If Donald Trump wins in November and launches a full-blown authoritarian presidency next year—as he has promised to do in his own words—what exactly would that national nightmare look like?

One set of oft-floated worst-case scenarios looks something like this: Trump orders his pliant pick for attorney general to prosecute Liz Cheney and other high-profile critics and frog-march them before the cameras. Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to dispatch the military into cities to crush mass protests. Trump unshackles deportation forces to drag millions of undocumented immigrants from homes and workplaces. Trump purges our nation’s intelligence services, stocks them with loyal foot soldiers, and unleashes them as a domestic spying force to gather information on designated enemies of the MAGA movement.

It would be folly to dismiss these possibilities, since Trump has repeatedly threatened to carry out something resembling every one of those things. He has vowed to prosecute his political opponents without cause. He has loudly called for the indictment of members of the congressional committee that investigated his January 6, 2021, insurrection attempt. He has mused aloud that he might send the military into Democratic-run cities. Trump and his advisers have floated plans for mass migrant removals facilitated by huge detention complexes and even potentially carried out by the military. Trump has repeatedly pledged to purge the supposedly corrupt “deep state”—his shorthand for federal law enforcement and intelligence services—and has openly suggested he would use state power to persecute domestic enemies he describes as “vermin.”

Yet as horrifying as all that is, another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second Trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against.

The potential victims of such behind-the-scenes actions grasp this possibility perfectly well. While we constantly hear about high-profile preparations by Democratic lawmakers, pro-democracy advocates, and other interested stakeholders against the most nightmarish authoritarian scenarios underway, another more subterranean layer of preparations is quietly unfolding among a different class of targets.

These are Trump critics who have already hired lawyers who are advising them to gird for low-grade bureaucratic bullying. They are advocates anticipating years of legal warfare against vulnerable populations like transgender Americans. They are state-level officials scouring statutes to prepare for legal tussles over who controls the National Guard. They are career government officials bracing for the corruption of official information to serve the autocrat in chief’s whims and propagandistic needs, and the underhanded subversion of rulemaking processes to deliver spoils to his cronies. In interviews, what people in these situations say they anticipate is a type of legal and bureaucratic uncertainty that isn’t anything like watching troops invade cities—but nonetheless could prove highly unpredictable and deeply, unsettlingly precarious.

“We are organizing to win this election, but if, God forbid, an authoritarian MAGA clampdown comes, it may not be tanks in the streets and midnight disappearances,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me. “It may be more akin to a corrosive long-term campaign of constant official and vigilante harassment against perceived political adversaries of the president-king.”

Again and again, Trump and his allies have declared right in the open that a second Trump presidency will unleash law enforcement to carry out mass persecution of MAGA’s designated enemies.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Kash Patel, a high-level national security official during Trump’s first term who is expected to play a senior role in a second one, enthused last December. “We’re going to come after you.” Longtime Trump loyalist Steve Bannon has similarly suggested that, in Trump’s “first couple of months,” prosecutions will “get rolling.” People credibly being floated for high-level Justice Department positions—such as right-wing lawyer Mike Davis—are openly threatening such campaigns. Longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller has called for Trump-friendly U.S. attorneys to prepare in advance to prosecute Democrats based on nothing more than the big lie that current prosecutions of Trump are illegitimate.

These exchanges were quietly and widely noted by a very particular class of people: high-profile Trump critics now bracing to be victimized. Tellingly, however, what these people are actually envisioning is not quite what all these Trump allies are threatening. While they do believe Trump and his allies will attempt splashy prosecutions, they expect something more like sustained legal and bureaucratic harassment.

Mark Zaid, a veteran lawyer in Washington who represents federal employees and intelligence officials, said he now has at least a dozen clients who are actively planning for years of exactly that. He has advised them to expect Justice Department investigations that might not lead to prosecutions but nonetheless would drain them of resources; IRS investigations into their taxes and business ventures; revoked passports; or threats to cancel security clearances—all designed to get potential critics to self-silence.

“A second Trump administration will not hesitate to exercise every executive branch weapon it can against those it considers enemies, real or otherwise,” Zaid told me. “We expect a very targeted approach designed to drain the financial resources of perceived adversaries, designed to leave them neutralized and isolated.”

What might such an effort look like? After talking to a number of people preparing for such eventualities, I can report that they’re largely bracing for something like this: In early 2025, an emboldened President Trump orders his attorney general to drop ongoing federal prosecutions of him over his insurrection and theft of state secrets. As the public debate over this unfolds on the airwaves, Trump gets particularly irritated by commentary from, say, a longtime critic who is now castigating his latest moves. Perhaps that person is a commentator (George Conway) or someone who investigated Trump during his presidency (Andrew Weissmann, a top official in the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election), or a member of the January 6 committee (Liz Cheney). Trump curses uncontrollably about that person in a private conversation with his attorney general, and offhandedly mentions hearing that he or she is up to unsavory activities related to his or her business or legal practice.

But—unlike in the nightmare scenarios we’ve heard—this never results in real prosecutions. Instead, word of Trump’s rage filters down the chain of command in the Justice Department until it lands in the lap of an FBI agent or U.S. attorney who is eager to stand out to Trump and his top advisers. An investigation ensues. Investigators start calling that person’s associates and dig through his or her records. Nothing more materializes, but it puts the target through months or years of deeply unsettling, and expensive, precarity.

“That’s a completely plausible scenario,” Peter Keisler, who held high-level positions in the........

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