President Donald Trump began his second presidential term with an autocratic offensive aimed at consolidating power in his hands while bending public and private institutions to his will. But 10 months on, what seemed like a speed-run to autocracy has smashed into a roadblock of opposition, disapproval and a fracturing coalition.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg for Trump’s troubles. Following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Republican Party has begun to fracture over the invitation of the antisemitic, racist influencer Nick Fuentes into the party’s tent. Trump has even begun clashing with his closest allies, as a break with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) led her to resign from Congress. Greene was part of the initial faction of the party that broke from Trump to support legislation to release the Epstein files. What began as a minor faction bucking Trump’s wishes turned into a wholesale jailbreak as all but one Republican in Congress wound up supporting the bill after months of Trump trying to stop it.

This, in a very weird way, is all normal: Presidents’ honeymoon periods always end, often toward the end of their first year in office. But figuring out what it means for the core project of Trump’s deeply abnormal presidency ― one where the goal isn’t simply to preserve policy wins, but to fundamentally alter the balance of power in government and shift the country toward autocracy ― is difficult.

“The government’s weakening in terms of its public approval, its own coalition and societal willingness to push back without question limits the speed and the force of this authoritarian offensive,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of the book, “How Democracies Die.”

President Donald Trump has faced a string of setbacks in the fall of the first year of his second term in office.

Andrew Harnik via Getty Images

It’s not just Republicans inside the beltway who are breaking from Trump. They’re also reflected in Trump’s public approval ratings, particularly on the economy. Trump’s approval rating on the economy has tumbled to 36%, the lowest number he has ever scored, according to a Nov. 24 CBS/YouGov poll. That includes 19% of Republicans. Meanwhile, Trump has hit a record low approval with independents.

Trump’s response to his flagging approval ratings and mounting losses has, however, been to double-down on his most autocratic tendencies. In just the past week, the Trump administration has launched investigations into eight Democratic lawmakers for merely stating that military service members should follow the law.

“Weak and desperate autocrats are often much more dangerous and damaging than strong and popular ones,” Dan Slater, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, and an expert on dictatorships and democracy, said over email. “The risk of stirring up violence and inviting active military involvement in American cities is getting bigger rather than smaller as Trump’s popularity sinks.”

The administration’s initial autocratic offensive followed in the footsteps of recent efforts around the world by autocrats to seize power in democracies and consolidate control so that their opponents cannot beat them. Instead of tanks in the streets, these autocrats use the law to take control and steadily undermine democratic institutions and liberal principles. Opponents fear retaliation from the government merely for their opposition. And while elections may still occur, they are no longer free or fair.

In following the model pioneered by the likes of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Türkiye’s Recep Erdogan, Trump launched a full-scale assault to bend institutions to his whim. His push initially succeeded as elites bent the knee and institutions capitulated.

“It was an offensive that was marching and picking up steam in the early part of the summer,” Levitsky said.

Trump got law firms to agree to deals that would sideline them from challenging the administration in court. Columbia University partially surrendered control to the government. His impoundment of funds to nonprofits and universities forced them to focus solely on their own finances and futures. He began purging the civil service with mass firings and shuttered agencies like USAID. The administration arrested and sought to deport foreign students whose speech it disagreed with. Immigration enforcement officers, backed by the National Guard, invaded communities rounding up citizens and non-citizens, and documented and undocumented immigrants alike.

“We were living under an authoritarian government in the sense that the cost of legally opposing the government rose dramatically,” Levitsky said. “Americans across the country – whether it was law firms, businesses, the media, universities or politicians on either side of the aisle – had to think twice about engaging in legal constitutional acts of opposition to the government because they knew they faced a real risk of retribution.”

Under rising opposition and a fracturing base, this is no longer the case in some quarters. But Trump’s autocratic project continues apace thanks to a largely compliant Supreme Court that he packed with three justices in his first term.

“It looks like Trump is losing popularity and the Epstein thing might come and bite him, but he’s still in charge,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton University who has studied the rise of autocracy in the 21st century. “He’s still got complete control of the executive branch. His supporters are threatening members of Congress to go along with him. And he’s dealing with a court system that he’s packed at the top.”

That control is only expected to grow as the Supreme Court continues to expand presidential power. The conservative justices are expected to overturn a nearly century-old precedent to give Trump the power to fire independent agency officials for any reason. They have so far allowed him to dismantle agencies and fire civil servants. And they will hear challenges to his power to deploy troops domestically even absent the conditions that are legally necessary to do so.

