We Watched Others Fall: Now the Edge Is Beneath Our Feet

Putin and Orbán showed us the edge. Trump’s ready to push us over…

We watched it happen in Russia. We watched it happen in Hungary. Democracies, once imperfect but alive, were hollowed out from within by strongmen who declared emergencies, rewrote the rules, and convinced enough people that fear was freedom and corruption was strength.

We told ourselves it couldn’t happen here. That our guardrails were stronger. That our Constitution was invincible. But now, we stand where they once stood: at the jagged edge of the authoritarian cliff. The wind has picked up, the ground beneath us trembles, and the man leading us forward isn’t walking, he’s charging. Not because he wants to save America, but because he wants to rule it as an absolute autocrat.

Following his demand for investigation and prosecution of President Obama, Trump is now demanding the same against Jack Smith. While it’s possible this is theater to distract from his involvement with Epstein and his underage victims, if he seriously follows through on either of these it’s a screaming red light that our democracy has failed.

When Donald Trump sent active-duty Marines and federalized National Guard troops into Los Angeles last month — over the objections of California’s governor and LA’s mayor — it wasn’t because of a real emergency. It was political theater with live ammunition.

There were no riots, no mass violence, no breakdown of law enforcement. The immigration protests that had drawn thousands were peaceful. LAPD Chief Michel Moore and Governor Gavin Newsom both made that clear.

But Trump wasn’t looking to solve a problem; he was looking to create one, and use it to justify an unconstitutional power grab. And he’s not done.

This is now the Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis.
— Declare an “emergency.”
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
— Bypass Congress.
— Bully or ignore the courts.
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
— Send people to foreign concentration camps.
— Build concentration camps within the United States.
— Prosecute lawyers and judges.
— Assert control over universities.
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
— Then call it all “law and order.”

The press largely treated the July 2025 LA deployment as a one-off. A headline here, a legal challenge there. But that wasn’t just another Trump overreach. This was a test run for a new kind of American autocracy.

And it’s not an uniquely American phenomenon. Trump is following the playbook used by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Vladimir Putin in Russia, two men he openly admires, both of whom used fake emergencies to destroy their nations’ democracies from within.

It’s an old playbook, and yet we keep getting sucker-punched by it with every new Trump outrage.

Around the world — and now here at home — autocrats and aspiring dictators have discovered that the fastest way to consolidate power in a fragile democracy isn’t through the slow, messy process of persuasion or legislation: it’s through manufactured emergencies.

Crises that either don’t exist or are deliberately exaggerated, can be invoked to trigger “temporary” emergency powers that simply never get relinquished.

Increasingly, Americans are realizing that Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump are all reading from the same authoritarian script that Hitler first authored, and if we don’t recognize the pattern soon, we may find ourselves locked in Act III with no exit.

Let’s start with Putin. When he first came to power in 1999, Russia was still experimenting with post-Soviet democracy. That changed quickly. Within months, a series of apartment bombings in Russian cities — blamed on Chechen terrorists — killed hundreds and terrified the nation.

Putin used the attacks as a pretext to declare an emergency, launch a brutal war in Chechnya, and expand domestic surveillance. To this day, multiple journalists and former FSB agents, including poisoned whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko, have suggested the bombings were a false flag carried out by Russian intelligence to create a climate of fear and bolster Putin’s legitimacy.

Whether or not that’s true, the outcome is indisputable: emergency powers were invoked, independent media were crushed, and a cult of leadership emerged.

Putin never looked back. He’s since used invented and exaggerated crises — from “Nazi infiltration” in Ukraine to “foreign plots” at home — to justify censorship, surveillance, and the jailing and even murder of opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny.

Orbán in Hungary took a more methodical and less brutal — but nonetheless equally effective — approach. After returning to power in 2010, he undermined the judiciary, rewrote the constitution, and brought public broadcasting and most private media under government control. But it was the COVID-19 pandemic that gave him carte blanche.

In March 2020, Hungary’s parliament passed a law granting Orbán the “temporary” right to rule by decree without oversight. Critics and journalists who challenged his policies could be prosecuted for “spreading misinformation.” Civil society, universities, even businesses fell under tighter control.

The emergency powers were extended again and again, even after the pandemic subsided. By then, Orbán had packed the courts, gerrymandered elections, and created a self-perpetuating authoritarian regime with a democratic façade that included the absolute right for him to actually rule by decree.

And then he spoke to Republican groups at CPAC, both in Texas and when the conservative group held its meeting in Budapest, encouraging conservatives to do in America exactly what he had done in Hungary. His suggestions about seizing control of the media, shutting down universities, going after immigrants as a way of increasing political power, trashing the rights of queer people and women, and rigging election systems was greeted with a standing ovation in both cases.

Trump may lack Putin’s cunning or Orbán’s ideological discipline, but he shares their fundamental disdain for democracy and their love of unchecked power.

During his first term, Trump declared a phony “national emergency” at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2019 to redirect billions in military funding away from upgrading troop housing and toward his border wall project after Congress had refused to approve it.

This blatant abuse of the National Emergencies Act set a dangerous precedent: the president discovered he can now override Congress simply by saying the word “emergency.”

When Covid hit, Trump had an actual crisis on his hands, but he used it not to unify the country, but to divide it. He favored Red states over Blue ones in distributing supplies, mocked mask-wearers, and deliberately undermined Democratic governors. Worse, as reporting has shown, his inner circle believed using the virus could be “an effective political strategy” to hurt elected Democrats. Jared Kushner reportedly recommended Trump let the pandemic spread unchecked in Democratic-leaning states because, in its early days, it was “mostly affecting Black people” and largely killing “Blue-state voters.”

Now, in his second term, Trump is ramping up the authoritarian playbook. His allies have instituted reimplementation of Schedule F, a plan that has let him fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with loyalists and toadies.

