The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025

(Badge: United States Department of Homeland Security / Wikimedia Commons; I Voted Sticker: Dwight Burdette / Creative Commons; All other images: Shutterstock)

Executive Summary

Putting the authoritarian threat in context

Since June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump descended an escalator in Trump Tower and announced his run for the presidency, the American body politic has struggled to figure out how to treat him, his rhetoric, and the threat he poses to our system of government. A similar pattern plays out repeatedly: Trump makes a seemingly outlandish promise that upends conventional understandings of politics. Then, those who help Americans make sense of current events — the media, other politicians, pundits, and influencers — dismiss, distort, or deny the very promise Trump has made. And few then know quite what to make of it all or how to respond — a state of confusion that has enabled Trump to shatter democratic norms in previously inconceivable ways.

We now have more than eight years of experience with this phenomenon and a full presidential term as a track record proving that Trump’s pledges should be taken both seriously and literally. He has, for the most part, sought to do the extreme things that were dismissed as mere rhetoric when first promised, from enacting a “Muslim ban” to refusing to accept the results of an election. And yet, here we are again, with Trump making even more extreme promises to “terminate” the Constitution, seek “retribution” against political opponents, and be a “dictator” (just on day one), only to see people unsure what to make of or how to respond to these threats.

This report aims to alter these dynamics by clearly showing how Trump would follow through on his most extreme anti-democratic pledges for a second term and then offering expert recommendations for how to mitigate that danger. 

The bulk of the report looks specifically at three things: Promises, Powers, and Plans. 

• It collects a set of promises Donald Trump has made, in his own words, for what he would do in a second term. It places them in their proper context, coming amidst a resurgence of similar authoritarians worldwide that Trump has openly admired and modeled himself after.

• It examines the powers of the presidency and how they could be used to implement those promises. It explains the legal mechanisms that will be applied to turn Trump’s campaign promises into government policy and programs. And, it assesses the previously available guardrails that could constrain or prevent these abuses of power and the extent to which they will still hold.

• It explores the plans Trump and his allies have drafted to circumvent or override the checks in our system that otherwise have or could restrain his most extreme intentions. Based on expert input, it describes how these policies will play out in practice and negatively impact American life upon implementation.

In these ways, this report seeks to add to the growing body of reporting from outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times that have begun documenting what a second Trump term would look like. It also builds on prior work by Protect Democracy. 

Protect Democracy previously issued The Authoritarian Playbook, which provided a framework for understanding how modern strongmen around the world have consolidated power and subverted modern democracies. This report builds on that earlier one and places Trump’s promises, powers, and plans in that context.

The ultimate assessment is a sobering one: As damaging as Trump’s first term was to American systems of constitutional government, culminating in his efforts to overturn an election and violently halt the counting of electoral votes by Congress, what he has promised in his own words to do if returned to office would be even more destructive to our Republic.

Trump’s campaign promises are extensive, as are the plans of groups working to support those promises in preparation for a second Trump term. This report, therefore, does not seek to cover them all. It also does not cover dangers posed by a second Trump term about which he has not made explicit promises or that fall outside of federal government operations, but that may pose even graver risks, such as the degree to which he uses the threat and reality of violence to achieve political ends. Those and other risks of a second Trump term also require attention, reporting, and analysis but are beyond the scope of this report. This report addresses the following topics on which he has made explicit promises and about which his allies have developed specific plans for federal government action:

• Pardons to License Lawbreaking: During Trump’s first term, he discovered that he could leverage the pardon power to induce witnesses against him into silence. In a second term, he has indicated he would further abuse pardons to incite political violence, incentivize lawbreaking for his benefit, and render himself above the law.

• Directing Investigations Against Critics and Rivals: Retribution is the dominant theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign, and his allies are making plans to eliminate the Department of Justice’s traditional prosecutorial independence to give Trump greater personal control to direct law enforcement against his perceived opponents and insulate himself from accountability.

• Regulatory Retaliation: In addition to steering prosecutorial discretion via the Department of Justice, Trump has vowed to consolidate and wield federal regulatory power to reward political loyalty and punish his critics, particularly those associated with the media. There are numerous reports of this regulatory retaliation happening during Trump’s first term, and plans for a second include ways of removing those obstacles that limited opportunities for more. 

