POLITICS

Dictator Trump?

Yes — it’s a possibility

‘Don Colossus’ — the 22 foot Golden statue of President Trump that will greet world leaders at this year’s Group of 20 summit hosted by the United States in Miami later this year.

Source: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-g20-doral-giant-statue-b2913280.html

We often hear it said that Trump is a fascist. As if to underscore the point, on Thursday a gigantic blue banner of the President was unfurled from the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, at the same time as the construction of a grand Golden statue of Donald Trump, “Don Colossus,” is underway in preparation for the G20 summit.

Despite these grandios projects, and even given the fact that Trump and his coterie have used neo-Nazi language, symbols and imagery, Trump isn’t a fascist. Fascism is a very specific form of authoritarianism. Under fascism, the state comes before all else. Mussolini’s description of the fascist doctrine as “anti-individualistic” certianly does not apply to Trumpism or today’s radical right.

However, there is another type of authoritarian government that we should be concerned with: Dictatorship. It might sound outlandish to suggest that Trump is moving towards dictatorship, but this trepidation is based on years of study of social movements and authoritarianism in other contexts.

So, here is why we should take this claim seriously.

Dictators — whether they adopt a fascist, communist, nationalist ideology, or have no doctrine at all — seek to centralize power exclusively around themselves. To do so, dictators promote a ‘cult of personality’: the dictator’s words become the national religion; children are taught to regard the dictator as a sacred expression of the nation; schools, hospitals, cultural centers and airports are named after them; statues are built in their likeness; and copies of their image are expected to be hung on the wall in every home and business.

In North Korea, the ‘Dear Leader’ is deified and worshiped as a god. Under Mao, everyone was expected to follow the dictates of his ‘Little Red Book’. In the Central African Republic’, Jean Bidel Bokassa, crowned himself emperor in a ceremony modeled after Napoleon’s coronation, replete with a horse-drawn gold encrusted carriage and a golden throne flanked by an enormous imperial eagle. Not to be outdone, the former dictator of Turkmenistan, self-titled “Türkmenbaşy” or “Head of the Turkmen,” had a gargantuan golden statue of himself placed in the center of the capital which rotated daily to ensure the sun would always shine on the image of his face.

Though Trump has yet to achieve that level of cultish-status, he appears to be on his way. The White House periodically releases AI generated images that depict Trump in a heroic, almost god-like fashion, “as the pope, as Superman and as a Star Wars Jedi.” More concretely, it is widely known that Trump renamed the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center and had himself elected as its Board Chair. But it has been less-well publicized that in December of 2025, Trump “placed his name on the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a congressionally funded think tank.” That same month he launched a new fleet of U.S. Navy vessels to be called Trump-class battleships. Trump has also used taxpayer dollars to festoon the USDA building with a large banner of his portrait next to a large banner of Lincoln.

In fact, soon after the President assumed office, three federal departments contracted to create enormous political banners of Donald Trump’s portrait paid for by tax-payers. Two now hang prominently outside the Departments of Agriculture and Labor. “A third previously undiscovered federal solicitation is for 88-foot signs to be hung on the Department of Health and Human Services.” And on February 19th, a forth blue banner “with Mr. Trump’s visage was draped on the exterior of the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.”

Several Trump backers have been helping forward his cult-of-personality agenda. Some Trump supporters have pressured the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery to display portraits of Mr. Trump. Legislation has been proposed by Republican Congressman Joe Wilson to create a US currency bill featuring Trump’s image. The “*Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act*” was introduced in February 2025, despite the fact that since the 19th century US law has forbidden having the likeness of any living politician on our official currency. Congressional supporters have even proposed adding his face to Mount Rushmore (although it has gained little traction). And in a move disturbingly resonant of Türkmenbaşy, a group of cryptocurrency investors has pledged $300,000 to fund the 22-foot-tall gilded bronze statue of Mr. Trump, the aforementioned “Don Colossus,” to be installed at his golf complex in Doral, Fla.

Of greater concern is that dictators purge would-be opponents. Stalin presided over waves of deadly political purges that saw government figures removed from power, many of whom were executed. But not all purges are this spectacular. A recent study, using original data on 16 dictatorships between 1922 and 2020, found that imprisonment is the most common way that dictators tend to purge elites. This is the road that Trump has already begun to go down. Prosecutors under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro have been investigating, and attempting to arrest and indict Trump’s perceived political enemies, among them Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz, Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell, Arizona Senator Mark Kelley, and former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation James Comey. Justice Department employees have also come under fire. With Trump allies at the top ranks of the DOJ, “More than 200 lawyers have been fired, and thousands more have resigned.”

