Trump’s Latest Executive Order Lays Bare His Authoritarian Ambitions

Can you imagine yourself being called a traitor by the president of the United States and thus potentially facing prison? Having to hire expensive attorneys, which may well force you to sell your home to pay for defending yourself? Not to mention having to protect yourself and your family from the right-wing enforcers who are probably at this moment doxxing and threatening Krebs and Taylor?

This echoes tactics used by autocrats throughout history: Stalin’s purges, Nixon’s enemies list (though less successfully executed), and more recently, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Putin in Russia. If normalized, it risks further turning the United States into an illiberal democracy or autocracy, where elections occur but power is retained through fear, manipulation, and coercion. Or worse, a violent kleptocracy like Russia.

Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, had the audacity to do his job by ensuring the integrity of our elections and debunking Trump’s baseless lies of fraud in the 2020 election. Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, dared to speak out against the administration’s reckless policies and wrote a book.