Becoming a Tyrant in Five Easy Steps: a Blueprint

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Abstract: This essay argues that Donald Trump's second presidential term follows a classic dictatorial playbook that has been employed throughout history by authoritarian leaders seeking to consolidate power. The analysis identifies several key phases in this process: first, fabricating an emergency crisis (in Trump's case, the fentanyl crisis and illegal immigration) to justify extraordinary measures; second, framing the crisis in terms that appeal to the leader's base while scapegoating specific groups; third, systematically purging potential internal opposition through actions like revoking security details for former officials and intimidating critics; fourth, weakening democratic institutions by threatening Congress members with electoral opposition, defunding universities, and shutting down government agencies standing in his way; and finally, seeking legislative ratification of expanded powers through comprehensive bills. The essay draws historical parallels to Julius Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Putin, and other autocrats who cited emergencies to justify their actions. While noting that such regimes typically fail due to military defeat, economic collapse, loss of elite support, or popular resistance, the essay concludes with a call for active civic engagement and peaceful resistance to prevent the permanent erosion of democratic institutions.

Since day one of term two Donald Trump, trampling the constitution and without legislative authority, rules by decree. His Congress has to date proven most subservient. Bills have been introduced to carve his likeness onto Mount Rushmore (Rep Anna Paulina Luna, R-Florida), to put his face on the $100 bill notwithstanding the law prohibiting using the likeness of any living person on U.S. money (Rep Brandon Gill, R-Texas), to make Trump’s birthday a national holiday (Rep Claudia Tenney, R-New York), to rename Dulles Airport Trump International Airport (Rep Addison McDowell, R-North Carolina), to award him the Nobel Peace Prize (Darrell Issa, R-California), and to impeach every federal District Court judge who has ruled against Trump’s edicts (Reps Andy Ogles, R-Tennessee; Andrew Clyde, R-Georgia; Eli Crane, R-Arizona; and Derrick van Orden, R-Wisconsin). We’re watching with bated breath to see if the vague rumblings of Republican senatorial discontent materialize into any significant resistance or simply dissolve into more headline grabbing.

The first thing the tyrannical despot does to seize absolute power is to fabricate an emergency and declare it an official threat to the very existence of the state requiring urgent action thereafter -- ever after. It of course helps to blame the crisis on the failures or criminal conduct of the tyrant’s predecessors. What was Trump’s first sudden emergency? Fentanyl, coming from Mexico, or is it Canada, or is it directly from China, or perhaps Mars or somewhere else with millions of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border unchecked. It matters not that deaths from synthetic opioids decreased by an estimated 37% between 2023 and 2024, well before Trump re-took office, or that neither legal nor illegal southern-border immigration has contributed one bit to significant employment, crime or economic harm to the nation. The latest emergency -- this one on April 2 to justify the vast irrational imposition of tariffs on almost every country in the world: "foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency,” says the prez. That particular emergency has been going for seventy-five years or more -- but such precision cannot be expected from a stable genius like the Donald. The dictator’s best emergency is of course a slippery and elusive one which doesn’t suggest any obvious solution, thus silencing the quibblers.

Next after naming the peril is to cloak the emergency action in terms acceptable to the populace, at least to the populace which puts the tyrant in power and keeps him there. For Trump, that’s easy and natural: MAGA fears and hates Mexicans -- particularly Mexican rapists and violent criminals who stream across our open borders by the millions. (Fentanyl is rarely mentioned nowadays, while the illegal-entry-violent-criminal trope remains almost a daily theme.) As a brief aside, it is extremely difficult to compare statistics about rape, given that it is one of the most under-reported crimes. But the best we can learn is rough estimates of about 700 rapes per million population in Mexico and about 1000 per million in the United States. The conclusion has to be that American men are probably far more likely to be rapists than Mexicans -- or, with lots more certainty, that Trump once again dishes the cattle excrement.

Next comes the cleansing. It is important that the tyrant not face internal opposition, lest his autocratic energies become dissipated just staying in power. The way to accomplish this is to remove all the enemies or relegate them to impotency. Here is where Trump I failed and Trump II is succeeding in spades. During his first term, there were at least a few in positions of authority with the wisdom and power to stymie his worst impulses. Trump’s own ignorance of government further enabled putting on the brakes. Not that he has become any smarter as his mental status further deteriorates, but most likely because his closest most loyal neo-fascist confidants like Bannon, Scavino, Miller, Homan. Noem and Don Jr. now direct him case by case and keep a tight rein as he engages in daily purges of the insufficiently loyal. He revoked the security details of people like his first term Secretary of State and National Security Advisor who have both received credible death threats -- and announcing publicly that Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and others would no longer receive federal protection! Notice now that Trump isn’t limiting his attacks to critics who might fail to support his efforts to deal with his fabricated emergency but now has broadened his fury to those who might insist on fiscal responsibility, or oppose irrational import duties which actually hurt many of Trump’s core loyalists, or support Medicaid. His latest enemy is Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) -- Rand Paul, for goodness sake, just about the most dependably right-wing member of the U.S. Senate, only he lately isn’t one to genuflect or kiss Trump’s ample posterior. Obviously the purpose of these announcements isn’t just to silence their opposition or belittle them -- name and shame is Trump’s favorite parlor game -- but really to intimidate all the others who might for a brief moment think of crossing Great Leader. Careful, or the FBI will be knocking at your door.

