Experts on political leadership – including me – have warned for years that Donald Trump had the making of an authoritarian. Or that he was an authoritarian who, to lead like one, needed only followers who were compliant.
Which was to say that it takes two to tango. For authoritarianism to happen you need one authoritarian leader and one or more followers who are willing to follow the leader, even if reluctantly. Conversely, if followers refuse to follow a leader who would be an authoritarian, the leader cannot be one. The leader cannot lead like one because their followers are not following. Though they have less or even no power or authority, by not following followers stop or at least slow their leader from doing what they want to do when they want to do it.
Confused? Don’t be. When you think about it, it’s quite simple. Authoritarian leaders exist only when people give them permission to be authoritarian. This is especially important early on, when authoritarianism first takes hold. For as I write in my book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, later, when authoritarian leaders become stronger and more deeply entrenched, resistance becomes more difficult and, frequently, more dangerous.
Initially, followers of authoritarian leaders tend to be meek. They are compliant, because they think that pleasing, pacifying, placating the authoritarian will work. But it rarely does. Authoritarian appetites grow with eating. The more such leaders eat the hungrier they get. Satiation is out of the question.
As Stephen Kotkin points out in his most recent article in Foreign Affairs, “no authoritarian regime could survive without security police and military forces capable of domestic repression.”* As I write we see this playing out most dramatically in the state of Minnesota, the city of Minneapolis consumed by the spectacle of armed and masked federal agents struggling to control a situation in which resistance to their intrusion has gone from intermittent to consistent and from furious to fierce. We’re at the point where resisting ICE agents in Minneapolis is risking your well-being. Still, out in the ice-cold streets are refuseniks, ordinary people refusing to comply with Trump’s authoritarian strictures.
They, however, are only the most dramatic example of followers refusing to follow. This post is to point out that whereas early in the second Trump administration people caved – they did what he wanted them to do, cowed by his bullying and mute in the face of it – times are changing. I am not predicting the end of the Time of Trump. Nor am I minimizing the complexities, and the risks of resisting the American president. What I am claiming is that Trump’s followers are refusing to follow with greater clarity and sense of purpose, and increased frequency.
People in the streets across America? You got it. The Chair of the Federal Reserve shedding his longstanding reserve to hit back hard at the administration that threatened him? You got it. CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, who up to now has played footsie with Trump, finally taking him to task on the issue of the independence of the federal reserve? You got it. Congress – suddenly, astonishingly, bipartisan – rejecting Trump’s draconian budget cuts to, for example, foreign aid, global health, and scientific research? You got it. Members of NATO including Germany, France, Canada and Great Britain stiffening their spines, increasingly grasping that being accommodating to Trump he sees only as weakness? You got it. China more formidable a competitor than ever, Xi now considering Trump a paper tiger who is not to be toyed with, but also not to be cowed by? You got it.
Heaven knows there’s a long way to go. A long way to go before President Trump’s followers stop following long enough, and in numbers large enough, to make a significant difference. But, unlike early last year, early this year are fledgling signs of life. Of followers finding their footing.
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*Stephen Kotkin, “The Weakness of Strongmen,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2026.