Members of the National Guard stand near a Humvee outside of Union Station after U.S. President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and ordered an increased presence of federal law enforcement to assist in crime prevention, in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 21, 2025. REUTERS/Al Drago
President Donald Trump was serving his first term when Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both political science professors at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside Boston, wrote their 2018 book "How Democracies Die."
Levitsky and Ziblatt took a close look at former democracies that fell into authoritarianism, and they drew a distinction between outright fascist dictatorships and countries that technically have voting rights but are heavily rigged in favor of one particular party.
Seven months into Trump's second presidency and seven years after his book with Ziblatt, Levitsky examined the state of U.S. democracy during an interview with The Guardian.
In an article published on Labor Day 2025, The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt notes that Levitsky "does not believe Trump is a dictator in the truest sense" but rather, is promoting a system that has opposition in name only.
Levitsky told The Guardian, "Technically, in political science terms, no, he's not a dictator. The United States, I think, is collapsing into some form of authoritarianism. But it has not consolidated into an outright dictatorship."
Levitsky points out that in the 21st Century, many authoritarian governments are what he calls "hybrid regimes" — for example, Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro.
Orbán doesn't embrace the 20th-century fascist model of Italy's Benito Mussolini or Spain's Francisco Franco. And leftist Maduro doesn't follow the communist model of North Korea or the old Soviet Union. Yet Hungary and Venezuela are no longer truly democratic.
Levitsky told The Guardian, "They're authoritarian, in that they're not fully democratic. There's widespread abuse of power that tilts the playing field against the opposition. So nobody would look at Turkey and say: 'That's a democracy.' But they're not what I would call a dictatorship. And that's what I think the great danger is in the United States."
Similarly, Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, told The Guardian that Orbán, Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin have gone to "great lengths" to avoid looking like "20th Century dictators."
Scheppele observed, "If you think of dictators as, you know, tanks in the streets and large numbers of military people saluting the leader, and big posters of the leader going up on national buildings, all that stuff does remind everybody of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia and all, and Mussolini's Italy."
Nonetheless, Scheppele finds Trump's actions extremely troubling.
Scheppele told The Guardian, "If I was hesitating before, it's this mobilization of the National Guard and the indication that he plans to overtake resistance by force that now means we're in it…. He's really planning a military, repressive force, to go out into the streets of the places that are most likely to resist his dictatorship and to just put down the whole thing by force.”
Read Adam Gabbatt's full article for The Guardian at this link.