• Federal Law Enforcement Overreach: Trump’s declaration that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country” is a grim foreshadowing of how he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision dating back to 1798. Once Trump has that power, he has also expressed his will to expand the footprint of federal law enforcement to police cities and shut down lawful protests.

• Domestic Deployment of the Military: A central hallmark of American democracy is that the U.S. military not be used against American citizens. But Trump plans to abuse the Insurrection Act to order military force to quash dissent and target vulnerable communities. 

The report also considers Trump’s repeated flirtation with staying in office beyond a second term. When viewed in the context of the Authoritarian Playbook and the actions of Trump-like figures around the globe, this threat becomes hard to ignore.

This report is not all doom and gloom, though. Although Trump’s first term battered our constitutional guardrails and the lives of many Americans, our democracy ultimately survived. As the report explains, that was no accident but the result of the courageous actions of a broad array of Americans and public leaders who stood up for our democracy. That work can provide both instruction and inspiration going forward.

Drawing from those lessons, the report ends with ten recommendations to prepare to protect American democracy against unconstitutional and authoritarian actions. As of the release date of this report, we are one year away from the next presidential inauguration. The time to act on these recommendations is now. The recommendations include:

1. Create pro-democracy coalitions before the crisis arrives.

2. Take anti-democratic ideas and promises seriously.

3. Keep a broad pro-democracy movement united against the acute, big-picture autocratic danger.

4. Support Republicans that stand firm for democratic institutions.

5. Rally around non-partisan, independent public servants. 

6. Uphold the rule of law and democratic institutions, and always repudiate violence.

7. Protect the first targets, and arrange now to advocate for the most vulnerable.

8. Evaluate security at the community, household, and personal level. 

9. Work to protect free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.

10. Continue building the democracy of tomorrow.

Introduction

It’s not just rhetoric. Campaign promises are being translated into plans and programs to deploy executive power.

Take Him at His Word 

One year from now the next president of the United States will be inaugurated, and that person may very well be former president Donald Trump. 

Recently, Trump was asked if he would “abuse power as retribution against anybody” if re-elected president in 2024. The question came from a friendly source, Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity appeared to hope that Trump would reject the notion ahead of the Iowa caucus. Yet, that proved to be difficult for Trump. 

Distancing himself from his earlier comments would mean denying the central promise of his campaign, which Trump launched by declaring to his voters: “I am your retribution.” Trump chose to mock Hannity’s question. “This guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’” Trump replied, referring to Hannity. “I said, ‘No, no, no, no — other than Day 1.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.” 

The audience laughed, humored by the way Trump played with the word “dictator,” as if he had never previously displayed any indication of acting like one. CNN’s Manu Raju asked Republicans on Capitol Hill for their reactions to the comment. They, too, dismissed it as a joke, saying things such as: 

• “It’s entertainment. And, you know, we’ve been around him long enough. It’s entertaining.” — Texas Rep. Michael McCaul 

• “I think it was a joke.” — South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham

• “We all know Trump uses unique expressions when he explains things.” — Kentucky Rep. James Comer 

Senator J.D. Vance wrote: “Trump’s superpower is that he’s the most quick witted leader in a generation. Every grown man hyperventilating about this clip needs to find a sense of humor.”

These reactions might be understandable if Trump had not already established a record of employing authoritarian tactics during his first term. Or, if there was no credible reporting by publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post documenting the ambitions that Trump and his allies harbor of consolidating power to seek vengeance on their adversaries come 2025. But GOP lawmakers, like many others in elite political circles, have declined to take the threat seriously. 

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in December 2023: “We think American institutions are strong enough to contain whatever designs Mr. Trump has to abuse presidential power,” while suggesting that the real “danger” that could come from a second Trump administration is that he would “set up the left for huge gains in 2026 and 2028.”

Others have adopted a fatalistic “both sides” approach to the looming crisis. As one writer at National Review asked: “[I]f our existing checks and balances under the Constitution aren’t strong enough to stop abuses of power by Trump … why would you think that they’re strong enough to stop abuses of power by Joe Biden or anyone else?”

