All Things Considered

04/22/2025

But many democracy scholars say the Trump administration is using tactics employed by autocrats, and they point to specific actions. For instance, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is investigating all the major broadcast outlets — except for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, which owns the pro-Trump Fox News Channel.

Princeton’s Scheppele says this is reminiscent of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán took aim at the business model of Hungarian media, which heavily relied on state advertising.

“Overnight, [Orbán] cuts all the advertising to the independent and opposition media,” Scheppele says. “They all have a hole blown in their budget.”

In another example, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars from universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Columbia, citing concerns about antisemitism. Scheppele says Orbán also targeted universities that had been critical of his government.

“In the first two years, Orbán cut the university budgets by 40%,” she says.

Another way to measure authoritarianism, according to Levitsky, is whether publicly opposing the government comes with a cost. He says — under Trump — it does. For instance, Trump has issued executive orders barring lawyers with firms he doesn’t like from entering government buildings and representing government contractors.

Fear of government retribution is now spreading through society. A scholar who spoke to NPR for this story later asked not to be quoted, saying he feared the Trump administration might try to punish him by slashing research grants he’s working on. In a recent NPR series on free speech, many people did not want to be identified by name.