U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters, as he departs for travel to Pennsylvania from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C. U.S., July 15, 2025. REUTERSJonathan Ernst

Intelligencer writer Ed Kilgore said Democrats’ attempts to paint Donald Trump as a “threat to democracy” in the 2024 election “did not move that many voters.” But it’s a different story for the mid-terms, as Trump actively snatches power to himself with the Republican Party’s blessing.

“Trump no longer represents a prospective ‘threat to democracy’ who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric,” wrote Kilgore. “… he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime.”

No longer a candidate, President Trump is moving forward on his power grab, openly contemplating sending military forces into more American cities, while Democrats fuss about “distraction[s]” from other things, “whether that’s the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts [Trump] signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files.”

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The “distraction” argument is a nuisance, considering the existential threat lurking in the wings, said Kilgore.

“Nearly every step [Trump] has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal.

Dismissing creeping fascism “as a distraction from Medicaid cuts or the Epstein files is rightly infuriating to many Democratic activists,” said Kilgore.

“This approach implicitly legitimizes Trump’s lawlessness as relatively unimportant. When rank-and-file Democrats demand their congressional representatives show more ‘fight’ against Trump, they aren’t asking for more frequent or louder protests about the distributional effects of the One Big Beautiful Act. They are alarmed more fundamentally about what’s happening to their country under a proto-fascist regime whose leader treats all opponents as traitors to be jailed, sued, deported, gerrymandered, or physically intimidated.

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Non-congressional Democrats have already caught the ball and are running with it, said Kilgore, with Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsome and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker denouncing Trump as a “wannabe dictator,” in “fiery” news conferences, often surrounded by local business, religious and civic leaders.

Pritzker said: “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm,” Kilgore noted, and rightfully so, he argued.

The GOP’s chronic assaults on the material interests of Americans through regressive tax cuts and the ruination of the nation’s safety net programs, as well as the party’s alignment with international oligarchs like Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Orban is “precisely what history tells us you can expect from any right-wing authoritarian movement in the kind of power Republicans now enjoy,” Kilgore said. “Trump is forever declaring emergencies to justify his endless expansion of his own power. It’s time for Democrats to recognize the real emergency that threatens to make economics almost irrelevant.”

Read the Intelligencer report at this link.