With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.

But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals.

Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey.

Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life. Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists. Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same. He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another.

[Read: The spies are shown the door]

Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities. In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits.

The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment. Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged. At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights.

Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition.

Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms. Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons). Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters.

[Read: Trump and Musk are destroying the basics of a healthy democracy]

They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South. Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region.

Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly.

Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior. Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs.

But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation. Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it. Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists. Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance.

Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations. They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens.

Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines. But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game. How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism? How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution?

Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support. His approval rating has never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration. An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support. The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box.

Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.

Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid. Project 2025 did not call for freezing all foreign aid or locking USAID employees out of their headquarters. Nor did the treatise suggest shutting down the $40 billion agency and subsuming it into the State Department—all without a single vote in Congress.

As the chair of Trump’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has razed USAID with shocking speed. He’s called it “evil,” “a radical-left political psy op,” and “a criminal organization.” The rampage seemed to come out of nowhere, but the 64-year-old agency has long been one of the government’s most vulnerable conservative targets.

[Read: Why Trump can’t banish the weirdos]

Although foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget, right-wing politicians began attacking it well before Trump. In the 1990s, the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina likened the disbursement of American money abroad to shoving taxpayer dollars “down a rathole.” Conservatives have even tried to abolish USAID—most notably Helms in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But the scope of those attempts pales in comparison to what Trump and Musk are doing now, George Ingram, a former USAID official in the Clinton administration, told me. “This,” he said, “is fundamentally different.”

At Musk’s urging, the Trump administration has placed nearly all USAID employees on administrative leave and recalled thousands from overseas postings with virtually no notice. (At the same time, the president declared that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip—a mission that would presumably require a sizable American deployment.) Trump designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator. In one of his first moves, Rubio wrote to senior members of Congress—not to ask for their help in reforming the agency but merely to notify them that the government might reorganize it.

“It’s ridiculous,” Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator, told me. He ran the organization for the first five years of the George W. Bush administration and describes himself as “the most conservative administrator in the history of the agency.” Natsios has his share of problems with USAID, including his sense that its staff is often unresponsive to political leadership, a critique that Project 2025 echoes. But Natsios, who’s now a professor at Texas A&M University, is aghast at the Trump administration’s purge of USAID. (He began our conversation by comparing it to the Russian Revolution.) For days, he’s been fielding calls from panicked contacts at the agency. “They are not reviewing each project,” he said. “They’re eliminating entire bureaus, whole programs, simply deleting them without even looking at what they’re doing.”

USAID was created in 1961 to consolidate programs that had grown out of the Marshall Plan, said Ingram, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Congress considered putting USAID in the State Department but kept it separate so that it could operate more nimbly—like a business, Ingram told me, rather than a bureaucracy.

Presidents of both parties have supported foreign aid, including Ronald Reagan and the second Bush, who weren’t enthusiastic about it as candidates. “Once they got into office, they saw that it was a very important tool of U.S. foreign policy,” Ingram said. Even one of the Project 2025 authors acknowledged that foreign aid has helped America check global adversaries; a former USAID deputy administrator, Max Primorac, credited the agency with countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, authoritarian regimes have long denounced American aid, and now some of them are praising Musk’s efforts. Musk himself promoted a laudatory post on X from a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With that adulation in mind, Natsios questioned whether Musk’s campaign against USAID might be “motivated by his desire to please the Kremlin.”

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Sending taxpayer funds abroad has never been particularly popular, a reality that Trump seized on during his first term by attacking foreign aid as part of his “America First” agenda. In 2017, administration officials reportedly drafted proposals to merge USAID with the State Department, but they never went anywhere. Polling has found that Americans dramatically overestimate the amount of money the government spends on foreign aid, and in a survey released this week, most respondents backed cuts to foreign aid. Natsios faulted the Biden administration for making USAID an even more inviting target for Trump 2.0 by trying to export progressive values such as LGBTQ and abortion rights, especially to countries where they are unpopular. “They brought part of this on,” he said.

By and large, Republican lawmakers have simply watched as Musk and his allies shut down an agency that, according to a paper published on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, cannot be abolished, moved, or consolidated without authorization from Congress. A few have issued mild protests. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana criticized the pause on distributing HIV/AIDS drugs through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a George W. Bush–era program that enjoys wide bipartisan support domestically and internationally. “It is a Republican initiative, it is pro-life, pro-America and the most popular U.S. program in Africa,” Cassidy wrote on X. “This must be reversed immediately!!”

