Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him.

Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home. It’s just before 9 o’clock on a frigid Monday in March—we haven’t even reached Act II of the three-hour pageant. RAW debuted 30 years ago and remains the top-rated cable program nearly every week, trouncing Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, whose fiery monologues are—knowingly or not—greatly influenced by those of professional wrestlers.

Rollins takes another step forward. Flames burst toward the ceiling. I’m mid-arena, enthralled, sitting next to Abraham Josephine Riesman, the author of Ringmaster, a new biography of WWE Executive Chair Vince McMahon, whose valorization of violent spectacle over morals led to, as the book’s subtitle wants you to believe, “the unmaking of America.” I’ve brought Riesman here to unpack that claim, and to better understand how one man could have such a profound influence on American culture and politics.

[Read: Donald Trump, wrestling heel]

You may recognize McMahon as the eye-bulging star of the internet’s go-to reaction meme. He also happens to be a close personal friend of former President Donald Trump. (His wife, Linda, served in Trump’s Cabinet as small-business secretary after two failed Senate bids in Connecticut.) McMahon stepped down from his position as WWE CEO last summer following allegations of sexual misconduct with female employees and related hush-money payments. Nevertheless, he’s still the company’s biggest shareholder and, depending on whom you ask, its puppeteer.

Though ostensibly banished from public-facing wrestling engagements, McMahon is rumored to be in the building tonight to welcome back his former moneymaker John Cena. But Cena and his jorts won’t slide into the ring for a while. Right now, the jacked-up crowd is chanting “FUCK YOU, LOGAN!” at 27-year-old Paul, who revels in the hatred. It’s loud. “Look at the smile on Logan Paul’s face,” Riesman shouts into my left ear. “He’s a dangerous man!”

Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view match. Foley really did fall 16 feet and crash through the announcers’ table. He was carted off on a stretcher, only to fight the paramedics and stumble back to the ring, where the Undertaker once again sent Foley’s massive body flying, this time through the “Hell in a Cell” chain-link roof. A bit later, the Undertaker choke-slammed him onto a pile of thumbtacks. By the time the match was over, Foley had a badly injured shoulder and a broken tooth shoved up his nose. Professional wrestling delivers sensory overload that’s almost impossible to capture with mere description. “It’s the best [thing] I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Andy Warhol said of a 1985 match at Madison Square Garden.

Eight years ago, a pervasive idea took hold in what passes for our “national political conversation.” During the summer and fall of 2015, with each new rally, interview, and debate, we were told that the outsider candidate Donald Trump was transforming American politics into wrestling. It was a convenient, if ahistorical, conceit. Politics and wrestling were entangled long before Trump descended the golden escalator and villainized imagined adversaries to the delight of hooting fans and cable-TV cameras. Around the turn of the millennium, Jesse “The Body” Ventura made televised wrestling cameos while serving as the governor of Minnesota. Teddy Roosevelt brought his love of wrestling into the White House. “George Washington wrestled,” Riesman writes in Ringmaster, “as did Abraham Lincoln, who fought in roughly three hundred matches—indeed, a famous one in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 made Honest Abe a local celebrity and was a key factor in putting him on the path to politics.”

Millions of people love wrestling; millions more loathe it. Many people simply don’t know what to do with it. Although the symbiotic relationship between politics and wrestling goes back centuries, it is fair to say that Trump exploited WWE tools and tricks better than anyone who had come before him. TV networks once carried Trump’s campaign rallies live because of their sheer unpredictability. In January 2016, it wasn’t enough for Trump to kick protesters out of a Vermont rally; he directed security to “throw ’em out into the cold” and “confiscate their coats.”

In Boston, while watching Seth Rollins and Logan Paul provoke, then pummel, each other, Riesman predicted—with a distressingly low level of irony—that Paul would be president of the United States someday. Paul is a skilled trash-talker and, despite his youth, a veteran self-promoter, two qualities that would serve him well in politics. One of the WWE’s greatest orators, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, spoke at the Republican National Convention during the peak of his wrestling career. Johnson, a household name even without his wrestling moniker, has been hinting at his own presidential run for the better part of a decade. Kane (Glenn Jacobs), the fire-and-brimstone on-screen brother of the Undertaker, is currently the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.