Ex-CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who covered Trump extensively in his former job, said that even though Trump made “life hard for my family,” he was open to voting for him in 2024 because “We survived a Trump administration. Would we survive another one? Yes. Yes…I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with him than with Biden.”

Democratic-turned-Independent former Senator Joe Lieberman, a prominent booster of efforts by No Labels to recruit a third-party 2024 presidential candidate, has a similar take. “This is such a strong country and our laws are so strong,” he told Intelligencer. “Trump lost 60 cases and he had to accept the final judgment of the courts. Well, he didn’t accept it, but Congress came back from recess and got it done.”

One has to ask, why does the belief, whether genuine or performative, persist that if Trump regains power, somehow, his authoritarianism will be contained? How can his references to dictatorship be construed as humor at this point? Why do so many people still refuse to take Trump at his word?

This failure is particularly striking given not only Trump’s track record but how wrong similarly dismissive statements have proven to be in the past. 

After repeated refusals by Trump to assure Americans that he would accept the results of the 2020 election led to concerns he might resist the transfer of power, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat famously wrote a column entitled “There Will be no Trump Coup,” in which he addressed directly the question of “whether [Trump] will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance.” Douthat assured us it was the former: “Our weak, ranting, infected-by-Covid chief executive is not plotting a coup,” Douthat insisted, three months before Trump dispatched a violent mob to storm the Capitol, leaving five dead, halting the congressional process of counting electoral votes, and threatening the peaceful transfer of power.

And Douthat was not alone. Roughly two months before the 2020 election, Protect Democracy’s Executive Director asked the chief of staff to a senior Republican senator to assess, on a scale of 1 to 10, how concerned he and the senator were about potential disruptions to the regular electoral process. “Zero,” he replied, saying they were “not worried at all.” A recently retired Republican senator offered a similar assessment.

Assessments of how seriously to take Trump’s seemingly outlandish statements during his 2016 campaign were similarly wrong. Trump issued a statement “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on December 7, 2015. At the time, his Republican primary rival, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush posted on Twitter that, “Donald Trump is unhinged. His ‘policy’ proposals are not serious.”

Tech entrepreneur and major political donor Peter Thiel defended and downplayed the promise. “I think a lot of voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally, so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment their question is not, ‘Are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China?’ or, you know, ‘How exactly are you going to enforce these tests?’” he said. “What they hear is we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy.”

But of course, Trump was absolutely serious and signed Executive Order 13769 during the first week of his presidency. Referred to by Trump himself as his promised “Muslim ban,” EO 13769 directed the Department of Homeland Security to, among other things, shut down entry to the United States by travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries. 

Overcoming a Failure of Imagination

Time and again, predictions that Trump was not serious have proved disastrously incorrect. And yet pundits and officials, mainly on the political right, continue to make them, having failed to internalize lessons from these past errors. 

Why is this? David Frum has suggested in The Atlantic that it stems from an ordinary human failure: “For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future,” Frum wrote. “When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior — never mind normal political behavior — that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly.”

This report attempts to help overcome that failure of imagination, from which we all suffer to some degree. In this report, Protect Democracy adds to the respectable body of reporting regarding the stakes of the 2024 election by explaining how a second Trump administration will go about consolidating power at the federal policy level in service of an agenda of retribution.

This report examines Trump’s campaign promises, which are no less ominous after campaign officials tried to temper them. It focuses on a set of pledges most central to an authoritarian agenda. For each category, the report explains how these promises are being translated into concrete action plans that will become federal government policy, should he take office. Protect Democracy’s legal and policy experts have carefully evaluated these plans and explain in the following pages how Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to overcome factors that constrained him, to varying degrees, in his first presidency. We lay out the legal, policy, and bureaucratic mechanics of how these policies will be rolled out through the White House and various federal agencies. 

In focusing on Trump’s plans to implement his agenda of retribution through federal policy and programs, this report does not cover all aspects of the authoritarian threat come 2025. For example, it does not cover potential dangers to U.S. national security from Trump’s foreign policy plans. Likewise, it does not address the complete set of extremist domestic policy plans. Nor does it address the dangers posed by Trump’s give-and-take with white supremacist militia groups, the way his autocratic approach has been echoed by like-minded politicians at the state level, or the extent to which his rhetoric incites political violence. Additionally, in describing from a legal and policy perspective how Trump will use federal powers to disassemble our democracy, it does not portray all of the ways these abuses of power will harm the everyday lives of the American people. The report makes clear that the heart of Trump’s agenda is not to address particular policy challenges or advance public policy goals; it is to aggrandize the executive branch’s powers and use them for retribution. 

