There is a version of hope going around right now. Hold on, vote, get him out, and things go back to normal. It’s understandable. It’s also based on every relevant historical example we have, which is dangerously wrong.
Not because things can’t get better. They can. But the pattern of how authoritarian movements unfold is almost nothing like what most people picture when they imagine a return to normal. And understanding what we’re actually inside right now is not defeatist. It’s the only thing that makes an effective response possible.
The Pattern History Actually Shows
Authoritarian regimes don’t arrive fully formed. They build. Academic research published in Oxford Open Economics confirms what historians have documented across dozens of cases: no matter where an authoritarian leader starts, the tendency is toward deterioration over time, not self-correction. The consolidation of power isn’t a single event. It’s a process, and it accelerates the longer it goes uninterrupted.
The structure is recognizable no matter the country or the era. A leader emerges during a period of economic anxiety or political instability. They position themselves as the only one who can fix a broken and corrupt system. They promise to restore greatness. They find an enemy, internal or external, to unify their base around a shared threat. They begin eroding the institutions that could check them, usually while those institutions are still technically standing. And when they face resistance, they don’t back down. They escalate.
What feels chaotic and unprecedented from the inside is, historically speaking, a fairly legible sequence.
What Germany Actually Looked Like
Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Most Germans at the time didn’t think his government would last. They had seen too many governments come and go. The business class and the conservative establishment largely believed they could control him, that he was a useful tool for stabilizing the country, that the more extreme impulses could be managed from the inside.
Within weeks of taking office, the Reichstag building burned. Hitler used the fire to declare a national emergency and suspend civil liberties. By March 1933, the Enabling Act had passed, giving him the power to enact laws without parliamentary consent. By April, the first concentration camp had been ordered to be constructed at Dachau. By August 1934, after the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler merged the chancellery and the presidency, declared himself Führer, and the formal democratic structure of Germany was finished.
Eighteen months from his appointment to complete dictatorial power. Germany wasn’t liberated from what followed until 1945, twelve years later, after a war that killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people.
The people who believed the situation would self-correct weren’t stupid. They assumed the rules of the world they had always known still applied. They didn’t.
Historians are right to note that direct equivalence between Trump and Hitler flattens real and important differences. Nazi Germany became a genocidal totalitarian state in ways that have no current parallel in the United States. But scholars who study this closely don’t dismiss the comparison either. What they point to is a documented similarity in early-stage mechanics: a populist nationalist appeal built around restoring lost national greatness, the targeting of scapegoated groups with dehumanizing language, a sustained attack on the press as enemies of the people, an attempt to overturn a lost election, and one man positioning himself as the only legitimate voice of real Americans against a corrupt elite. These aren’t interpretations. They’re on the record.
The warning from history isn’t that we’re definitely headed toward the same destination. It’s that people at the beginning of these trajectories rarely believe they’re at the beginning of them, and by the time they understand what’s happening, the capacity to stop it through normal democratic means is often already significantly reduced.
He Is Not the Architect
This is the piece that gets lost in all the focus on Trump as a personality, and it might be the most important thing to understand.
Trump didn’t write Project 2025. During the 2024 campaign, he publicly distanced himself from it, claimed he’d never seen it, and said he didn’t know who was behind it. That was false. Russell Vought, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Executive Office of the President, became Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Paul Dans, who served as Project 2025’s director, had previously served in Trump’s first administration. Multiple other contributors moved directly into administration roles. The public distancing was a performance. The implementation wasn’t.
Project 2025 is a 920-page governing blueprint produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has been operating since 1973. More than 100 right-wing organizations contributed to it, and it’s the ninth version of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, the first of which was handed to Ronald Reagan in 1981. By the end of Reagan’s first year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy. They have been building this for fifty years.
The stated goal, in their own words, is to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.” Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, called it “a second American Revolution, bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”
The four core goals are to dismantle the administrative state and give the president direct control over the entire federal bureaucracy; to push a Christian nationalist framework into federal governance, with key architects on record saying they don’t believe in the separation of church and state; to center what they call “the family” as the foundation of American life, which in practice means abolishing the Department of Education, banning abortion nationally, and defining sex legally as male and female only; and to aggressively enforce what they call national sovereignty through immigration crackdowns and withdrawal from international agreements.
Nearly two-thirds of the executive orders signed on Trump’s first day directly mirrored Project 2025 recommendations. That wasn’t a coincidence. That was implementation.
Removing Trump from office doesn’t remove the project. The Heritage Foundation will still exist. The coalition of over 100 organizations behind it will still exist. The infrastructure built for placing aligned people at every level of government will still exist. The legal architecture being constructed to expand executive power and shrink every institution that could check it will still exist. Whoever comes next steps into a governmental structure that has already been significantly reshaped around this vision.
What Actually Stops This
History does give examples of authoritarian movements being reversed or contained, and the conditions under which that happens are worth knowing.
In most cases, it takes a combination of things: organized, sustained resistance that doesn’t evaporate between election cycles; institutions that hold their ground, including courts, press, and civil society; the withdrawal of support from the elites who initially enabled the movement; and often, fractures within the movement itself as factions compete for power and resources.
None of that happens on its own. None of it happens because one election went the right way. And none of it happens without real cost to the people doing the work.
Research on authoritarian regimes shows they are most vulnerable when loyalty in the military and law enforcement begins to shift, when the inner circle starts to fracture, and when sustained external pressure meets internal resistance. Those conditions don’t arrive on a schedule. They have to be built.
The legal challenges happening right now, the investigative journalism, the community organizing, the support of independent institutions, that’s not just holding the line until the next election. That is the actual mechanism by which trajectories like this one get interrupted. And it has to keep going regardless of who holds office, because what’s driving this is bigger and longer-term than any individual.
What To Do With This
None of this is meant to produce despair. It’s meant to produce clarity, because a clear read on what’s happening generates a real response instead of a wishful one.
If this is bigger than Trump, then the energy spent obsessing over him as a personality is energy that could go toward the institutions actually running the project. The Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society, which has spent decades placing ideologically aligned judges throughout the federal judiciary. The donor networks behind all of it. These are the load-bearing structures of what’s happening, and unlike a single man, they can be named, scrutinized, defunded, and opposed in ways that outlast any election.
Things will get harder before they get better. Knowing that isn’t giving up. It’s what keeps people from being blindsided, from burning out, from walking away the moment the work doesn’t produce results on the timeline they imagined.
The people who lived through moments like this and came out the other side stayed organized, stayed connected, protected what they could, and kept going when keeping going was genuinely difficult.
That’s what this moment is asking for.
Pixie Saavedra is the founder of Grunge Luxe, a lifestyle brand at the intersection of punk aesthetics, political resistance, and intentional living. This post is part of Rebel Dispatch at grungeluxe.com