Trump, though twice impeached and not a wrestler, remains a proud member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Even if you’ve never watched a single match, you’ve likely seen the clip of the 45th president shaving Vince McMahon’s head with maniacal joy, or the one of him clotheslining his dear friend just outside the ropes. And if not, you’ve certainly seen the edited version in which instead of McMahon, Trump pulverizes the CNN logo. Trump shared that one on his official Twitter account in 2017, back before he was banned (and later reinstated) for inciting a violent mob at the Capitol.

I kept going over Riesman’s subtitle—The Unmaking of America—in my head while watching RAW a few weeks after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. During that speech, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a white, fur-collared coat suitable for the WWE legend Ric Flair, shouted, “Liar!” at Biden. Her congressional colleague Lauren Boebert has released scores of short, taped monologues that look and sound more than a little like wrestling promos. During Trump’s term, the CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s earnest sparring in the White House briefing room often resembled pre-bout barbs. Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, infamously asserted—with absurd sincerity—that his new boss had drawn the biggest crowd in inauguration history, period. Revisiting that day recently, I thought again of Ric Flair and his boundless hyperbole: “I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”

[Read: Viceland’s Dark Side of the Ring shows the sleaze and humanity of wrestling]

Riesman’s book is not about politics, nor is it strictly about wrestling. More than anything, Ringmaster describes one man’s greed and his quest for ultimate power, for control. Thus, politics—implicit and explicit—are woven through the decades-long narrative history of violence-as-capitalism. Yes, matches are rigged, and story lines play out over months or years, but it’s not all a show: Wrestlers really do get hurt. Sometimes they covertly slice their own skin with a blade to produce real blood. Other times, stunts go horribly wrong, such as when Owen Hart’s theatrical descent into the ring with faulty wiring ended his life in 1999. Chris Benoit, after years living with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, murdered his family and then committed suicide in 2007.

“You have a lot of injury and death that comes out of wrestling in a way that it certainly does not in other athletic events, with the possible exception of boxing,” Riesman said. “Pro wrestlers die younger on average than a lot of other professions. And somehow that gets glossed over.”

Through exhaustive research and a few key in-depth interviews—namely with Hart’s more famous older brother Bret—Riesman unspools a story of a messy beast that’s not quite a sport and not quite an opera, and has long occupied a dangerous gray area. As a reader, your appetite for territorial wrestling-promoter disputes and regional-broadcast wars will vary, though Ringmaster contains several valuable insights about how money and influence affect politics.

“Even before he started accepting their campaign dollars, Rick Santorum owed a debt to the McMahon family,” Riesman writes. In the 1980s, the future U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate was a young lawyer lobbying for deregulation on behalf of the WWE (then called the WWF). “Santorum was aggressive in his efforts to sway legislators and officials to Vince and Linda’s point of view,” we learn, especially when it came to loosening wrestling’s health-and-safety protocols.

The ’80s were a curious time for wrestling culture, and most of Ringmaster’s memorable anecdotes take place during this period. In 1988, then-businessman Donald Trump “hosted” Wrestlemania at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. That word is in quotes because, as with so much involving Trump, it was a con—the actual event took place across the street, at the Atlantic City Convention Center. (TV audiences were none the wiser, Riesman notes, and this helped Trump build his brand.) Two years earlier, the lawyer G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate fame, served as a Wrestlemania celebrity guest judge. A year before that, Gloria Steinem and the former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro filmed segments in which they emasculated “Rowdy” Roddy Piper to show support for Piper’s then-rival, the pop star Cindy Lauper. Although it was still derided as a sideshow, wrestling was going mainstream. Nonwrestlers—including Trump—played a key role in this evolution.

Over dinner before we walked to the arena, I asked Riesman, who goes by Josie, about the masculine stereotypes embedded within wrestling culture. Truthfully, my question was a little clumsier than that. I wanted to know if she thought that the “average” WWE fan we were about to encounter might be surprised to learn that she, a Harvard-educated transgender woman, could love something so barbaric.

“Wrestling is a carnival, and the carnival is a great leveler—there are people who came into wrestling as kids and came out as diehard Trump supporters or Second Amendment thumpers, but then you have people like me who came out as queer, weirdo anarchists,” she said. “I watched wrestling as a kid with a lot of people who came at wrestling from having been sports fans, but I was the one who came at it from the entertainment side.” Specifically, Riesman told me, she loved the wrestlers’ knack for elocution. “I had been doing musical theater, and it felt like musical theater to me. I found it thrilling; I didn't care about the matches,” she said. “I love the drama.”

