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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/trump-authoritarianism-warning>
"The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to
a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and
national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is
accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched
without organized resistance.
The report, titled
Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of
Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of
more than 340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and
other national security agencies.
To conduct the assessment, the authors applied the same analytic methods used
by US intelligence agencies to assess the fragility of democracies abroad but
turned them inward for what the group called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis of
domestic democratic decline.
“We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now
show unmistakable warning signs at home,” the group said in a statement upon
its release.
The authors conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving
toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which
elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated”
to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the
assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a
broader effort by Donald Trump in his second presidential term to “ensure
loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.
“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy
is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady
State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on
Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we
are.”
Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6
rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career
officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute
political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled
against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while
testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have
repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.
Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James, the New York
attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged
the former FBI director James Comey, a longtime political adversary. He has
also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, and the Chicago
mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal
troops there.
The speed at which the administration was moving made it difficult to complete
the assessment, Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, told
reporters. “We would finish a draft and then five things would happen,” he
said, adding that the document was published as a “baseline” that could be
updated with new developments."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
