Warnings from a global writing festival as U.S. democracy hangs by a thread
The world is sounding the alarm as Donald Trump runs the well-worn authoritarian playbook. Are we listening?
PERUGIA, Italy — The warnings about America’s authoritarian drift don’t feel abstract here.
In parts of Europe — and in Italy, in particular — fascism isn’t theory or a debate on social media.
It’s history. Memory. Scars etched deep into the landscape and the culture. That’s why warnings about America’s authoritarian slide sound louder here — louder even than the bells of the Basilica di San Pietro echoing through this medieval city in the heart of Umbria.
And certainly louder than any alarm sounding inside the United States.
I came to Perugia for the International Journalism Festival, my second time at this annual gathering of journalists from around the world. Last year, many of us still clung to the fantasy that the United States had narrowly escaped the clutches of Donald Trump’s first presidency.
This year, nearly every conversation circles back to a singular, sobering theme: the creeping authoritarianism of a second Trump term.
Of course, I didn’t need to cross the Atlantic to understand how dire the state of democracy has become at home.
Around the time my flight took off from John F. Kennedy International Airport, Trump’s administration was openly defying a U.S. Supreme Court order to return a Maryland father with no criminal record whom it disappeared into a Salvadoran torture prison based on what it called an “administrative error” (or on newly released flimsy evidence).
Then, at a chilling and grotesquely staged Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele — a man who proudly calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” — Trump casually floated deporting U.S. citizens to Salvadoran gulags.
That’s not a joke. That’s not tough talk. That’s the language, and promise, of dictators. And millions of Americans who call themselves “patriots” cheered this shredding of the Constitution.
Here in Perugia, fellow journalists who’ve watched democracies fall and know how hard it is to claw freedom back once it slips are watching and urging us — pleading with us — to step up before it’s too late.
At a session titled “Journalists Under Fire,” Kathy Im, director of media, culture, and special initiatives at the MacArthur Foundation, opened with statistics that set the tone for the rest of the conference. Citing research from the V-Dem Institute, she quoted from an article by Joel Simon in Vanity Fair:
“For the first time in more than 20 years, the world now has more autocracies than democracies,” she said. “Twenty-seven countries — let that sink in — have transitioned from democracies to autocracies since 2005.”
Scarier still — especially for us in the U.S. — is this:
“If autocratization starts in a democracy, the probability of [it] surviving is very low.”
That hits harder in a place that’s lived it. These are people who’ve seen firsthand how fragile freedom is, how the often slow erosion becomes irreversible.
Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist from the Philippines, broke it down even more clearly in another session titled “The Weaponization of Nostalgia.” Here in the States, we know it as “Make America Great Again.”
There’s a playbook, she said — a well-worn one used by authoritarians everywhere:
“Media capture,” by elevating a propaganda arm like Newsmax while punishing the Associated Press for not taking orders from the president.
“Academic capture,” by slashing billions in critical research funds if schools won’t do his bidding.
“NGO capture,” by infiltrating and defunding nonprofit nongovernmental organizations that help millions of the world’s most vulnerable.
“State capture,” by ignoring checks and balances and demonizing anyone — including members of their own political party — who oppose the autocrat’s power grab.
Underpinning it all? The breakdown of the rule of law.
When we lose our rights, Ressa warned, “the executive begins to rule by executive order, the legislature is either corrupt, coerced, or co-opted, and the judiciary takes too long.”
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact script Trump is following — not just picking up where he left off, but accelerating with the help of enablers in the U.S. and strongman role models abroad.
What took six months in the Philippines, Ressa said, is happening even faster in the U.S.
“It boils down to the citizens … to every citizen in the democracy,” she said. She worried, as we all should be, that “Americans are like deer in headlights.”
Her message was simple, but urgent: If we don’t act now (by calling out the lies and the liars every time, for starters), the next day you lose a little more of your rights — until there are no more left to lose.
That’s not easy. Fear works as a strong deterrent. Look at the obedience. The cowardice. The capitulation that seemingly happens every hour in the U.S.
We’ve long known facts alone aren’t enough — not when emotions are being weaponized, and tech platforms provide the ammunition.
No one knows that better than Christopher Wylie — the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who exposed how Facebook data was twisted and weaponized to help elect Trump in 2016 and to pass Brexit. He also revealed the company’s ties to Russia.
At a session titled “Captured: How Silicon Valley’s AI Emperors Are Reshaping Reality,” Wylie didn’t mince words:
“This is not tech,” he plainly told the audience. “This is abuse of power.”
He called out Silicon Valley’s elite — especially Elon Musk — for cloaking dangerous ideologies in innovation.
“Just listen to what these guys say,” he compelled the journalists in attendance. “If you take them seriously — and I think you should take them seriously — because these are the richest men in the world, with some of the most powerful companies in the world, running the U.S. government, it’s super scary.”
Also scary is how we’re reacting, or failing to react, to it.
“You guys are talking about this as if it’s some app, a widget, or whatever,” Wylie chastised the reporters in the room. “No — it’s a fascist movement.”
His advice was blunt:
“When they say insane things, call it out. Ask: Who gave you this power? Why do you get to do this?”
Most importantly, he said: “Say no.”
Say no.
I don’t know why that message landed the hardest, why days after my return they are the words that ring the loudest, the truest.
Maybe because I realized how often we don’t say no. And how powerful we can be when we finally do.
The way Harvard University did when it said no, it won’t comply with Trump’s demands to give up its academic freedoms.
The way a federal judge ruled that no, the Trump administration couldn’t just violate orders and could be held in contempt for failing to return two planes deporting migrants to El Salvador last month.
The way hundreds of thousands of Americans said no to Trump and Musk and their hostile takeover of our institutions and our rights in large “Hands Off!” protests across the nation.
But there, in a city that’s seen empires rise and fall — among reporters who’ve risked their lives to protect fundamental freedoms, and in the shadow of those who lost theirs in the same pursuit — the message couldn’t have been clearer:
The danger is real.
The warnings are loud.
Wake up, America.
It’s long past time we said no.