Ringmaster has one of the best dedication pages I’ve read: “For my mother, who custom-stitched me a tearaway T-shirt after I first saw Hulk Hogan on TV.” One Halloween, my own saintly mom used a black marker to draw the Rock’s trademark sideburns on both of my cheeks and helped me wedge a set of football shoulder pads under a JUST BRING IT shirt to complete the costume. Like most parents, she didn’t love that I loved wrestling, but she eventually understood that I and every other middle-school boy was obsessed with it. RAW, Smackdown—we couldn’t look away. Maybe it was transitive: Watching a “good guy” like the Rock deliver “the people’s elbow” to a bullying foe was cathartic.

Or maybe we were just addicted to the story lines. Reflecting on my interview with Riesman, and her use of the word drama, I thought again of Santorum, who, after his failed bid for the White House in 2016, joined CNN as a political commentator. Although CNN positions itself as centrist, it leans left, and, until his firing in 2021, Santorum was one of its few Trump defenders. In other words, he was the network’s go-to “heel,” in wrestling parlance—a bad guy. I thought back to a line from the former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who helped bring Trump and The Apprentice into American living rooms back when he was at NBC. Zucker once told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that he viewed CNN’s pro-Trump panelists as “characters in a drama.” On-camera feuds boosted ratings. Political TV panels, like professional wrestling, could be both live and structured with familiar set pieces each week. Yet you never knew what someone might say or do. With WWE, McMahon perfected a sports-and-entertainment behemoth that kept 12-year-olds like me glued to the TV. With Trump, Zucker and his competitors were crafting similar news-and-politics-and-entertainment products. Flashy graphics, flying taunts, unraveling democracy: Who could look away?  

In Boston, the RAW broadcast cut away for a commercial break, and the jumbotron ran a WWE promo: “This May,” a booming voice began, “live from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia …” WWE is currently in the midst of a 10-year deal to stage programming in the Middle East, a privilege for which the kingdom is paying an estimated $40 million per event, according to Riesman. One of WWE’s rising stars, the scrappy and cerebral Sami Zayn, is the son of Syrian immigrants. Zayn reportedly refuses to participate in the Saudi gigs and thus, Riesman argued to me, “can never be champ.” Some wrestling insiders allege that it’s the Saudis who have banned him, on account of his ethnicity and political leanings. (Zayn has also been known to share links from the socialist magazine Jacobin—back in December, he wrote “GOAT” over a photo the publication had posted of the leftist public intellectual Noam Chomsky.) The WWE did not respond to a request for comment about Zayn’s involvement in matches in Saudi Arabia.

As Wrestlemania returns next weekend, Seth Rollins and Logan Paul will once again square off. During the main event, the title belt may transfer from the uber-dominant Roman Reigns to Cody Rhodes, son of the legendary wrestler Dusty Rhodes. The younger Rhodes is a buttoned-up, blue-eyed, bleached-blond character whose nickname is “The American Nightmare”—the inverse of his father, “The American Dream.” Rhodes’s logo is a menacing skull with eagle wings covered in an American flag. His entrance song also has its own choral “whoa-ohh-ohh.” It is hard to watch Rhodes strut out into the arena in his suit and tie and not think of a tougher, fitter, more strapping Trump—or, for that matter, Vince McMahon. Riesman’s full portrait of McMahon is by no means a puff piece, though I’d also hesitate to call it a hit job. For all of McMahon’s undesirable traits, for all the toxic masculinity, Riesman does seem impressed by his ability to vanquish his enemies through the years. More than an aloof businessman, McMahon is portrayed as an unhealthily competitive auteur who tapped into the American id and, on occasion, made magic.

Trump, in relative exile, seems obsessed with rekindling his 2016 campaign’s grotesque, supersize magic. For a while, Trump has been road-testing nicknames in hopes of denigrating his strongest 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Ron DeSanctimonius” wasn’t cutting it. “Meatball Ron” had potential. “Tiny D” was, well …

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis, for his part, recently reacted to news of Trump’s legal troubles with a slow-motion insult: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a press conference last week. Though still a fairly new force in Republican politics, DeSantis, too, makes a brief cameo in Ringmaster. In April 2020, barely one month into the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis deemed WWE an essential business, and permitted the organization to film fanless events at its facility in Orlando. The result was oddly quiet and a tad dystopian. “You can have a baseball game without a crowd,” Riesman said. “You can’t really have a wrestling match without a crowd.” Nor, for that matter, a political rally.

