How Trump is conditioning Americans to accept his autocratic rule

The images are bizarre yet familiar. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, troops stand watch in full battle dress. Armoured vehicles idle before monuments built to honour liberty. This is Washington, not Kyiv, Caracas or Moscow. It is not the aftermath of a terrorist attack or invasion but rather a president who has discovered that the spectacle of force is itself power. On the orders of US President Donald Trump, National Guard units have been deployed across the US capital. More striking still, he has taken the extraordinary step of federalising the District of Columbia police under a presidential emergency declaration in an unprecedented assertion of executive authority in the city. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has acquiesced, albeit under protest. Trump’s rationale, as ever, is vague. He has claimed “the murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City or some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth.” However, this has never been about crime; otherwise, Republican strongholds with higher crime rates would have seen similar actions. The timing of these deployments is not an accident, either. Trump still faces pressure over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The economy remains shaky, inflation is stubborn and job growth is anaemic. What better way for Trump to change the subject than to conjure a menace in the streets and present himself as a saviour? However, this is not just a distraction. It is conditioning that started when he deployed the National Guard and the US Marines to Los Angeles, actions that US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled illegal on Tuesday, warning that Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared intent on “creating a national police force with the president as its chief”. This ruling notwithstanding, Trump has been conducting a rehearsal for autocracy by normalising soldiers and federalised police on American streets. The United States has always harboured a deep suspicion of standing armies. The country’s founders enshrined this in the US Constitution, with the Third Amendment that prohibits the quartering of troops in homes a permanent scar from British colonial overreach. Civilian policing, decentralised and local, was meant to be the American answer. Trump has turned this instinct on its head. He has invoked emergency powers with a casualness unseen in modern times and stretches this authority to cover not riots or rebellion but amorphous “threats”. This is the method of the would-be autocrat. You do not seize power in a single stroke; you accustom the citizenry to smaller usurpations until outrage gives way to weary acquiescence. Benito Mussolini’s “March on Rome” was not only a seizure of government but an introduction, an armed parade to familiarise Italians with the presence of blackshirts on their streets. The greater tragedy is that Trump has not achieved this alone. The Republican Party, once the party of constitutional conservatism, has facilitated his aggrandisement of executive power at every step. For decades, conservatives railed against judicial activism, bureaucratic overreach and the imperial presidency. Now, they applaud it. They act as if Democrats will never return to power and as if today’s precedents will never be used against them. This is constitutional myopia, and it should make one wonder what exactly is happening. But the real stress test – the 2026 midterm elections – has yet to come. Trump cannot afford defeat and a hostile House of Representatives. His first term was twice marred by impeachment. A Democratic House majority would resurrect oversight committees, subpoena his records and expose political vulnerabilities. How, then, to ensure this does not happen? The playbook is already being tested. Declare emergencies. Deploy troops. Federalise police. Justify it with the language of “law and order”. As campaigns heat up, it does not take too much imagination to envision protests in Democrat-controlled cities that allow Trump to declare disorder and place polling stations under federal “protection”. The mere presence of troops deters and intimidates. No need to stuff ballot boxes when one can suffocate turnout through fear. To call this far-fetched is to ignore Trump’s record. He refused to accept defeat in 2020. He encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol. He flirted openly with martial law. What he is doing now is not improvisation but preparation. Optimists argue that the courts will act, the military will resist and Congress will step in, but the guardrails are weaker than assumed. The Supreme Court has deferred to expansive executive power. Republican governors have aided Trump’s midterm strategy via gerrymandering electoral maps, while Trump loyalists within federal organisations enforce loyalty tests, purge dissenters and streamline domestic deployment mechanisms. None of this should come as a surprise to any honest observer of US politics. For four years, Trump told the world exactly what retribution he would seek during his presidency. What even experts did not see coming, however, was the speed with which he and his enablers would dismantle every norm and guardrail that kept the nation together. If this trajectory continues, the 2026 midterms could become the first American election stripped of real choice. The groundwork is being laid in broad daylight through the gradual normalisation of force as politics. What is happening is not a secret scheme but an unfolding reality, shaping the conditions under which citizens will cast their votes and the nation’s future will be decided before anyone fully grasps what has changed.

How Trump is conditioning Americans to accept his autocratic rule

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}By normalising soldiers and federalised police on US streets, Trump has been conducting a rehearsal for autocracy

By normalising soldiers and federalised police on US streets, Trump has been conducting a rehearsal for autocracy