“I don’t see the force that’s going to stop the autocratic capture part,” Scheppele adds.

While Trump’s attempt to consolidate power in the White House may continue moving forward, it faces its own challenges. First and foremost, Trump’s autocratic management has suffered from a glaring lack of competence.

One of the hallmarks of Trump’s second term has been the appointment of unqualified loyalists to positions across the government. Trump didn’t want a repeat of his first term where competent bureaucrats mostly protected him from his worst instincts. Instead, he wanted people who wouldn’t say no.

“What Trump has done is mid-20th century tinpot dictator stuff,” Levitsky said. “In pockets of the DOJ, you see a real embarrassing level of incompetence and that’s slowing him down. It’s double edged because they will do what you want them to do, but they won’t do it very well.”

There is no better example of this than Trump’s efforts to prosecute his perceived enemies. In an effort to exact revenge on former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Trump put pressure on the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert to indict them. Siebert wouldn’t do it and resigned instead. Attorney General Pam Bondi replaced him with White House aide Lindsey Halligan, who had never prosecuted a case in her life. Halligan signed her name to the Comey and James indictments, but a judge ruled on Monday that her appointment by Bondi was illegal and tossed the indictments.

The indictments were based solely on political animus and intended to both actually punish Comey and James, and instill fear in others not to cross Trump. That they crumbled so quickly, however, revealed the weakness of the retribution campaign.

Meanwhile, the loyalist appointees who launched investigations into James, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) have themselves come under investigation for abusing their offices. Federal prosecutors in Maryland who were examining a mortgage fraud claim against Schiff are now reportedly investigating DOJ official Ed Martin and Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte for improperly accessing mortgage information and sharing information about investigations with outside parties.

President Donald Trump has modeled his autocratic offensive on Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Evan Vucci via Associated Press

Even though Trump’s second term has been exceedingly abnormal, one normal rule of political gravity is likely to still apply. Presidents live or die by how the public views their economic well-being.

This is what sank President Joe Biden’s term in office. It’s what truly cratered President George W. Bush’s approval in his last year. On the flip side, it’s what helped President Ronald Reagan win one of the biggest reelection victories ever and sustained President Bill Clinton’s popularity as he faced impeachment in his second term.

“[T]he big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule,” Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote in September.

As Krugman shows, previous attempts by autocrats to solidify their rule succeeded thanks to improving economic conditions. For example, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s popularity rose as his unorthodox economic policies helped Germany recover from runaway deflation and unemployment during the Great Depression. In Hungary, Orban succeeded by getting the country out of International Monetary Fund-imposed austerity.

But Trump, with his own set of unorthodox economic policies, has moved the economy, which by every measure was doing well, in the wrong direction. Inflation has increased and unemployment has risen since he took office. And the public has noticed by giving him his worst approval ratings on the economy since he began his political career.

“If the economy goes under, that’s not a good look for the executive in charge,” Scheppele said.

He could, however, copy the model of modern day autocrats like Orban, who buttered the public with extra money, including providing a 13th month pension payment at the end of the year, Scheppele said. Trump has already flirted with this through a plan to hand out $2,000 checks from the money collected under his tariffs. This would, theoretically, require congressional approval and could also be knee-capped if the Supreme Court voids his tariff policy.

While the economy may ultimately doom Trump’s autocratic drive, he will still be able to do unfathomable damage over the next three years, just like previous failed autocrats.

“I see clear parallels with Ferdinand Marcos’s failed effort to consolidate authoritarian rule in the Philippines in the 1980s,” Slater said. “But the painful lesson there is that Marcos did tremendous lasting damage to Philippine democracy even while failing to establish a stable autocracy of his own design. I think something similar is unfolding in America under Trump. We’ll be living with the damage he’s causing for a very long time.”

The true damage to democracy that Trump has set in place is the autocratic and illiberal direction that he has taken with the Republican Party. That means that even when Trump departs the scene, the threat of autocracy will not recede. The heirs to the party appear to be even more radical, whether it be Vice President JD Vance, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson or Fuentes’ white supremacist youth movement.

“Trump has crossed certain authoritarian lines that virtually no other living politician would have done in 2016,” Levitsky said. “Whether that can be unlearned is the big question mark.”