Riesman and I were at RAW right after I watched Trump deliver one of the darkest speeches of his career. “I am your retribution,” Trump told his CPAC fans. Though it wasn’t his strongest turn at the mic, the former president sounded more than a little like a pro wrestler, psyching himself up, hobbling back to the ring. And people seemed hungry for it.

You’d think that, by now, Donald Trump’s fans would be tired of all this. The long lines and the self-indulgent speeches and the relentless blasting of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” as they stand outside exposed to the elements. But they aren’t. Not at all.

After six years, the former president’s rallies still have summer-camp vibes—at least at first. At last night’s event in Waco, Texas—the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign—Trump’s thousands of supporters seemed delighted simply to be together at the Waco airport hangar, wearing their ULTRA MAGA T-shirts and drinking lemonade in the hot sun. Sure, the vendors ran out of water at one point, and there was no shade to speak of, but nobody really complained. They were too busy singing along to the Village People and bonding with new friends over their shared interests (justice, freedom, theories about a ruling Deep State cabal).

But the sunny mood of Trump’s supporters contrasted with his 2024 campaign message, which is different this time around—darker, more vengeful, and, if such a thing is possible, even more self-absorbed. “The abuses of power that we are witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved chapters” in history, Trump told the crowd in a clear reference to a potential indictment he’s facing related to hush-money payments to the porn actor Stormy Daniels—and probably also to the three other main legal cases against him. He spent 30 minutes soliloquizing about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the corrupt “thugs” in America’s justice system, and the apparent threat to his attorney-client privilege. Behind Trump, supporters held up WITCH HUNT signs that had been given out by the campaign.

[David A. Graham: The most disturbing part of Trump’s latest rant]

At his rallies in 2016, Trump used to tell his supporters, “I am your voice.” Last night, he offered something more sinister. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he told them. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Choosing Waco for his first campaign rally of the season was a little on the nose even for Trump, a man who has always relished a chance to say the quiet part out loud. In the spring of 1993, federal law-enforcement agents laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound, where a leader had bound his followers to him with apocalyptic warnings. Thirty years later, here was Trump, whipping up his own supporters with claims of similar law-enforcement overreach—which, in Trump’s case, may mean being charged with crimes related to his dealings with a star of Porking With Pride 2.

At times over the past week, Trump has seemed almost giddy at the prospect of an indictment, reportedly musing with aides about how he might behave during a potential perp walk. The past few days have also been anxious ones for Trump, according to the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, but also according to anyone reading Trump’s frantic social-media posts. On Truth Social, in between site ads for mole and skin-tag removal, the former president has been Truthing and Retruthing with the all-caps enthusiasm of a middle schooler hopped up on Pixy Stix. “EVERYBODY KNOWS I’M 100% INNOCENT,” he wrote last week. “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!” Trump predicted an imminent arrest, and urged Americans to “PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!” On Thursday, presumably while pacing the gilded halls of Mar-a-Lago, Trump amped up his rhetoric by warning—or maybe, threatening—about the “death & destruction” that could occur if he is eventually charged.

[Tim Naftali: Indicting a former president should always have been fair game]

Trump was not indicted last week, but it could happen this week—as early as tomorrow, when the grand jury is due to reconvene. If Trump is arrested, he might be booked the same as any other suspect. Americans may get to see his mug shot. We may also see the kind of turbulent protests that he’s clearly agitating for. His supporters, predictably, think the whole Stormy Daniels situation is hogwash. “We laugh at it all, because the liberal side is just trying to throw everything at the wall to see if something sticks,” Ron Weldon, a helicopter pilot from Keller, told me at Waco. Texan rally goers I spoke with forecast that, if Trump is indicted, there will be protests, but they will be peaceful, and nothing major. They’d really like to avoid another January 6 situation, which, they reminded me, was caused by FBI plants. An indictment, they said, will only make them love Trump more. “If they do that, they might as well seal their fate: He’s gonna win,” Janet Larson, a retiree from Temple, told me.

