When I was researching my book on anti-democratic politics, I found a striking pattern in modern incarnations of it — that these movements, almost uniformly, claim their most aggressive anti-democratic policies are actually defenses of democracy.

While Donald Trump worked to overturn the 2020 election, for example, he insisted that he wasn’t trying to steal an election — but rather to “stop the steal” Joe Biden had already pulled off.

When Trump returned to power this year, I expected to see the same rhetorical maneuver deployed to justify his inevitable power grabs. And indeed, many of Trump’s Day 1 executive orders did exactly this.

Take, for example, Trump’s revival of Schedule F — a move that, in theory, could allow Trump to fire tens of thousands of nonpartisan civil servants and replace them with MAGA cronies. Such a move would be a serious threat to democracy, in that it would consolidate key powers of state in the executive’s hands in a manner that proved crucial to the rise of elected authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

Yet in the text of the order, Trump sells the move as a vindication of democratic principles. Because the president and vice president are the only executive branch members “elected and directly accountable to the people,” they must be able to assert greater control over civil servants “to restore accountability to the career civil service.”

The same is........

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