Following the Authoritarian Playbook

Our analysis builds on the foundation of Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Playbook, which offers expert advice for understanding authoritarian threats as distinct from politics-as-usual. The Authoritarian Playbook outlines the seven tactics used by strongmen to gain and retain power and describes examples, foreign and domestic. As that report describes, modern aspiring autocrats around the globe have developed strategies and alliances to seize and wield power. Trump’s core plans for a second term would employ each of these playbook tactics: 

• Politicizing independent institutions 

• Aggrandizing the power of the executive 

• Spreading disinformation 

• Quashing dissent 

• Targeting marginalized communities

• Corrupting elections 

• Stoking violence. 

Since rising to power in 2016, Trump and his allies have not only followed the global authoritarian playbook — they’ve also aggressively sought to ingratiate themselves with an international authoritarian network. Parallels between Trump and strongmen abroad show how autocratic promises can become a reality. 

Trump’s overt praise of autocrats, calling Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “tough” and “strong,” is a distinct departure from the American tradition. Although he initially talked tough about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump later showered him with flattery: “We fell in love,” he said. 

Trump, the authoritarian movement that backs him, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán are forming an especially strident international autocratic alliance. And, Orbán provides a particularly worrying data point about a would-be autocrat returning to power. 

Orbán governed Hungary from 1998–2002 through a center-right coalition, then left office and was out of power until 2010. Since returning to power, Orbán has ruled as an autocrat. He wrested control over the independent media, put the country’s universities and cultural institutions under his authority, used demonizing rhetoric to justify his immigration crackdowns, and leveraged his electoral wins to rewrite his country’s constitution to keep himself in power. In a marked departure from Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who shunned Orbán, Trump welcomed him to the Oval Office in 2019 and lavished him with compliments. “I know he’s a tough man but he’s a respected man,” Trump said during their shared remarks to the press. “Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK. That’s OK.”

A Roadmap of What Follows

As the following pages describe, the dangers of Trump returning to power are severe. The report focuses on the following areas where Trump has made campaign promises for how he will govern if in power. 

It begins with his pledge to issue pardons for the January 6th insurrectionists and others who ignore the law or commit violence on his behalf — a move that seeks to place him and his allies outside the constraints of the law. 

In Section Two, it then turns to how he will pierce the independence of the Department of Justice to direct it to investigate and prosecute perceived critics or opponents. 

His weaponization of the powers of government may begin with the criminal justice system, but it won’t end there. A third section examines how he will politicize regulatory agencies using their many administrative tools (licenses, permits, contracts, regulatory waivers) to force loyalty and quash dissent. 

The report then turns to more direct uses of government force. Section Four addresses Trump’s plans for using Department of Homeland Security agents as a domestic police force. 

Section Five considers his plans to deploy not just federal law enforcement but the U.S. military here in the United States. 

Section Six considers Trump’s repeated suggestions that — like other autocrats around the world — he might not leave office when a second term is up. 

Each section begins with Trump’s promises and situates them within The Authoritarian Playbook. It then explains in detail the legal and policy mechanisms that Trump will deploy to fulfill his promises. This includes assessing the strengths and vulnerabilities in the guardrails that could constrain the particular abuses of power. Each section then describes how these plans will likely play out in the world when implemented. 

The final portions of this report turn from what Trump has planned to how a pro-democracy coalition can work together to enable our democracy to withstand and overcome the threat. To succeed, we must learn from what has worked before, so this includes an analysis of what strategies worked successfully to combat authoritarianism during Trump’s first term, while recognizing that continued Trump-led assaults have left our democratic guardrails battered. 

The report concludes with a set of ten recommendations that the pro-democracy coalition should pursue to mitigate the threat of an autocrat in the Oval Office. As grave as the danger is, ultimately, a broad and united majority of the American public, working with our Constitution and laws, can preserve our democracy.

What We Can Expect >