Last night, though, no one acted as if their leader was about to be indicted. People sucked on Bomb Pops and danced and got sunburned. They carried around their tiny dogs and booed the press at all the right times. When Trump’s jet landed, an hour later than scheduled, a vendor abandoned her ice-cream truck to take a video. Zany conspiracy theories ran rampant: A woman named Stephanie Tatar wearing a hot-pink pantsuit told me that she’s starting a business that allows people to fax her handwritten letters to Trump; she’ll deliver them personally to Mar-a-Lago, to avoid censorship by the postal service. Priscilla Patterson, a 50-something woman from Waco, said that she wasn’t worried about Trump winning in 2024, because he’d be installed as the rightful president well before then. Her husband, Ricky Patterson, suggested that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is currently Trump’s main presumptive rival in the Republican primary race, was himself a puppet of the elite ruling cabal.

[Brian Klaas: Rule by law in Florida]

Recent stories about Trump’s supporters have suggested that they’re bored with him, or flirting with the idea of switching candidates. But the fans still showing up at his rallies—at least the estimated 10,000 of them last night in Waco—seem more bullish than ever. Maybe it was a good thing, they said, that Trump had been away for a couple of years—America got to see what it was missing: low gas prices, no wars in Europe. And they are not considering other candidates: DeSantis is too establishment, too fake, not ready for prime time. It’s Trump, all the way, baby. No one else even comes close.

Trump and his supporters have been through a lot together since 2020: the stolen election; the FBI inside job on January 6, 2021; the long list of legal persecutions. These trials have served only to cement their devotion. So, for them, seeing Trump back on the campaign trail was like witnessing the long-awaited return of an exiled leader. That’s why, they told me, this cycle’s campaign will be different. “The other ones were ‘Let’s make America great! Let’s clean it up, let’s do things right!’” a Waco man named Brian, who declined to share his last name, told me. But he prefers to use Trump’s word to describe this next iteration. “To me, this is retribution. We’ve got to get our country back, because it’s been stolen from us.” What would that retribution promised by Trump look like? I asked. “People who have done fraud and illegal stuff, they’ve gotta be perp walked. They need to face justice,” he said. “There’s a two-tier level of justice in this country.”

The legal system is corrupt, the political system is rigged, and Joe Biden was never elected president, Ricky Patterson told me. Trump’s campaign is a crusade for “redemption.” Trump is a “new-age Moses,” April Rickman, from Midland, Texas, told me. “He delivered the people from Egypt.”

The prophet himself—after ranting about Bragg and corruption, and getting off a few good DeSantis barbs—offered a few moments of hope for such deliverance. To round after round of applause, he promised to close the border, unleash ICE, and deport gang members “with tattoos on their faces.” He vowed to “settle” the war in Ukraine in just 24 hours, to keep trans girls out of girls’ sports, and to prevent World War III. The crowd around me screamed its approval.

[Adam Serwer: Don’t cut corners on indicting Trump]

But the high didn’t last long. Suddenly, a somber string melody was playing through the loudspeakers, and Trump was speaking over it. An American flag rippled on the jumbotrons behind him. “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation,” he said to an audience that, hours before, had been beaming in the sun with Mountain Dew and stuffed pretzels. “We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke. And we are a nation that is hostile to liberty, freedom, and faith.”

Then it was all over, and Trump’s plane pulled out onto the runway to take him back to Florida. The hardcore fans who’d stuck around to watch his departure lined up along the fence to wave goodbye. As the plane sped down the tarmac, April Rickman held her hands up to the sky.

Comedian and television host Jon Stewart discusses the Manhattan District Attorney's possible indictment of former President Donald Trump with CNN's Fareed Zakaria.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) says that he has been briefed by the FBI about possible threats that could occur if former President Donald Trump is indicted in New York. Trump is under investigation for an alleged hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, but Trump has not yet been charged in the case.

After Donald Trump sabotaged the 2022 midterm elections for Republicans by endorsing unelectable extremists, a comforting narrative took root among GOP elites. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would offer a return to “normal” politics, continuing Trump’s aggressive, unapologetic defense of traditional American culture and values but without all that pesky authoritarianism. He would continue to wrap himself in an American flag, but he wouldn’t invite people to dinner who preferred wearing the Nazi one.

Many on the political left drew the opposite conclusion. DeSantis was the real threat, a smarter, more disciplined version of Trump. Whereas Trump believed in anyone or anything that believed in him, DeSantis was a dangerous ideologue. Trump would tweet like an autocrat; DeSantis would act like one.