The next step to dictatorship is to weaken or isolate the institutions which might obstruct or slow the tyrant’s march. Close the courthouse, silence the lawyers, insure the legislature is a rubber stamp, threaten any public service organizations which have enough following to prove obstructive. Simply ignore the breathtaking seventy-nine national injunctions already holding Trump decrees to be so blatantly illegal. Cut off any federal funding from any university which might harbor intelligent opponents of the regime. Shut down government agencies whose work might illuminate the dictator’s flaws and which happen to be staffed with civil service carry-over employees from prior administrations. Start the process of rewriting the nation’s history to suggest that it has been hungering for the tyrant all along, that the tyrant’s supporters are the good people and all others evil, that the tyrant truly has ushered in the Golden Age notwithstanding the wobbly state of the nation’s economy, the uncertain business climate, the decisions of hundreds of judges that the tyrant acts illegally (some of these judges appointed by the tyrant himself, many others by appointees of Reagan or a Bush, predecessors from the tyrant’s political persuasion).

Then and only then it is time to seek legislative ratification of the tyrant’s authority and put it writ large on the statute books. That, friends, is the One Big Beautiful Bill which squeaked through the House of Representatives by one vote, now being criticized by some of those who voted for it and by at least one congresswoman who admits she hadn’t read it before voting for it. This is where we are today as we await Senate action.

Let us now pivot and scope out the historical precedent for this playbook, and its provenance is deep. Julius Caesar literally crossed the Rubicon to preserve the nation from the internal threat created by his adversary Pompey, just as Trump now urgently tells the world he must undue the peril created by his criminal robot predecessor Joe Biden. The 1933 burning of the Reichstag enabled Hitler to invoke Article 48 to seize absolute power; one Colorado mall attack by a crazed Egyptian is all Trump needed for an immigration shutdown (but, strangely, not including Egypt), legal process be damned. Mussolini claimed Italy was “on the brink of chaos”. The current autocratic regime in Hungary cited mass migration and the Ukraine war as justifying emergency powers which persist to this day over four years later. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seized emergency power because of the 2023 devastating earthquakes in southern Turkey. Pinochet in Chile justified his power grab because of the “breakdown of democracy” under Salvador Allende and the threat of communism; neither threat diminished in any perceptible way during his administration. Vladimir Putin constantly cites on-going terrorism and security threats, along with the alleged chaos caused by his predecessors. Emergency declarations of threats to national security or public order suffice in Cambodia. The South Africa apartheid governments from the 1960s onward cited alleged internal unrest and ungovernability of Townships; Trump’s updated 2025 version: “rigged elections” everywhere his movement loses. Notice the enabling emergencies commonly are of long standing, chronic, not amenable to quick or easy answers; no matter, once absolute power has vested in the tyrant the emergency can be dismissed. (On Day One Trump will end the Ukraine war, lower the price of eggs, secure the border and so on . . . . never mind, these things will take time.)

What, if anything, can we learn from history about how these autocracies and kakistocracies do fail? Most dramatically, some ended with military defeat. In most instances, they were accompanied by economic mismanagement and sometimes collapse: when the dictator can no longer deliver, he must leave. Loss of elite support is a common factor in the demise of authoritarian government: in the words of the immortal Dean Martin, everybody needs somebody sometime, and tyrants are beholden to their money backers and enforcers. The last viable weapon against the autocrat is popular mobilization and civil resistance -- it was “People Power” in the Philippines, Eastern Europe in the 1980s and the Arab Spring; these are examples where dictatorships ended, admittedly not always with relative democracy installed permanently, but nonetheless reached their sell-by dates. Which, not surprisingly, leads us once again to today’s lesson.

It is unlikely, although not unimaginable, the U.S. will sustain a military defeat during Trump II. A collapse of the U.S. economy seems more foreseeable, but probably in slow drips rather than suddenly. Elon Musk’s defection may be a start (isn’t it a treat to see two odious deranged moguls squabble like small children), but most of the billionaire elite -- Lutnick, McMahon, Bessant, Pichal et al., -- remain Trump-loyal. That is why, if you are anxious for the future of our democracy, it is important that you do even some little thing to manifest your concern. Write a letter to the editor, attend a public protest of Trump’s actions, discuss this among friends, encourage others to speak out, pass my essays along to other possibly like-minded, create you own quiet peaceful and non-threatening resistance. But please don’t just chuckle a bit at my feeble attempts at humor and then press the delete button.

Arne Werchick, after fifty years as a litigation attorney, pro tem judge, law lecturer, former Presiding Arbitrator of the State Bar of California, and past president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, moved to Hawaii and lives with his wife Ruth and their rescue dog Topaz. He writes Out of My Liberal Mind (werchick.substack.com), a periodic free blog about issues of concern to the liberal community and can be contacted at liberalmind@werchick.com.