states with sizable numbers of his opponents might push back against federal laws that violate their principles.

“You’d be looking at states — Democratic states — which would be taking over Republican arguments about states’ rights and applying them in a different way to try to limit the reach of the federal government,” said Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale University. “And then you’d also be seeing something which I think has already started to happen as a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade: You’re going to see people moving. It might be a peaceful process at first. But I think you’re going to see populations sorting themselves out according to where people feel safe and at home, which will mean red states becoming more red and blue states becoming more blue. And that makes some kind of secession or breakup scenario in the medium term more likely.”

That would only increase the chances of violent conflict within the U.S., experts said.

"The type of war [we would to see is an insurgency," said Barbara Walter, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. "[Participants] are going to fight a type of guerrilla war, a siege of terror that’s going to be targeted very specifically at certain individuals and certain groups of people, all civilians.”

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