When A neo-Con calls Trump a dictator...

Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened Americans' ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.

---Robert Kagan, author and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. This quote is from his latest article in The Atlantic is titled "America Vs. The World."

WHO: 

Robert Kagan is an American columnist. He is a neoconservative scholar. He is a critic of US foreign policy and a leading advocate of liberal internationalism.

In 1997, Kagan co-founded the now-defunct neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century with William Kristol. From 1998 until August 2010, Kagan was a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was appointed senior fellow in the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in September 2010. Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidates as well as Democratic administrations via the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kagan left the Republican Party due to the party's nomination of Donald Trump.--Gleaned from Wikipedia

WHERE: 

    Interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air

    Is the U.S. heading into a dictatorship?

    February 4, 2026

Here are the highlights from the interview. They appear in no particular order but are broadly categorized according to my whims. All are direct quotes. The entirety of the interview is available as a transcript.

TRUMP ACTING AS DICTATOR

I started warning that [Trump] was threatening to be a dictator back in November '23. And so pretty much everything that's happened since then, I think, was predictable, and I foresaw it. But I have to say, certainly his actions, his administration's actions in the first year, in which they very rapidly sort of dismantled the federal bureaucracy, took over the Justice Department, took over the FBI, took over the CIA and then have created this brute squad, which is called ICE - these are the acts of a dictator, plain and simple.

Everything now is about power. It's about pure power. And, you know, the fact that the Republican Party has become the party of dictatorship - I think people really do need to focus on that. There's so much focus on Trump. And Trump, of course, is the driving force behind this, although he has other people who are also major figures, like Stephen Miller and, I think, Russell Vought.

And he now has at his disposal a huge, powerful - literally, the forces of power. What they would call in another country the power ministries - he is in full control of that. And, you know, I can imagine any number of scenarios in which he uses that power.

2025, which is the remarkable - and I got to say, it will go down in history as really a remarkable destruction of the government that - his turning the Justice Department into his personal legal weapon, his turning the CIA into his personal organization, his using the FBI to go after enemies and solidify his position in power. These are all textbook actions of a dictator. He doesn't want to allow any pluralism in this country. He doesn't want to allow any dissent, you know, the way they talk about protesters as domestic terrorists. That's Stalin territory that you're in. So, I mean, it's almost too - there are too many things to list, it seems to me, that make him really not a would-be dictator, but really a dictator at this point.

TRUMP THREATENING ELECTIONS

I think we're already well into a dictatorship. It's just a question of whether he will go ahead and, you know, basically disrupt the '26 elections, which I think he's made it clear he has every intention of doing now. So I think that this should be a five-alarm fire for everybody. I - people, I think, are starting to figure out that the '26 elections are very much at risk and that his intention is to prevent the Democrats from taking the House or the Senate and that, you know, we are there now. You know, people are always talking about when this happens or if that happens. We're there, and I really think it's time for people to start taking that seriously.

But even to suggest that Republicans should be overseeing elections - I must say, I'm surprised even to hear that coming out of the mouth of Donald Trump. It's such a blatant declaration of dictatorship, a one-party dictatorship, that it - I have to say, I'm even a little bit surprised that he put it that way.

...it's clear that [Trump] has no intention of allowing the elections to play out and allow a Democratic victory. And I think it's important to understand his motives here. He knows perfectly well that, in effect, his presidency will be greatly diminished once the Democrats take either one or both of the Houses. He himself is saying right now that he'll be impeached, and that is why he wants to prevent the Democrats from taking power.

He wants to set the predicate for the idea that elections are stolen, that he and the federal government and, I guess, the Republican Party have to step in. I can easily imagine them seizing the ballots in some of these districts that are heavily Democratic. That's not even counting the voter suppression that they will engage in in order to prevent nonwhite people from feeling like it's safe to vote. And if you put all that together, then you have the final end to American democracy. I think that's what we're staring at right now.

UNDERSTAND THIS...

