“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” – Ida B. Wells

In late October 2025, journalist Julia Ioffe appeared on CNN NewsNight and made a statement that startled many and confirmed the fears of others: “An infrastructure is being built to allow Donald Trump to stay in office indefinitely.” It was not hyperbole or a dramatic flourish. It was a sober assessment of how political, architectural, and institutional power in America is being reshaped to serve permanence rather than governance. Her words cut through the noise of partisan debate and forced Americans to confront an unsettling question: what if the country’s democratic structures are being quietly remodeled to ensure they never change hands again?

Ioffe was not speculating about a distant threat. She was describing a process already underway, the transformation of the presidency, the bureaucracy, and even the physical seat of American government into tools of personal rule. She pointed to the destruction of part of the White House’s East Wing, the plan for a new ballroom and even a “triumphal arch,” and the firing of the Commission of Fine Arts, which for decades served as an independent check on architectural excess. She noted reports of ICE managers being replaced, new enforcement quotas being imposed, and loyalty tests spreading across agencies. None of this, she argued, looked like the normal cycle of administration. It looked like the careful building of infrastructure to ensure one man’s political immortality. “You don’t do this,” she said, “if you think anybody else is going to inhabit this thing after you.”

To understand her point, one must think of authoritarianism not as a coup but as an architecture. It is designed, brick by brick, through the consolidation of loyalty, the erosion of oversight, and the creation of physical and psychological symbols of permanence. The East Wing becomes a monument to personal power; agency purges become bureaucratic loyalty tests; and the refusal to rule out a third term becomes a trial balloon for a new political normal.

But in her latest comments, Ioffe went even further. She warned that the pace at which Trump has hollowed out American institutions has no precedent in modern U.S. history. “The speed,” she said, “at which President Trump has hollowed out America’s institutions, the courts, the legislative body, every check and balance imaginable and the way private industry has bent the knee rather than risk their profits, is breathtaking. He’s essentially dissolved Parliament.” Her phrasing, using “Parliament” to describe Congress, was intentional. She was drawing a parallel between what autocrats often do to legislative bodies: preserve their ceremonial function while stripping them of true authority. The comparison is chilling precisely because it is accurate.

She went on to say that she would not be surprised if the current or future Speaker of the House refused to seat Democrats who win seats in the 2026 midterms. “I wouldn’t be surprised if after those midterms,” she added, “we are effectively a one-party state in the way Hungary or Russia are.” It was a warning, not a prediction, but one rooted in historical pattern. In both those countries, democracy technically still exists: elections are held, legislatures meet, opposition parties campaign. But the results are predetermined by control of media, the judiciary, and corporate power. The formalities remain; the substance is gone.

The comparison is apt because it highlights what authoritarianism in the 21st century looks like. It does not always arrive in tanks or uniforms. It comes draped in the flag, reciting the Constitution, even holding elections. The real transformation happens beneath the surface, through legal manipulation, institutional corrosion, and the capture of private industry. As Ioffe noted, “the way private industry has bent the knee rather than risk their profits” is not an exaggeration. Corporations that once prided themselves on civic responsibility have chosen accommodation over accountability. Fear of presidential retaliation through regulation, tax audits, or public shaming has replaced the courage to defend democratic norms.

When a democracy’s economic elite stops defending democracy, the collapse of political pluralism accelerates. It is not just government institutions that crumble; it is the social contract itself. The judiciary, once a check, becomes a shield for the executive. The legislature, once a forum for debate, becomes a stage for obedience. Even the press becomes vulnerable, vilified as “the enemy of the people” until its role as watchdog gives way to self-censorship.

Ioffe’s description of Trump’s America as a hollowed-out democracy recalls the methods of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who turned a pluralistic republic into a one-party state through legal reform, media capture, and patronage networks. It mirrors Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where elections continue but power never changes hands. In both cases, authoritarianism arrived not through violent takeover but through incremental normalization. Every purge, every reshaping of oversight, every new monument to permanence was justified as routine. By the time citizens realized what had been lost, the transformation was complete.

Skeptics may dismiss these warnings as alarmist, insisting that America’s Constitution remains intact. But Ioffe’s argument reminds us that a document is only as strong as those willing to enforce it. Checks and balances can wither long before they formally disappear. Courts may exist, but their jurisdiction can be narrowed. Legislators may meet, but their votes can be ignored. Elections may be held, but the opposition can be disqualified or delegitimized. Even if Trump were to leave office after two terms, the institutional culture he has reshaped could persist—a permanent architecture of loyalty and fear.

What makes Ioffe’s warning especially urgent is the speed. Democracies usually erode over decades. America’s has been reconfigured in less than ten years. The guardrails that once seemed invincible, the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the civil service, the restraint of private industry are buckling. The slow-motion collapse that scholars once feared is now accelerating. The courts are increasingly politicized, Congress reduced to ceremonial opposition, and federal agencies repurposed as instruments of presidential will. The infrastructure of governance has become the infrastructure of dominance.

This transformation also exposes a cultural weakness: Americans have confused continuity with stability. They equate unchanging leadership with order, and turnover with chaos. But democracy depends on turnover. It thrives on rotation of power, of ideas, of responsibility. The moment citizens start longing for permanence, they begin to dismantle democracy with their own hands.

Ioffe’s analysis is not simply about Trump. It is about how systems built for accountability can be co-opted by spectacle. The East Wing’s reconstruction, the firing of watchdog commissions, the flirtation with extra terms, and the subservience of private industry are all pieces of a mosaic: a republic turning into a personality cult. What she describes is not political drama it is civic decay disguised as patriotism.

Ioffe’s diagnosis forces us to confront a grim possibility: the United States may soon resemble the very regimes it once condemned. Not because its Constitution vanished, but because its citizens stopped demanding that it be obeyed. The physical and bureaucratic “infrastructure” being built is, in essence, a fortress of continuity, a government designed never to yield power again. The future she describes is not speculative; it is visible in plain sight, poured daily into the foundations of government buildings and normalized through political theater.

The question is no longer whether authoritarianism could happen here it is whether enough Americans still care to stop it. Democracies die when citizens stop paying attention, when they accept permanence as security, and when power ceases to rotate. As Julia Ioffe reminds us, the greatest threat to freedom is not the ambition of one man it is the exhaustion of a people who no longer notice the walls closing around them.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ChatGPT.