Another means dictators purge potential adversaries is by supplanting the regular military and creating a fighting force loyal only to themselves. These paramilitary forces perform many functions, most of which are directed at terrorizing and pacifying the population. Stalin’s infamous NKVD, Pinochet’s Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), or Hitler’s Gestapo and the SS (Schutzstaffel) were all created, not to protect the population and secure the country, but solely to ensure the safety of the ruling elite: maintain power, suppress dissent, and prevent coups.

Increasingly, Trump’s ICE forces are coming to resemble this type of presidential paramilitary. With the National Guard proving to be somewhat resistant to President Trump’s whims, the government has intensified its ICE recruitment efforts. Homeland Security boasts that the agency “blew past its original hiring target of 10,000 new officers and agents within a year [to] …to 22,000” enabling it to place ICE “officers in the field faster than any previous recruitment effort in the agency’s history.”

Moreover, it is clear these recruitment efforts are focused on candidates who are likely to be highly supportive of President Trump. Homeland Security states on its website that the “recruitment initiative utilized data driven outreach efforts to recruit qualified patriotic Americans from across the country.” Indeed, according to a recent DW report, ICE is using modern methods of geofencing to target the “web browsers and social media feeds of anyone near, for example, military bases, particular sporting events or gun and trade shows” as well as by flooding the market “with social media ads and use influencers on sites like Rumble, a video sharing popular with those on the political right.”

There is even growing concern at the Departmant of Homeland Security that the Trump administration’s race to expand the number of ICE agents might lead the agency to “miss red flags in the backgrounds of some new recruits and inadvertently hire them.” In fact, DHS officials have stated that in some cases only after recruitment did they discover candidates should have been inadmissible because of drug use or criminal backgrounds, but these issues were only “flagged during training” after “the recruits admitted they didn’t submit to fingerprinting or drug testing before they arrived.”

In tandem with the expansive ICE recruitment, the administration has been steadily undermining the United States’ traditional armed forces. Since Trump assumed office in January 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals and terminated some of his closest advisers. This is a faster military purge than Xi Jinping’s, who took three years to out oust five of the six generals in China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission, reported as the “uprooting sick trees” and “removing hidden cancer” so that the military would be “reforged and reformed.”

And the administration does not seem to be slowing down its attacks on the military. On September 25, 2025, Secretary of Defense Hegseth called for a highly unusual summit requiring 800 US military generals and admirals to attend in Quantico, Virginia. Addressing the hundreds of senior military leaders summoned from their stations all over the world, President Trump joked that “If you do not like what I am saying, you can leave the room, of course there goes your rank and your future.” Though trump framed this threat as a joke, Hegseth directly warned those gathered that “More leadership changes will be made,” he said. “Of that, I’m certain.”

Thus far a pledge of loyalty to President Trump has not been made compulsory. Yet, Trump’s and Hegseth’s unprecedented messaging to the assembly of military leaders is reminiscent of the infamous ‘Nazi Reichswehr oath.’ In 1935, German officers and soldiers were summoned and made to declare: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.” Trump’s joking threat of high military officers losing rank over disobedience may not mirror Hitler’s ‘sacred oath’ “but it nudges in a similar structural direction: the implicit redefinition of allegiance.” Shortly after, two senior military leaders resigned: Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command, and Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.

What is even more worrisome is that Trump and his administration have signaled that they have no qualms about directing ICE agents to fire live ammunition at peaceful protestors. This matters because when authoritarian regimes are willing to mow down large numbers of protestors, they have generally been able to quell large opposition movements. Perhaps the most infamous of such events was when the Chinese military gunned down democracy protestors in Tieman Square in Beijing in 1988. But the same thing has happened in multiple countries from Chad and Sudan to South Korea. For example, the “8888” Uprising in Myanmar in 1988, a massive democracy movement led by monks, students and civil society groups, ended when the army fired straight at the crowd, slaughtering untold numbers of protestors. The Myanmar military government was able to stay in power again in 2009 when dozens of protesters were killed after a coup attempt. In Iran, the 2009 Green Movement was extinguished when the government killed a massive number of election protesters. More recently, when anti-government protests broke out in Iran in January 2026, they were brought to a standstill after as many as 30,000 protesters bodies disappeared.

