Constructing a Military Dictatorship: A Strategic Outline of Authoritarian Drift

How Trump is dismantling the Bill of Rights piece by piece, turning freedoms into privileges, and training Americans to live as if their liberties were already gone.

As we are distracted by Trump’s latest headline, it is easy to miss the larger design. As an anthropologist, I have learned to look for patterns beneath the surface: the deeper structures and the ways systems of relationships interact. In this case, not much imagination was required. The design was already in print. Project 2025 spelled it out in extraordinary detail. Since Trump returned to office, it is clear he is not improvising. He is following a plan to dismantle the Bill of Rights, turn liberties into conditional privileges, and build a dictatorship in plain sight.

The first target was freedom of speech and of the press, for the First Amendment is the foundation of American democracy. In February 2025, the White House barred the Associated Press from coverage unless it renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” The AP refused and sued. Soon after, the Correspondents’ Association gave up managing the press pool, handing the White House control over access. The Pentagon then imposed a pledge requiring reporters to avoid publishing “unauthorized” material or risk losing credentials. When Mario Guevara, an immigrant journalist, was deported, the message to the foreign press was unmistakable: freedom of the press is conditional, revocable at any moment.

Trump’s assault on the public’s right to know has been steady, often carried out quietly through regulation and funding. His FCC launched investigations into CBS, NPR, and PBS. He issued an executive order slashing their support, and Congress soon followed with the Rescissions Act of 2025, stripping $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR sued, but intimidation moves faster than the courts. In this climate, budgets become weapons—starving independent outlets while allies thrive. Project 2025 explicitly called for breaking the independence of public broadcasting and tightening executive grip over information.

Bringing institutions to heel is only one side of the campaign. Bending language to serve power is the other. Protesters are labeled “domestic terrorists.” Immigrants are cast as “invaders.” Political opponents are branded “traitors.” The press is vilified as “the enemy of the people.” Stephen Miller, who shaped immigration bans, and Tom Fitton, whose legal campaigns helped suppress voter access, have pushed to designate Antifa and Black Lives Matter as terrorist organizations despite their decentralized character. These labels do more than stigmatize. They create an ambient climate of fear in which people censor themselves. A teacher skips a lesson on civil rights. A student deletes a protest photo from social media. A journalist rewrites a headline. None have been punished, but all expect they might be.

Protest is treated not as dissent but as insurrection, and the right to assemble has become a pretext for force. Trump has deployed National Guard units to Democratic cities over the objections of mayors and governors. At the border, he stages “shows of force” with troops against a supposed invasion. These operations are not about security; they are political theater, rehearsals for repression. And when ICE carried out a nighttime raid in Chicago—agents rappelling from helicopters, breaking down doors, and zip-tying children, including U.S. citizens, before separating them from their parents—it became clear that this was more than an enforcement action. It was a warning to the entire country, a preview of things to come.

Such rehearsals prepare the ground for the next step: the open talk of martial law and the Insurrection Act. His allies now float the idea of invoking both as solutions to unrest or even disputed elections. The precedent is not new. After his 2020 defeat, Michael Flynn openly advocated for military intervention to rerun the vote. We hear these threats so often they begin to sound routine. The National Guard appears so frequently in civic life that their presence begins to feel ordinary. Once the extraordinary feels normal, any crisis—immigration, protest, or fiscal standoff—can be used to suspend liberties. And history reminds us that emergencies, once declared, rarely end quickly.

The rule of law and the right to due process are also under assault. Visas and green cards have been revoked with little explanation. The Department of Justice has been weaponized against officials who resist Trump’s directives. Surveillance of journalists and activists has expanded, while loyal judges are promoted and critics discredited. The law, once a shield, now serves as a tool of discipline—punishing dissent, threatening critics, undermining its legitimacy.

Economic power has likewise been turned into a weapon. Institutions that resist the administration’s directives face financial retaliation. Public broadcasting has been stripped of federal funds. Nonprofits labeled “left-wing” are harassed by the IRS. Universities—the engines of knowledge and speech—are smeared as “anti-American” propaganda mills, threatened with the loss of federal grants and tax exemptions unless they conform. Allies are rewarded with contracts, subsidies, and favorable rulings. Funding, which once sustained civic institutions, has been twisted into a tool of political control. As Project 2025 recommended, opponents are to be defunded while allies are rewarded, and the state’s economic leverage is used to enforce loyalty.

And just as institutions are punished or rewarded, so too are the terms of political participation. The right to vote is being rewritten in real time. Trump loyalists now hold seats on the Election Assistance Commission and inside the DOJ’s voting rights division. His aim is nothing less than to rig the 2026 election. Districts are gerrymandered. Voter rolls are purged. Restrictions mount. With federal oversight rolled back, manipulation proceeds unchecked. Minority communities are targeted with disinformation campaigns that threaten penalties for voting. Elections may remain as ritual, but their substance is stripped away, staged to provide the illusion of legitimacy.

Even freedom of thought and belief has come under siege. In March 2025, Trump reestablished the 1776 Commission as a permanent office, tying education grants to “patriotic” curricula. His administration scrubbed federal websites of terms such as “climate change,” “LGBTQ,” and “environmental justice.” Museums that mount critical exhibits face threats to their funding. CBS, under political pressure, has announced it will cancel Stephen Colbert’s show at the end of the season. Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended after a joke offended the administration. None of this is accidental. Project 2025 outlined the capture of education, culture, and public discourse. This is more than censorship—it is a narrowing of what may be studied, remembered, or even laughed at in public.

When NPR is defunded, when a foreign journalist is deported, when troops patrol city streets, the fingerprints of Project 2025 are unmistakable. Rights of speech and assembly are hollowed out. Due process bends to political ends. Elections are managed for appearance. Knowledge that contradicts the official narrative is silenced. Citizens are taught to behave as if their liberties have already vanished.

These are not isolated acts. They form a machinery of command, recognizable to anyone who has studied past regimes. What is at stake could not be clearer: the right to speak, the right to publish, the right to assemble, the right to due process, the right to vote, and the right to think and believe without coercion. As each is stripped away, democracy does not collapse in a single moment; it hollows out piece by piece, until only its forms remain.

Authoritarians fear resistance because they know it grows with every outrage, every injury, every life trampled under their power. Trump’s priority is to construct the machinery of repression. Ours must be to expose it, resist it, and refuse to normalize it. The plan is not speculative—it is operational, unfolding in full view. The only uncertainty is whether we will confront it with the clarity and resolve this moment demands.

Suggested Readings

Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. New York: Routledge, 2016 (3rd ed.).

Holifield, Ryan, Andrew E. Fisher, and Becky Mansfield, eds. “Special Section: Authoritarianism, Populism, and the Environment.” Journal of Political Ecology 26 (2019): 1–120.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.