The Authoritarian’s Secret Weapon: They Never, Ever Leave Voluntarily

Every gerrymander, purge, and press attack tightens the screw — until the system is locked and the tyrant holds the only key…

With the raid on John Bolton‘s home, it looks like we may have reached that stage when fascist governments begin to turn against their critics, weaponizing the tools of a police state.

Richard Nixon went after his enemies, too, and once said, in the depths of the Watergate scandal, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” He discovered the hard way that wasn’t true, at least back in the 1970s. More than 40 people connected to his White House and campaign were indicted, and many went to prison.

Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman, White House Counsel John Dean, Attorney General John Mitchell, and special counsel Charles Colson all did time. So did several members of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, better known as CREEP, for their crimes of burglary, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy. Nixon himself escaped accountability only because Gerald Ford pardoned him.

That experience left a permanent scar on America’s political consciousness, but it also left a roadmap that Trump and his inner circle are determined not to follow. They have no intention of being, like Nixon and his people, crooks who lost their grip on power. They’re apparently making plans to guarantee it never happens to them.

That’s the context for Trump’s recent announcement that he intends to issue an executive order directing states to defer to him in “counting and tabulating votes.” He’s laying the groundwork to seize control of the elections in 2026 and 2028, turning them into stage-managed rituals rather than contests.

This isn’t bluster on Trump’s part. It’s the natural progression of what Republicans have already been doing with their gerrymandering binge, redrawing district lines to ensure that even if they lose the majority of votes, they can still control the House of Representatives. The game is to rig the system so thoroughly that the people’s will can no longer threaten their grip on power, that Democrats in Congress will never be able to investigate their abuse of our system like they did with Nixon.

What Nixon tried to do in secret with plumbers, burglars, and hush money, Trump is doing in the open, loudly, and with the full backing of the Republican Party and its billionaire benefactors.

The danger of this moment is that history shows how difficult it is to remove authoritarian leaders once they’ve succeeded in consolidating control.

Fascists are not like ordinary politicians. They don’t lose gracefully. They don’t respect rules, laws, or constitutions except insofar as they can be bent to entrench their power. As Chris Armitage writes, once in, they’re damn hard to get out.

Mussolini stayed in power for more than two decades until the Second World War turned against him. Franco held Spain in his iron grip for almost forty years (and they’re still finding bodies). Hitler’s regime collapsed only after catastrophic defeat and the near destruction of Germany.

These men understood that once you have bent the legal system to your will, crushed independent journalism, cowed the opposition, and taught the public to accept corruption as normal, there’s no easy way for citizens to push you out.

And yet authoritarian regimes do fall.

Sometimes it happens through elite defections, like the Italian monarchy finally turning against Mussolini in 1943. Sometimes it happens through the pressure of outside forces, as with Vichy France collapsing under the weight of Allied liberation.

More often, though, it happens when the people themselves rise up in massive, sustained, nonviolent resistance.

The Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 showed what it looks like when citizens refuse to accept a corrupt authoritarian order. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Kyiv through a freezing winter, enduring beatings, arrests, and even killings. Yet they would not leave until Ukraine’s then-President (and Putin toady) Yanukovych fled the country.

The lesson was stark: even the most entrenched regime can crumble when confronted with organized, courageous defiance.

History is filled with similar examples, from the Solidarity movement in Poland to the fall of dictators across Eastern Europe in 1989. More recently, mass movements in South Korea forced the removal of President Park Geun-hye in 2017 despite her control over the levers of power, and again last year when President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law.

The thread running through all of these cases is that once fascists or would-be dictators gain the upper hand, it isn’t enough to hope they’ll obey laws or lose elections. By design, they manipulate the system to make losing impossible. It’s the one thing that’s so common among them that it’s predictable.

Trump understands this better than anyone, as I lay out in my new book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink. That’s why he is not just talking about seizing control of vote counting but is also working with Republican-controlled states to purge voter rolls, limit ballot access, and criminalize voter registration drives.

It’s why Republican governors are signing laws that let them override election boards and install partisan hacks in their place.

It’s why the neofascist right is pouring money into think tanks and dark-money operations that map out every legal loophole that can be weaponized against democracy.

Their strategy is to make resistance look futile by presenting their power as inevitable.

We must not let them succeed in that psychological warfare.

Resistance is not futile, but it does require seriousness, preparation, and courage. Trump and the GOP aren’t hiding their goals. They’re trying to seize control not just of elections but of the press, with constant attacks on independent media and regulatory approval of growing consolidation of news outlets into the hands of friendly oligarchs.

They’re targeting the legal profession, purging government of independent lawyers and bureaucrats, stacking the courts with partisans, and threatening judges and law firms who resist them.

They’re even drawing up lists of corporations deemed “friendly” or “unfriendly” to the administration, a tactic straight out of Putin’s authoritarian playbook. And with the Bolton raid, it appears they’re imitating Putin’s purges of “disloyal” former aides.

If you reward the loyal and punish the defiant, you create a political landscape and an economy that bend themselves to political power rather than to the rule of law, and it appears that is their explicit goal.

This is how democracies typically collapse, not with a single dramatic coup but through a steady tightening of control by elected officials until ordinary people feel they have no voice left.

The warning lights are flashing. Trump is telling us openly what he intends to do. The Republican Party is showing us in every state where it holds power what the model will look like.

Their gerrymanders, their purges, their threats to the media and the courts, their talk of “friendly” corporations: it’s all of a piece. They learned from Nixon that getting caught is dangerous. They intend to make sure they never get caught because they’ll write the rules themselves so they’re never out of power.

The only counterweight is we, the people. History shows that nonviolent resistance, when massive and sustained, is more effective than violence at bringing down tyrannies. But it requires solidarity, discipline, and an unshakable commitment to the idea that no one man is above the law.

We must be preparing now for the possibility that the 2026 and 2028 elections will not be free and fair. It’s time to build networks, coalitions, and organizations capable of bringing millions into the streets, of challenging illegitimate actions in courts, of protecting the few independent institutions that remain.

We must be telling the truth, loudly and constantly, about what is happening, so that average Americans don’t wake up one morning to find that democracy has been stolen while they slept.

This is not alarmism. It’s the plain reading of Trump’s own words and the GOP’s own actions.

The lesson of Nixon is that corrupt men in power will always push as far as they can get away with.

The lesson of Trump is that he has no intention of ever being forced into exile, prison, or disgrace.

The lesson of history is that once fascists take control, they will never leave voluntarily.

The lesson of the Maidan, and of countless other people’s movements, is that fascists like Trump and his ass-kissing cabinet can be defeated if enough of us are willing to stand up together.

The hour is late, but it’s not yet too late. If we take seriously what Trump and the Republican Party are telling us, if we organize and resist, if we insist on truth, solidarity, and democracy, then the future can still be America’s to win, reclaiming the vision of our founders and the freedom that generations of Americans have fought and died to keep.

If we don’t, we’ll live under the iron rule of men who have studied Nixon’s downfall and resolved never to repeat his mistakes even as they double down on his corruption of government to persecute his enemies and consolidate power. The choice is ours, and the time to make it is now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Once They’re In, They Never Leave”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social