Transcript: Trump’s Authoritarianism Has Failed in One Critical Way

Political scientist Donald Moynihan argues that Trump has consolidated power on many fronts, but has largely failed in his efforts to take control of the U.S. election process.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the July 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is the New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. We have a great guest today. It’s Donald Moynihan. He’s a professor of political science and public policy at the University of Michigan. Professor, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Donald Moynihan: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.

Bacon: And so Don has a great Substack that is about how we govern. I’ve forgotten the title for some reason—Can We Still Govern? is the title. I read it all the time, but I forgot. And it really gets into detail about how this Trump era, and the Trump administration, has affected... It gets into a lot of detail about how policy’s written, how it’s changed, how Trump is destroying the federal government, how we can rebuild.

It’s a really great Substack, Can We Still Govern?, that I highly recommend people read. But what I want to get into today is a post Don wrote in, I guess it’s August 28, 2025. This was early—this is about the time when Trump was sending the National Guard to Chicago and to LA, really in the height of the authoritarianism that we’ve had these last couple years.

And you wrote this piece called “The Authoritarian Checklist,” and you were arguing that we had now entered a competitive authoritarian period—that we lost democracy, and we were entering competitive authoritarianism—and you were describing the ideas that make an authoritarian administration.

And so I want to go through some of those. And what I’m going to ask you to do is rank them on a phase of one to 10, how much Trump has done these things—on a one to 10. Not because rankings are useful, but just to compare where he’s kind of been most successful in taking over and where he’s been arguably a little less successful.

And let me start by saying, this checklist you had is not some kind of—it’s not the political science authoritarian checklist. It was something you came up with yourself, right?

Moynihan: Yeah. I wasn’t drawing from another list of well-defined parameters that someone else had come up with. At the same time, I think it is a pretty standard checklist. I think if you look at authoritarian governments, they do basically the same thing. And so if you look at any textbook about authoritarianism, they might have a longer or shorter list, they might use slightly different words, but the patterns are very similar. The patterns really do look like each other across time.

The settings vary, the types of powers that authoritarians can tap into vary. But what we see with Trump—and this is part of the reason why I wrote the piece—it doesn’t look that different from what we see in Turkey today, or what we had seen in Hungary until Orbán was displaced. And this is also why I wanted to talk about competitive authoritarianism.

So it’s not like a light switch, where you’re either completely authoritarian or you’re completely democratic, but the idea that there is this sort of in-between—where you have some element of political competition, where you have some media, but at the same time the authoritarian force, the government in charge, has tilted the playing field so that it is very difficult for anyone opposing it to do so successfully.

Bacon: So let’s go through. There’s eight things you listed as elements of authoritarianism. So I want to go through, and we’ll discuss them all in order. You can give your one-to-10 ranking at the end—10 being the worst, one being the least bad, 10 being the most bad.

And first of all, control the bureaucracy.

Moynihan: Yeah. And I think this is maybe a nine out of 10 for Trump, and certainly an A for effort. And one of the reasons why I think they advanced so much in this space is because at the end of their first term, they really had this idea that the reason they did not succeed—and people who worked in the Trump administration were reasonably upfront in saying, We did not do what we wanted to do in the first term—is that they blamed the bureaucracy.

And so the deep state becomes a real obsession for Trump and the people working around him. And the types of people who worked in his first administration who came back to a second administration—a lot of them spent four years thinking very specifically, How can we use the legal system? How can we use executive orders? How can we push lawsuits in a way that’ll favor us, so we take control of the bureaucracy?

And so there was a lot of homework that went into this. If you look at someone like Russ Vought at OMB, this is very much his baby. And so Trump might have the broad outlines—very much supportive of the idea of making it easier to fire bureaucrats he doesn’t like—but there was an army of lieutenants who did the work of making this happen.

And I think from the start of the second Trump administration, we’ve gone from a system where you have public employees, about two million who had real civil service protections, to today, where they are de facto at-will. They can be fired for any reason, and that is not what the law says, but that’s the reality on the ground.

If you’re working in government right now and you cross paths with a political appointee, or if Laura Loomer finds some old post you did online, you can be fired, and your options for trying to retain your job are really not very good at this point. And the room for resistance within the bureaucracy at this point is pretty small.

Bacon: OK. So in other words, the bureaucracy was something of a check on them in the first term and isn’t now.

Moynihan: I think that’s true. And I think if you were someone who supports Trump, you would say they were engaged in resistance and democracy says the president gets the final say on these things, and therefore we’re within our rights. When you look at the specifics of many of the cases that are under dispute, it’s often bureaucrats saying things like, That’s not what the science says about pollution, or, The law tells us something different about how you’re supposed to use these powers.

Take a super-specific example here, where Kash Patel fired senior FBI officials because they wouldn’t fire their own FBI colleagues, because Patel wouldn’t give them a cause—and you’re supposed to have some sort of cause for firing people related to performance. And they were saying, Look, we think the law says this, and Trump officials were saying, That’s not what we want to hear, and therefore you’re going to be fired.

And so in many cases, resistance was simply people trying to draw on their expertise, or people saying, The law says this, and you’re saying something different, and so we’re going to try to follow the law here.

Bacon: Control the military.

Moynihan: I think that this is probably something more like a six or a seven.

And what we’ve heard are a lot of stories about Hegseth being incredibly active here, in a couple of dimensions. One is, early on, we heard stories about Hegseth basically rewriting military history. So if you go to government websites and you learn about military heroes, or if you go to a graveyard, or if you go to memorials, Hegseth has removed a lot of what he saw as DEI—but basically highlighting women and non-white military heroes and erasing them from military history.

That can be fixed, but that is real. Part of the way the military maintains its esteem in American society is by telling these stories, and who is included, who’s represented. That’s an important part of what they do.

The second thing is the personnel. And obviously Hegseth immediately pushed out the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We’ve seen an unprecedented degree of turnover in senior military officials, and we’ve also seen unprecedented action, with Hegseth intervening on promotion lists and seemingly specifically targeting, again, typically Black officers, female officers, or officers who were deemed woke—like they might have participated in some sort of event around LGBTQ. And so if there’s any of those measures that Hegseth doesn’t like, your opportunities to advance in the military decline quite a bit.

And the reason why I........

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