Former President Barack Obama warned on Tuesday night that the country was “dangerously close” to allowing its government officials to act in a way “consistent with autocracies,” offering a veiled rebuke of the Trump administration that was delivered with trademark caution, the New York Times reports.

Said Obama: “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to what we understood — and not just my generation, at least since World War II — our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work.”

He went on: “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that. And we need people both outside government and inside government saying, ‘Let’s not go over that cliff because it’s hard to recover.’”

Paul Krugman: “America is no longer a full-fledged democracy. We are currently living under a version of competitive authoritarianism — a system that (like Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey) is still democratic on paper but in which a ruling party no longer takes democracy’s rules seriously…”

“Trumpists, however, haven’t yet fully consolidated their hold. America still has a chance of reclaiming itself from the grip of brazen corruption, mindless destruction, and contempt both for the rule of law and for our erstwhile allies. We don’t have to become a country bullied into submission.”

“But we’re teetering on the edge, and one of the most important ways we can step back from that edge is for ordinary Americans to engage in mass protests.”

Paul Krugman: “There are two disastrously wrong ways to read the news from Los Angeles right now, and the rest of America over the next few days. The first is to believe that there is actually anything resembling an insurrection underway. The second is to believe that the Trump administration’s response to the nonexistent insurrection is simply cynical politics, an attempt to gain Donald Trump a few points in the polls.”

“What we’re actually seeing is much worse: An attempt to end politics as we know it, to deploy force to suppress dissent. Not eventually, but right now.”

G. Elliot Morris: “If Trump gets away with this, he will absolutely do the same thing during the 2026 and 2028 elections. He will manufacture unrest just like in LA and send federal troops to every major city as a way to intimidate voters and decrease turnout. A functional end to fair elections.”

“Gov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decisions to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles have put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism,” the New York Times reports.

Said Newsom: “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived.”

Washington Post: “Newsom said the Trump administration is becoming an authoritarian regime and warned that while his state may have been first, ‘other states are next.’”

Paul Krugman: “It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many problems. But runaway urban crime wasn’t one of them. In fact, Trump chose to proclaim urban carnage after a remarkable generation-long run of plunging crime in our major cities. New York, for example, had only 335 murders in 2016, down from 2,262 in 1990.”

“So what was that about?”

“At the time, I thought it was mostly about sadism. Trump clearly loves punishing people, so he was eager to portray a nation full of people who needed punishing. And it remains true, as Adam Serwer pointed out back in 2018, that for Trump and many of his supporters cruelty is a goal in itself, that they rejoice in the suffering of those they hate and fear.”

“But the events unfolding in Los Angeles as you read this and, I fear, the events likely to unfold across much of America soon, quite possibly this weekend, suggest that the motivations of Trump and his cronies go deeper than mere (mere!) sadism. They want to use false claims of chaos to justify a power grab that, if successful, would mark the end of the American experiment.”

“I don’t believe there is any problem of American politics and American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government.”

— The late Supreme Court Justice David Souter, speaking in 2012.

Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt, writing in the New York Times:

“We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.”

“Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.”

“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.”

Andrew Marantz: “Other countries have watched their democracies slip away gradually, without tanks in the streets. That may be where we’re headed—or where we already are.”

“We seem to be facing the destruction of the United States. I don’t see anyone articulating that this is an attack on what it means to be American, on the very idea of America, and it’s an emergency.”

— Yale professor Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism, quoted by the New York Times.

Adrienne LaFrance: “Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America.”

“If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.”

Jerusalem Demsas: “Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.”

“While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential ‘tyranny of the majority’ have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) on Sunday accused President Trump of sending the U.S. into a constitutional crisis, saying members of the Trump administration “are very much flouting the courts as we speak,” NBC News reports.

Josh Marshall: “We can talk endlessly about whether we’re still in a democracy or whether Trump wants to be or is acting like a dictator. We can debate words such as ‘fascism’ that were unknown before a century ago. But what we are seeing right now is the definition of tyranny, a half-archaic concept the founders of the American Republic were very familiar with.”

“Trump’s rule is both lawless and arbitrary. He has taken the bundle of powers the Constitution provides him to govern and defend the Constitution and turned them to an entirely different and corrupt purpose: using them as weapons to attack the people and institutions he deems his enemies.”

“In a blistering ruling, a federal judge blocked a new executive order from President Donald Trump punishing a prominent law firm that successfully sued Fox News for promoting false claims of election fraud,” NBC News reports.

Judge Loren AliKha said that Trump’s order targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey was part of a “personal vendetta.”

She added: “The framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power.”