Is DeSantis an authoritarian? The governor is the political equivalent of an overly greased weather vane, twisting to follow the winds within his party. In the post-Trump GOP, those winds are blowing in an authoritarian direction. Whether he’s an authoritarian at heart or just a cynical opportunist, what matters is how DeSantis behaves. And as governor, he has repeatedly used the powers of his office in authoritarian ways.

Several political words have taken on an expansive meaning in recent years, drifting from their intended use to serve as a linguistic cudgel against any opponent. On the right, many people have misused the word woke as a lazy shorthand to mean anything they classify as “bad cultural change.” A smaller group on the left has misused authoritarian to describe right-wing policies that are perhaps objectionable but nonetheless compatible with democracy.  

[Adam Serwer: Woke is just another word for liberal]

Authoritarian, in the political-science sense of the word, usually refers to two broad kinds of political action within democracies such as the United States. The first is antidemocratic politics, where a politician attacks the institutions, principles, or rules of democracy. The second is personalized rule, in which the leader uses their power to target specific groups or individuals, persecuting their enemies while protecting their allies.

Wooden rather than magnetic, DeSantis doesn’t engage in the impulsive, stage-based showman authoritarianism of Donald Trump. His antidemocracy politics are calculated and disciplined. In Florida, he has engaged in legislative authoritarianism, replacing rule of law with rule by law. His playbook is now familiar to Floridians: He uses attention-grabbing stunts or changes formal policies to target individuals, groups, or companies he doesn’t like. Then he holds a press conference to tout his ability to take on all the people the Republican base loves to hate.

In functioning democracies, the law is a great equalizer—political allies and adversaries are treated the same. But in “the free state of Florida,” that’s not true. After DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill, Disney denounced it. That’s part of democratic politics; citizens and companies are free to speak out against legislation without fear of retribution. But DeSantis retaliated forcefully, using his formal political power to punish a perceived political enemy. He signed a law revoking Disney’s control over a special district in the state.

DeSantis made clear that the legislation specifically targeted Disney because of its political speech. “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California,” DeSantis said before signing the bill. “And you’re going to marshal your economic power to attack the parents of my state? We view that as a provocation, and we’re gonna fight back against that.” Lest anyone misread his intent, he also assured his supporters: “We have everything thought out … Don’t let anyone tell you that somehow Disney’s going to get a tax cut out of this. They’re going to pay more taxes as a result of it.” This was legislative authoritarianism in action.

Last summer, DeSantis developed a flimsy pretext to remove a Democratic prosecutor, Andrew H. Warren. In a subsequent lawsuit, a judge reviewed an extensive array of evidence and concluded that DeSantis’s goal had been “to amass information that could help bring down Mr. Warren, not to find out how Mr. Warren actually runs the office.” The judge suggested that this was a political move. Decide whom to fire first; figure out how to justify it later.

More broadly, DeSantis has repeatedly used the law for purely political ends. In one instance, DeSantis used state funds to fly a group of bewildered migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as a political stunt. He wasn’t advancing a broad-based policy change. He was targeting a specific group of vulnerable people to score headlines that would benefit him personally, which isn’t how legal authority is supposed to operate in a democracy.

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

DeSantis has also taken aim at freedom of the press, hoping to weaken existing legal protections for reporters. And he has signed legislation that reduces legal liability for drivers who injure or kill protesters with their cars on public roads. Critics say the legislation, which has been blocked by a judge, could expose protesters to the risk of prosecution.

Of course not everything DeSantis does merits the authoritarian label. He has proposed that hospitals be required to collect data on patients’ immigration status. This, as critics argue, is likely to worsen public-health outcomes and put an undue burden on doctors and nurses to become Florida’s frontline immigration police. But it’s not authoritarian. It’s just a run-of-the-mill bad policy idea.

Sometimes, context determines whether a political action is authoritarian. Cracking down on voter fraud is certainly not authoritarian; it’s just enforcing the law. However, if the crackdown is supposed to undermine public confidence in democracy while targeting a specific group of people who are unpopular in your own party, then it may deserve the label.

