Preparing to protest the rebuilding of America from democracy to autocracy
After less than nine months in his second term in office, Americans are now finding what President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Project 2025 are all about — rebuilding America from a democracy into an autocracy wherein things, once thought impossible, are rapidly taking place.
Our unfettered president is following the playbook of many past and present authoritarian dictators.
He is aided and abetted in this endeavor by his cabinet members — all with blind loyalty and some with questionable competence — and the similarly sycophantic leaders of the Republican House and Senate — who effectively force their cowered party members to vote as told — and by a Supreme Court that has been appeasing the president by ceding power to the executive branch of government via its controversial shadow docket — without public argument, debate, or discussion — with its six Republican appointees apparently violating precedent and the Constitution they swore to uphold.
Consequently, the president is leading America down a dark path to a cruelly malevolent autocratic political system as evidenced in words and deeds by lies, deceit, grifting, retribution, bullying, extortion and hateful division.
So, it seems ironic that this effort has been cast as a God-driven Christian mission by the president’s political allies and his MAGA devotees.
To better understand what’s going on, consider the following actions by the Trump Administration: Direct assault on the First Amendment right of free speech (witness Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel); the scapegoating and the indiscriminate deportation of illegal immigrants and visa violators by masked, quota-driven ICE agents — instilling a deep sense of fear in black, brown and foreign-language-speaking U.S. citizens; the deployment of military assets in cities; the hollowing out or elimination of government departments with the dismissal of proven military leaders and dedicated career civil servants including many blacks and women — drastically depleting the government’s strategic knowledge base; the interference in upcoming elections (witness Texas); and incompetent management at the Department of Health and Human Services compounded by the loss of expertise in critical areas that is placing our citizens at risk especially re: the Department leader’s anti-vaccine complex and concerning lack of scientific or medical background — making him prone to serious mistakes of judgment.
Also consider the persistent attacks on what were free press and media organizations and the defunding of PBS, NPR, America’s world-class universities and the Council of the Inspectors General that oversees the Trump Administration; attacks on liberal nongovernmental and other civil society organizations — labeling all as part of a “vast domestic terrorist movement”; the flagrant violation of national security protocols by a historically least competent Secretary of Defense who is now establishing new likely unconstitutional constraints on journalists; the elimination of public informational signage at National Parks, the Smithsonian and other public museums that mentions climate change, slavery, Japanese citizen World War II internment camps and conflicts with Native Americans that, in the eyes of the Trump Administration, “undermines the remarkable achievements of the United States”; and the ongoing persecution of and retribution against political opponents and critics with intense presidential pressure on the attorney general to go after his foes.
With regard to the latter action, specifically that taken against National Security Advisor John Bolton, The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board wrote on Aug. 22, 2025: “The real offender here is a president who seems to think he can use the power of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out worse than we imagined.”
It’s all happening before our very eyes.
In a related Sept. 25, Daily Herald op-ed, syndicated columnist Susan Estrich asked how many instances of authoritarian behavior do we have to see before we have seen enough and what exactly will we do when we see enough? What we can do is let our voices be heard: Vote in next year’s elections and, in the meantime, attend our local Oct. 18, “No Kings” day protest that will be aligned with previous national “No Kings” protests that took place all across America this past June.
The protests are exactly two weeks before my 95th birthday, I plan to join my friends, neighbors and others to demonstrate opposition to the authoritarian tactics of the Trump Administration. It is my fervent hope that we will be joined by many more like-minded citizens.
• Frank G. Splitt, of Mount Prospect, is author of the book An Odyssey of Reform Initiatives: 1986-2015, its sequels Reflections: 2016-2021, Reflections: 2022, and Extra Innings: A Memoir, is a former McCormick Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and was a Vice President Emeritus of Nortel Networks.