He’s floated using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, not because of any real uprising, but to suppress dissent and criminalize political opposition. Already, he’s stacked the Department of Justice with allies willing to prosecute his critics.

He’s fired or driven out independent voices at the EPA, CDC, DOD, VOA, NSA, CIA, and FBI, and there’s evidence that political litmus tests are being used for top appointments. He’s even demanding that the top generals in our military must submit to in-person interviews with him, presumably so he can see how willing they would be to turn their guns on the rest of us should he decide it’s come to that.

Trump has also continued insisting that “the 2020 and 2024 elections were rigged” despite his own win last year, a claim so bizarre it would be laughable if it weren’t so sinister. The message is clear: every election Republicans win is legitimate; every one they lose is fraudulent.

And either way, it’s an excuse to purge millions more from the voting rolls, make voting more difficult, and pass legislation to prevent millions of women from participating in our elections. This isn’t about winning or losing anymore: it’s about dismantling our democratic institutions altogether.

This is how it happens. Manufacture a crisis. Declare emergency powers. Undermine the courts, Congress, and the press. Rewrite the rules. Repeat until democracy becomes a hollow shell and the state exists solely to serve the men at the top and their billionaire supporters.

We’ve seen this story before. Putin rewrote the Russian constitution and declared himself president for life. Orbán turned Hungary into a one-party state masquerading as a democracy. And now Trump is trying to do the same thing here.

And just like in Russia and Hungary, the press is too often playing along, normalizing the abnormal, treating creeping authoritarianism as just another partisan squabble.

Which brings us to where the buck stops.

Democrats in Congress must stop dithering. They need to explicitly and loudly call out Trump’s abuse of emergency powers, and begin the work to repeal or radically reform the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which currently allows any president to rule by decree with shockingly little oversight. The Insurrection Act, last updated in 1871, must also be rewritten to limit unilateral use by the president without approval from Congress or the courts.

All that Democrats need to accomplish either one of these things is a small handful of Republicans willing to do the right thing. Perhaps this could happen with enough pressure from their Democratic colleagues and if enough of us reach out to them.

Meanwhile, the media must do its job. Stop framing this as a “Trump vs. the deep state” narrative or a clash of styles.

Today’s Republican Party under Trump’s iron-fisted rule has become an existential threat to our democratic republic. This isn’t about tax policy or tariffs; it’s about whether the president can declare himself and his party above the law, jail his opponents, and rule by fiat, all of which he is trying to do or proclaiming he will do right now.

The Founders were clear-eyed about tyranny. They weren’t naïve idealists. They read Montesquieu, studied Caesar and Cromwell, and understood that the only bulwark against dictatorship is a functioning system of checks and balances. That’s why they built three co-equal branches, and gave each the power to check the other two. That’s why emergency powers were kept limited and subject to judicial review. They feared exactly the kind of consolidation of power that Trump is now pulling off.

We’re standing on the edge of the same cliff that Russia and Hungary have already fallen from. The only question left is whether our leaders — especially in the Democratic Party, but hopefully soon they’ll be joined by a few Republicans who still have some integrity — will find the courage to call this what it is, and whether our institutions will act before it’s too late.

If Congress doesn’t rein Trump in, if the courts don’t slap down his illegal deployments and other actions, if the press doesn’t wake up, we’re going to lose more than an election. We’re going to lose the Republic.

Because once a strongman fully seizes power, it never ends with just the “emergency” ending.

We’ve seen this play before, and we know how it ends. One false crisis at a time. One emergency decree after another. One judge silenced, one protest criminalized, one more power seized “for our own good.”

This is not just another news cycle. It’s not partisan noise. It is the moment when a nation decides whether to step back from the cliff or follow others into the abyss.

Russia fell. Hungary fell. Now the edge is beneath our feet. If we keep pretending not to see it, gravity will make the decision for us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Authoritarian Cliff”

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

The Authoritarian Cliff

(Verse 1)
The sky was calm, the streets were still
But he cried out for war from the Capitol Hill
No riot, no fire, no threat in the air
Just a man with a crown and a vacant stare
He sent the soldiers into our towns
Said he’d save us all as he tore things down
The sirens screamed what the headlines missed
Another freedom erased with a clenched white fist

(Chorus)
We’re standing on the edge of the authoritarian cliff
With flags in our hands and truth adrift
Hungary fell, and Russia too
And now the mirror shows a red, white, blue
So raise your voice before it slips
Before we tumble from the authoritarian cliff

(Verse 2)
They called it order, they called it law
But it was theater wrapped in martial awe
A test of silence, a trial by fear
While the Constitution disappeared
He jailed the truth, fired the wise
Fed the courtrooms calculated lies
Called every loss a stolen prize
Now justice wears a thin disguise

(Chorus)
We’re standing on the edge of the authoritarian cliff
With shadows behind us, and no safety net if
We keep on watching, keep playing dumb
Then we deserve what we’ve become
Speak now, or the silence rips—
And down we go from the authoritarian cliff

(Bridge)
There’s a playbook written in cold regret
Of tyrants risen, and nations that forget
And we are reading Act III aloud
While the crowd still cheers, and the press still bows
But I won’t sing the strongman’s song
Won’t let him drag this soul along
To camps, to walls, to courts gone blind
To a future we’ll wish we’d left behind

(Chorus)
We’re standing on the edge of the authoritarian cliff
With history’s ghosts whispering “resist”
This ain’t a drill, it’s not pretend
This is how the republic ends
Unless we fight, unless we lift—
Each other from the authoritarian cliff

(Outro)
So light the truth, and pass it fast
Because the time for warnings has almost passed
One more step, and that’s the fall—
We either rise, or lose it all.