What should we make of DeSantis’s high-profile task force to tackle voter fraud in Florida? Twenty-six cases of voter fraud have been verified in the state since 2016. In that time frame, voters have cast roughly 36 million ballots in general federal elections. That’s a nonexistent problem, but the Republican base, thanks to Trump’s lies about fraud, believes it’s widespread. DeSantis was likely trying to score political points while diminishing faith in the democratic process. Last summer, this stunt culminated in a Black man being arrested at gunpoint for illegal voting. (He had cast a ballot because he mistakenly believed that Florida’s restoration of felon voting rights applied to him. Similar cases have been dismissed when they reach the courts.)

In Florida’s public schools, DeSantis has sought to make book-banning easier. Again, governors have the legal right to sway educational policy, and doing so is not authoritarian. What’s worrying about DeSantis’s role in education is that he’s trying to muzzle classroom speech that differs from his worldview. House Bill 7, sometimes referred to as the Stop WOKE Act, prohibits educators from teaching students about systemic racism. This has had the predictable effect of eroding freedom of expression in the classroom. One publisher even removed references to race in a textbook entry about Rosa Parks. Parks’s story became about stubbornness, not racism. “One day, she rode the bus,” the post–H.B. 7 text reads. “She was told to move to a different seat. She did not.” Why was she asked to move? For Florida’s students, that will remain a mystery.

In higher education, similarly, DeSantis has tried to make it easier to fire professors who teach material that a conservative like him might find objectionable. Palm Beach Atlantic University has already fired a professor who taught about racism, after a parent complained.

Those who argue that DeSantis is not an authoritarian have pointed to his evasive refusal to echo Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. But before the 2022 midterm elections, DeSantis actively campaigned for some of the GOP’s most prominent election deniers, such as Kari Lake of Arizona and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, even though Mastriano had prayed that Trump would “seize the power” on January 6 and was at the Capitol rally before the attack began.

But would President DeSantis be worse for American democracy than President Trump: The Sequel? To answer that question, you have to understand why DeSantis is behaving like an authoritarian.

DeSantis started his career when the Republican Party was dominated by George W. Bush and John McCain. He was first elected to Congress in 2012, when Mitt Romney defined the GOP. DeSantis, unlike Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, wasn’t drawn to politics by Trumpism; he was comfortable making the case for Romney Republicans.

That party is now dead, its former darlings turned into pariahs. Like so many Republicans, DeSantis recognized the death of the old party in 2016. He enthusiastically rebranded himself, going so far as to make his toddler “Build the Wall” with toy bricks in a cringeworthy 2018 campaign ad.

DeSantis understands that after years of Trump dominating the party, its base has changed. Core Republican voters now crave an authoritarian bully, a culture warrior who will pick fights. DeSantis may not have always been an authoritarian political figure, but he has made clear that he will behave like one to pursue power.

This makes DeSantis dangerous for American democracy. On the political left, opinion is divided as to whether DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump. My take is that DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump was when he became president in 2017, but less dangerous than Trump would be if he took office in 2025.

That’s because Trump changed the Republican Party, winnowing out any remaining principled prodemocracy conservatives, either through primaries or resignations. Many of those who stayed underwent the “Elise Stefanik conversion,” morphing from Paul Ryan supporters into Trump disciples, willing to torch America’s democratic institutions if it aligned with their self-interest. As evidenced by the so-called sedition caucus, many elected Republicans will use their power to undermine democracy.

By contrast, Trump faced some pushback in 2017, when his legislative agenda, including his health-care plan, stalled in a Republican-dominated Congress. DeSantis, a more methodical politician, would face fewer constraints. He could undercut American democracy with a legislative scalpel, all with his party’s fervent support in Congress.

But Trump in a second term, with the Trumpified Republican caucus in Congress, would take a wrecking ball to our institutions. Since leaving office, he’s become even more erratic and unhinged. His current social-media posts make his 2017 tweets appear statesmanlike by comparison.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to vote for one of these two authoritarians, I’d vote for DeSantis. But his track record in Florida should make us wary. He may not be Trump, but he’s a danger to American democracy nonetheless.

Facing a potential indictment, Donald Trump took a defiant stance at a rally on Saturday, disparaging the investigation against him and predicting his vindication.

The rally in Waco, Texas, may be the former president’s last public appearance before he faces potential criminal charges.

• Trump baselessly rails against 'prosecutorial misconduct' at rally as investigations loom

Ex-US president casts 2024 contest in apocalyptic terms, compares investigations against him with 'Stalinist Russia'.

As Donald Trump stares down a potential arrest, it is business as usual at his campaign rally.