The United States is facing a major test of American democracy as experts warn that the Trump administration is dragging the nation into “some form of autocracy,” NPR reports.

The U.S. has already crossed the threshold and become an “electoral autocracy,” Staffan I. Lindberg, the director of Sweden’s V-Dem Institute, told NPR.

“I would argue that the United States in 2025-26 has slid into a mild form of competitive authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. “I think it’s reversible, but this is authoritarianism.”

“Under competitive authoritarianism,” NPR explained, “countries still hold elections, but the ruling party uses various tactics — attacking the press, disenfranchising voters, weaponizing the justice system and threatening critics — to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor.”

Levitsky cited several critical points in September as examples, including the Trump administration’s threat against ABC parent company Disney following host Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks on the killing of Charlie Kirk.

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“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said.

He also cited Trump’s proposal to use American cities as “training grounds” for troops.

“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military,” Trump said, as the Military Times reported.

The president “told the commanders that defending the homeland was the military’s ‘most important priority’ and suggested the leaders in attendance could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City.”

“No different than a foreign enemy,” Trump said, “but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”

Levitsky, NPR reported, “said this is the kind of language dictators in South America used in the 1970s — leaders like Augusto Pinochet in Chile.”

NPR notes that the “next big test” could come during the midterms.

Kim Scheppele, a Princeton University sociologist who has studied the authoritarian tactics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, warned that in 2014 Orbán’s government “disenfranchised almost all the Hungarians in the U.K., most of whom were oppositional to Orbán,”

Dartmouth College professor of government Brendan Nyhan warned, “The way Election Day works in this country, there are no do-overs.”

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If Americans during President Donald Trump’s first term were exhausted by his “controversy and chaos,” they now appear to be similarly distressed by his “backtracking and blowing things up,” according to a report by Politico.

In the second year of his second term, President Trump “intensified the volatility” from year one “with a succession of whiplash-inducing policy swings, several of which have almost immediately withered in the face of Republican opposition and public outcry.”

For example, the Trump administration just withdrew thousands of federal law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, following the two violent deaths of U.S. citizens and after “clashes with protesters turned the tide of public opinion against the president’s immigration crackdown.”

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There is the Greenland gambit, which appears to be paused, at least for now. There were the “Liberation Day” tariffs he announced in April, only to partially, but quickly, lower them “within days following tremors in global bond markets.”

Trump threatened to decertify Canadian aircraft, then dropped the threat. He declared he would drop credit card interest rates to ten percent, then dropped that, too, and in a rare move, asked Congress for legislation to do so. His push to create 50-year mortgages appears to have subsided.

He paused millions of dollars in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funding for state programs, then reversed course about a day later.

“The whiplash has real implications,” Chrissie Juliano, the executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, told Politico. “It’s incredibly disruptive, even if you can get back to continuing the work, you know, two days later.”

Domestically and internationally, Trump’s “unpredictability” has become a “feature, not a bug.”

“In many matters, especially negotiations with other countries, his mercurial opacity is often an attempt to gain leverage, but his threats seemingly lead just as often to backtracking as blowing things up, be they Iranian missile depots, Venezuelan drug boats or the transatlantic alliance,” Politico reported.

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The risks are real.

“Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences,” a financial industry insider, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly without fear of blowback from the White House, told Politico. “Markets react. Issuers reassess risk. When policymakers float price controls, it creates uncertainty that can translate into tighter underwriting and reduced access — particularly for higher-risk or lower-income consumers.”

Trump’s poll numbers are now at the lowest point of his second term, Republican pollster Whit Ayres told Politico.

“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term,” Ayres said.

When a president’s approval rating is above 50 percent, the party in the White House loses House seats in the midterms, “but not that many,” Ayres noted. “When the president’s job approval is below, the average loss of seats is 32.”

Ayres “said that Trump’s approval numbers largely mirror those from his first term, when the public over four years grew exhausted by constant controversy and chaos.”

“Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy,” Ayres said. “And that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”

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Prominent podcaster Joe Rogan warned that the handling of the Epstein files “looks terrible” for President Donald Trump and his administration.

“During Tuesday and Thursday’s episodes, Rogan criticized redactions the Department of Justice made from the files,” The Hill reported.

“Who knows what f — — happens with all this Epstein files s — —,” he said, according to video of his streaming show. “It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper.”

“Why would your name be redacted if you’re not a victim?” Rogan also asked. “Like, this is what’s crazy about all this. Like, how come you redact some people and you don’t redact other people?”

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“Like, what is this?” the podcaster continued. “This is not good. None of this is good for this administration. It looks f — — terrible. It looks terrible. It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real. This is all a hoax. This is not a hoax. Like, did you not know?”

“Maybe he didn’t know if you want to be charitable? But this is definitely not a hoax. And if you’ve got redacted people’s names, and these people aren’t victims, you’re not protecting the victim. So what are you doing?”

“And how come all this s — — is not released?” Rogan asked.

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