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who until last month served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration was “right to scrutinize and revamp” USAID, but he strongly defended its purpose and urged the president to eventually resume sending aid abroad. “U.S. foreign-assistance programs not only feed starving women and children in some of the most destitute parts of the world, but they also promote democracy, help stabilize fragile nations on the brink of collapse, and counter our adversaries’ attempts to shift the global balance of power,” McCaul told me.

By contrast, McCaul’s successor atop the committee, Representative Brian Mast of Florida, cheered the administration unreservedly and released a four-minute video “exposing radical, far-left grants” supposedly issued during the Biden administration. His list included $15 million for “condoms for the Taliban,” money to expand “atheism in Nepal,” and various line items promoting LGBTQ rights. (The contraceptives were for Afghan citizens, not members of the Taliban; the Nepal grant promoted religious freedom.)

When I asked Natsios, a lifelong Republican, what he made of the response from GOP lawmakers, he scoffed: “The Republican Party in Congress is a disgrace.”

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Advocates for USAID now have little choice but to place their hopes in Rubio, who as a senator defended foreign assistance as “critical to our national security.” In his new role, however, he has characterized USAID as a rogue agency whose leaders misspent taxpayer money and refused to cooperate with Trump’s directives during his first few days in office. “There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue,” Rubio told reporters in El Salvador on Monday. “But it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”

Natsios used to enthusiastically support Rubio. He told me that he once saw Rubio give “the strongest speech for foreign aid” he had ever heard. He contributed to Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016—when Rubio was a GOP rival to Trump—and said the then-senator had told him that, had he won, he would have brought him into the White House. Now, Natsios told me, Rubio has a choice to make: “He is going to accept the ideology” of Trump and Musk, “or he is going to get fired.”

While Rubio and other Republicans decide whether, and how much, to fight for U.S. foreign aid, the ripple effects of the firings and funding freeze at USAID are quickly growing. Many policy decisions in Washington take weeks or even months to be felt overseas. Not this one, Ingram said. The moves threaten the jobs of thousands of people connected to the aid industry inside the U.S., and they jeopardize the livelihood of potentially hundreds of thousands of people—or more—in the developing world, who rely on USAID for health care, food, fertilizer, and other crucial supplies. Ingram was stunned: “I have never seen a government action have such an immediate impact.”

El Salvador has offered to take in criminals deported from the US and house them in its mega-jail.

For a moment on Sunday, the government of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro looked like it might be the first in Latin America to take a meaningful stand against President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans. Instead, Petro gave Trump the perfect opportunity to show how far he would go to enforce compliance. Latin American leaders came out worse off.

On Sunday afternoon, Petro, a leftist who has held office since 2022, announced on X that he would not allow two U.S. military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees to land. He forced them to turn back mid-flight and demanded that Trump establish a protocol for treating deportees with dignity.

Colombia had quietly accepted military deportation flights before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Financial Times. But the Trump administration began flaunting these flights publicly, and some deportees sent to Brazil claimed that they were shackled, denied water, and beaten. Petro saw all of this as a step too far, and reacted. He clarified that he would still accept deportations carried out via “civilian aircraft,” without treating migrants “like criminals” (more than 120 such flights landed in Colombia last year).

Trump responded by threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods (to be raised to 50 percent within a week), impose emergency banking sanctions, and bar entry to all Colombian-government officials and even their “allies.” The message was clear: To get his way on deportations, he would stop at nothing, even if this meant blowing up relations with one of the United States’ closest Latin American partners.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Petro almost immediately backed down. He seemed to have taken the stand on a whim, possibly in part to distract from a flare-up in violence among armed criminal groups inside his country. The White House announced that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights, including on military aircraft. Petro gave a tepid repost, then deleted it.

For Trump, the incident was a perfect PR stunt, allowing him to showcase the maximum-pressure strategy he might use against any Latin American government that openly challenges his mass-deportation plans and offering a test case for whether tariffs can work to coerce cooperation from U.S. allies. For Latin America, the ordeal could not have come at a worse time.

Across the region, leaders are bracing for the impact of deportations—not only of their own citizens, but of “third-country nationals” such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, whose governments often refuse to take them back. They are rightfully worried about what a sudden influx of newcomers and a decline in remittance payments from the United States will mean for their generally slow-growing economies, weak formal labor markets, and strained social services, not to mention public safety, given the tendency of criminal gangs to kidnap and forcibly recruit vulnerable recent deportees.

If Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the scope or scale of deportation behind closed doors, they do not appear to be having much success. Several leaders seem to be losing their nerve. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, went from expressing hope for an agreement with the Trump administration to receive only Mexicans to accepting the continued deportation of noncitizens—perhaps because Trump threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods as soon as February 1. Honduras threatened to expel a U.S. Air Force base on January 3 if the United States carried on with its deportation plans. By January 27, Honduras folded, saying that it would accept military deportation flights but requesting that deportees not be shackled. Guatemala is trying to draw the line at taking in only fellow Central Americans.

Most Latin American leaders will bend to Trump’s wishes on mass deportation rather than invite the strong-arm tactics he threatened to use on Colombia. One reason is that tariffs can really hurt the countries whose cooperation Trump needs most on deportations. Unlike most of South America, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador still trade more with the United States than with China. Only with Mexico, the United States’ largest trade partner, does the leverage go both ways, but even there it is sharply asymmetrical (more than 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP).

Latin American countries could improve their bargaining position by taking a unified stand and negotiating with Trump as a bloc. But the chances that they will do so are slim and getting slimmer. Today, Honduran President Xiomara Castro called off a planned meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a left-leaning regional bloc, to discuss migration, faulting a “lack of consensus.”

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

Latin American presidents have relatively weak incentives to fight Trump on migration. The region is home to more than 20 million displaced people, millions of whom reside as migrants or refugees in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere—and yet, migration is simply not that big of a diplomatic political issue in most countries. That could change if deportations reach a scale sufficient to rattle economies, but Latin American leaders are focused on the short term, much as Trump is. Presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall based on crime and the economy more than immigration, and at least for now, anti-U.S. nationalism is not the political force it has been in the past.

So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.

“Every South American leader, even pro-American ones, will look at Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis Panama, Colombia, and Mexico and understand the risks of being overly dependent on the U.S. right now. The majority will seek to diversify their partnerships to limit their exposure to Trump,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian international-relations analyst, posted on X in the middle of the Colombia standoff. He’s right. Latin American leaders, even several conservative ones, moved closer to China during Trump’s first term, which is not what Trump wants. Reducing China’s presence in Latin America seems to be his No. 2 priority in the region (see his threats to Panama over the Hong Kong company operating near its canal). Chinese investments in dual-use infrastructure and 5G technology pose long-term national-security risks to the United States. But Trump’s tariff threats and coercion could rattle Latin America and help China make its sales pitch to the region: We’re the reliable ones. The long-standing lament that Latin American conservatives, centrists, and leftists share is that whereas the United States comes to the region to punish and lecture, China comes to trade. Trump’s current approach gives that complaint extra credence.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

Trump’s deportation plans threaten to destabilize parts of Latin America, which will have repercussions for the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people to countries without the economic or logistical capacity to absorb them could leave the region reeling. Consider that the Trump administration is negotiating an asylum agreement with El Salvador—a country with one of the weakest and smallest economies, and highest rates of labor informality, in all of Central America. If Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans are sent there, they are almost guaranteed not to find jobs. People deported to Honduras and Guatemala will also likely struggle to find work and face recruitment by gangs. And because remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Guatemala and about a quarter in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, large-scale deportations threaten to deliver a brutal shock to their economies. Mexico’s economy is bigger and sturdier, but economists have shown that large influxes of deportees there, too, tend to depress formal-sector wages and increase crime. The inflow of workers might still benefit economies like Mexico’s in the long run. But in the short to medium term, Trump’s mass-deportation plans are a recipe for instability.

The lesson of the past several decades—Trump’s first term included—is that Latin American instability never remains contained within the region. It inevitably comes boomeranging back to the United States. Mexican cartels didn’t gain far-reaching influence just in their country. They fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed more than a quarter million Americans since 2018. Venezuela’s economic collapse under authoritarian rule didn’t bring misery only upon that country; it produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than half a million Venezuelans fleeing to the United States. Instability nowhere else in the world affects the United States more directly, or profoundly, than that in Latin America.

In the 1980s and ’90s, internal armed conflicts raged in Colombia and Central America, and Mexico confronted serial economic crises. Since then, the United States’ immediate neighbors have become relatively more stable, democratic, and prosperous. But slow growth, fiscal imbalances, and, above all, the growing power of organized crime have tested that stability in recent years. Trump is adding to the pressure with mass deportations—then hoping to contain whatever erupts by simply hardening the southern border. That’s quite the gamble.