...it's clear and has been clear that the purpose of ICE is to create protests and riots of sufficient size to justify Trump, in his own mind, invoking the Insurrection Act and bringing in the regular military. It's clear that he wants to do that. And so Minnesota, in my view, has been a test run for the seizure of power, using these forces that he has brought under his control and created. This is not about immigration primarily. It's about white supremacy. It's about white Christian supremacy, but it's also about using the full force of the federal government effectively to nullify the voters' choices.

...this is a homegrown dictatorship, if you will. I mean, the forces that are supporting Trump are very much an American phenomenon, this white Christian supremacy, that is - and the sort of status anxiety of white Christian and especially males. This is very much - it goes back, I would say, there have been - a significant portion of the American body politic has held these kinds of what I call antiliberal views, going back to the founding.

And Trump is very much an American. I mean, if you look at sort of how he came to, you know, have this power, it was by being a television personality, a kind of a phony billionaire. I mean, he's very much an American phenomenon. So I'm always a little wary of bringing in the examples from other countries because, in a way, it makes us feel like, well, those are in other countries. It couldn't happen here. And I think the belief that it couldn't happen here has been a real handicap for us in trying to prevent him from getting to where he is now going.

Define America: there's always been a fight between those who define it as an idea, which is to say the idea of universal human rights, and those who wanted to define it and continue to want to define it as an ethnoreligious entity. People talk about, today, heritage Americans or - how long have your people been here? - etc., etc., which is very contrary to the founders' view but which nevertheless has been a very powerful force in American life. And, you know, now you hear it straight out of the mouths of JD Vance and Stephen Miller. It's part of the propaganda, recruitment propaganda of ICE, you know, where they're saying, come defend our culture. Come defend our civilization. And we know what they're talking about, and they know what we're - the [ICE] recruits also know what we're talking about.

NATO AND THE WORLD AT LARGE

I've been telling my European friends that they need to understand that NATO is over. I used to just focus on the fact that Trump certainly has no commitment to our Article 5 security commitment to the allies. He's made that clear on numerous occasions. But as you say, and let's be clear about what happened in Greenland, we just had a situation where a number of European powers, our allies, were talking about sending troops to deter a potential act of American territorial aggression against a NATO ally. That's not a thing that goes unremembered. And I think that Europeans today, some of them can't imagine separating themselves from the United States. But I think increasingly, we're seeing Europeans regarding the United States correctly as among their adversaries. Europe now faces a situation where they really have a predatory empire to their east in the form of Russia, and a predatory empire toward the west in the form of the United States. And that leaves them in a very perilous situation.

The Trump administration has been very active in supporting the AfD, which is a, you know, far-right, almost neo-Nazi party in Germany. They support the right wing in France. They support the right wing in U.K. in the form of Neil Farage.

And so they are meddling in the affairs of Europe very, very substantially, and the tariffs are hardly minding our own business. He is attempting to wield power over every nation in the world using these tariffs. They're not about economics. They're about power. Meanwhile, he's removing governments in Venezuela. He's bombing Iran and talking about removing the government in Iran. My point is that, you know, there were - there was a school of foreign policy which, theoretically, Trump was heading toward called restraint. And these are people who think that America should not be so involved in the world. But Trump is the opposite of restrained. He is, you know, really quite deeply involved in the affairs of countries all over the world, and he enjoys that.

...there's nothing more important in Trump's world than Trump himself. And so everything is a function of him. And it would be one thing if he really were, let's say, an America First president in terms of foreign policy. It would be one thing if he really did intend to pull the United States back into the Western Hemisphere and let the rest of the world do whatever it's going to do. But, of course, that's not what he's doing because he is Donald Trump. He wants to be world emperor. He wants to be able to bomb Iran and bomb Syria and remove a dictator in Venezuela and change governments in Europe, etc. And so in a way, he's creating the worst of both worlds. It's really a recipe for foreign policy disaster.