Today, it is becoming uncomfortably possible that such unimaginable events could occur in the United States. We have already witnessed the administration’s virulent defense of ICE officers’ extra-judicial execution of innocent citizens who were simply opposing their operations. So far, this has occurred on a relatively small scale. But Trump’s rapid expansion of his faithful ICE forces, combined with Hegseth’s continual efforts to eliminate military leaders who oppose the president’s agenda do not bode well for the nation. It is possible that, at some future date, greater numbers of protestors could be gunned down with as little compunction.

Critically, dictators rule by fiat. All legislation and judicial review are controlled by the executive. As we know, Trump has moved steadily to reduce the power of the legislature, undermine the federal government and defy the courts, including the Supreme Court. But this could just be the tip of the iceberg. If these combined actions are true indications of Trump’s dictatorial designs, they may point to what we could possibly see in the not-so-distant future — and knowing Trump’s admiration of Hitler, the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Republic could provide a model for what could happen. On February 27, 1933, the German parliament (Reichstag) building was mysteriously burned down due to arson. Hitler’s government made the false claim that communists had set the fire. The Nazi leadership was then able to use the event to enact emergency legislation to prevent a violent Communist uprising. With this, they abolished a number of constitutional protections in an act commonly referred to as the “Reichstag Fire Decree,” which paved the way for Nazi dictatorship.

It is conceivable that a catalyzing event will occur in the United States that will bring about America’s ‘Reichstag moment’. There are various scenarios that could lead to such an eventuality. Though it is not clear what such a precipitating event would be, a strong candidate could be malfeasance taken by the regime during the upcoming mid-term elections and/or the next presidential election. It is becoming increasingly likely that both will be tampered with. Several ominous signs point to this possibility.

The recent FBI seizure of more than 650 boxes of ballots and other 2020 election materials from the Georgia’s Fulton County Election Board, where President Trump and his allies pushed baseless claims of widespread fraud in an unsuccessfully effort to overturn that 2020 election, seems to indicate that they hope to supplant the election board there to ensure their candidate wins this year. Trump has repeatedly attempted to greatly limit or altogether end mail-in-ballots. The administration has also been pressuring states to turn over their voter rolls to enable the Trump administration to build a national voter file. And most recently, Trump directly stated in an interview that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Furthermore, when Trump assumed office he declared his intention to stay for three terms; And he came armed with a plan worked out during the 2020 election for how Republicans could use hand-picked electors to ensure Trump’s presidential victory. The plot did not succeed in 2020, but there will be very little to stop Trump from using a similar strategy in the 2028 Presidential election.

All these actions suggest that the administration will do everything in its power to ensure that Republicans maintain command of the legislature and that eventually Trump will work to make himself impregnable. If that were to happen, Americans across the country would likely swarm the streets in protest. This could provide the administration with a reason to claim that a dangerous leftist movement is threatening the safety of the country and to therefore demand that supreme measures be adopted to protect the nation. As protests escalate, President Trump could then declare martial law and further usurp all the branches of government.

Voilà— Trump’s Reichstag moment.

There are still rays of hope. In communities around the US, people have united to protest Trump, his policies and ICE. Whatever Trump’s intentions, he will not be able to effect his increasingly authoritarian agenda without an enormous amount of resistance. Case in point is the fact that Trump backed down from his forceful immigration escalation in Minnesota. Trump, like all dictators, loves adulation and values good press. As of yet, it does not appear that Trump’s coterie feel they can give ICE forces a green light to shoot randomly into a crowd.

But Trump has been extremely effective at holding onto his core adherents and backers even after heinous acts taken by the administration; primarily by directing them towards issues that enrage them (such as Somali’s in Minnesota mistreating children to defraud the government and Hattians eating cats and dogs) and by demonizing his opponents. He has also been able to steadily eviscerate media outlets that challenge him. For all these reasons, it remains disturbingly possible that over time the administration’s willingness to order the indiscriminate killing of “dangerously animalistic, anarchist leftists” will increase.

Granted this is a worst-case scenario, but one the American people need to be aware of.

Therefore, as wild as it sounds, yes, it is conceivable that Trump could actually become America’s first dictator.