Authoritarian Transitions

Is it too soon to start thinking about Trumpism after Trump?

June 17, 2025

To date, no New Authoritarian regime has gone through a transition from one leader to the next. Will the United States be the first?

Last night, Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

On Friday, journalist Dean Blundell reported that Washington insiders and observers from abroad had noticed how rarely Trump appears in public and how often he falls asleep when he does, prompting speculation that he is not physically able to do the work of the presidency. Blundell suggested Trump’s team would look for a way to get the president out of the G7 early to avoid exposure.

Since the 2024 campaign began, others have noted the increasingly rambling quality of Trump’s speech, the mispronounced words, the vague answers that sound like he is missing words or concepts or trying to dance around not knowing the what the question means. In a meeting with Britain’s Keir Starmer yesterday, he dropped a sheaf of papers and appeared to confuse the UK with the EU. After confusing and conflicting social media posts about discontinuing some workplace raids and intensifying ICE actions in Democrat-led cities, the White House announced that it would not cut back on raids on farms, meatpacking plants and hotels, in a sign that there is conflict within the Trump White House, consistent at least with a president in decline.

Is Trump in charge?

The New Authoritarian states I am most familiar with – Hungary, Russia, El Salvador and Türkiye, roughly in that order – have yet to consider the prospect of their leaders aging out. Those transitions pose a high risk for the stability of the regimes.

Examples of effective transitions in dictatorships are surprisingly few. It is unclear and seems unlikely that Ba’athist Iraq would have survived intact had Saddam Hussein died of natural causes, though Syria under the Assads managed the transition. Zaire and Zimbabwe saw the governments of Mobutu Sese Seko and Robert Mugabe collapse after their departure.

The authoritarian governments that have survived, among historical examples, are more likely to be classical totalitarian states. Though there was a brief window of liberalization, the Soviet Union survived the death of Stalin, as it had survived Lenin and would survive another four General Secretaries after Stalin’s demise. Iran navigated the transition from Ayatollah Khomeni in 1989, and has seen many successive presidents and prime ministers, less important but not inconsequential leadership positions. In both cases, leaders ran highly controlled states with well-regulated political systems that were designed to ensure survival of the institution of government. Many other 20th Century dictatorships followed a “strongman” model, and depended more heavily on the charisma, vision, and violent temperaments of their leaders.

With their lighter touch, New Authoritarians face a difficult dilemma. The systems they have created out of the husk of a functional democracy are still, to a limited degree, democratic – Viktor Orbán, Nayib Bukele, Recep Erdoğan and Vladimir Putin have all been reelected in nominally competitive elections. None have built systems as durable as the Soviet Union or the Iranian Revolution, and all have amassed power to some degree on charisma and personal popularity. There are opposition parties in Hungary, El Salvador and Türkiye that arguably have enough of a voting base to win, in a leadership vacuum. Ensuring the continuity of the regime requires clear electoral dominance, but the steps needed to lock down elections in favor or the ruling party require deeper structural changes that these modern authoritarians have been willing to make. If they take steps such as banning political parties or rallies and demonstrations, say, they invite both public and international backlash. Hungary, for example, is heavily dependent on European Union aid, and while the ruling Fidesz party has been a defiant thorn in the side of its European benefactors, they maintain the stream of funding by dancing around democracy, and not going so far that the EU can no longer tolerate their antics. A facade of democracy is essential to their survival.

What will happen if what we are witnessing is a hastening decline in Trump’s capacity to hold office?

Trumpism has in no way consolidated power to the extent of its New Authoritarian models, undermining and coopting the three systems I discussed the other day. If the presidential election were to happen now and Trump were not on the ballot, the likelihood is that their nascent “illiberal democracy”¹ would fall apart.

But what happens if Trump dies or retires, and JD Vance ascends to the presidency? That depends very much on how much of the power of Trumpism is rooted in personality versus ideology. And on when in the term the transition takes place.

In terms of autocratic impulses, Trump and Vance could not be more different. Trump wants power for Trump – corruption and vanity motivate him far more than any fixed political convictions. Vance, by most accounts, is a Christian Nationalist. He has appeared at events with Lance Wallnau, a leader of the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that seeks to exert control over the political system to align government policy with Biblical edicts. Vance wrote a preface to a book written by Kevin Roberts, who headed the Christian Nationalist-adjacent Project 2025.

Vance is also associated with the secretive billionaire Peter Thiel, who has a different set of antidemocratic views than Christian Nationalists that have been increasingly in the public view. In 2021, journalist Max Chafkin wrote a book about Thiel; he told Time:

I think that Peter Thiel is secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley. He’s this behind the scenes player… [with views] bordering on fascism. Thiel taught this class at Stanford and then turned it into a book called Zero to One. He talks about how companies are better run than governments because they have a single decision maker—a dictator, basically. He is hostile to the idea of democracy.

Thiel is a fan of Curtis Yarvin, who has been plucked from relative internet obscurity by reporters lately who note his longstanding belief that democracy must be overthrown in favor of some new kind of monarchy.

In short, Vance is intimately connected to the movements that have thought the hardest about how to transform a pluralistic democracy into an illiberal state, whether that means theocracy or technofeudalism. These connections give him a leg up in planning for the interregnum that might come when Trump is too feeble to go on.

Vance is also widely seen as lacking the charisma of Trump; he is frequently mocked for his awkward demeanor and lack of humor, and his eyeliner is now a joke unto itself. He acts like a dick and he says the quiet parts out loud sometimes, and has somehow managed to make an enemy of two popes in one year. He is not well prepared to win a fair election. If the future of the Trumpian illiberal state depends on charisma, we are in good shape.

Ultimately, oddly enough, the future of American democracy may depend on how long Trump can hang on. He is inconstant and egotistical – not interested in planning and hewing to consistent policies over his present whim, and not one to tolerate others working to build constancy around him, as the adults in the room tried to do in his first term. As long as he is in charge, efforts to subvert the checks and balances in our system will be above board, overt efforts rooted in his own sense of absolute power. These will continue to face successful court challenges, throwing sand in the gears of the authoritarian enterprise.

If the president continues to run the country for, say, three years or more, his shambling, self-centered approach will probably make it impossible for Vance and his backers to game the system effectively in their favor. If he doesn’t make it to the midterms, even assuming a GOP rout at the polls, Vance, Thiel, Yarvin, Russell Vought and other would-be monarchists have time to push measures in Republican states to further stack the deck in their favor, while using DOGE-style wrecking balls to dampen any institutional response in defense of democracy.

And so, for now, with all possible unenthusiasm, Long Live the Would-be King!

1. This term was popularized by Viktor Orbán, but I don’t much like it. What Fidesz has built and CPAC and the Heritage Foundation want is not a system that is democratic but not free, but one that is free but not democratic. It’s “liberal autocracy,” though the term would be toxic to their base.