First USAID, now Los Angeles: This is the moment to act
An opinion piece by a USAID foreign service officer and democracy expert
I’m a U.S. public servant, a democracy and governance expert with USAID, and I’m a proud American. That’s why I’m deeply concerned by what’s unfolding in Los Angeles.
The action President Donald Trump is taking is calculated, and it’s taken directly out of the authoritarian playbook.
I know this because I’ve seen it with my own eyes—in nations teetering on the edges (or well in the throes) of democratic backsliding. I was sent to these countries, for years at a time, on behalf of the American people. To help save and strengthen their democracies. To sound the alarm bells against corrupt “strong men” who try to seize and consolidate control through fear and brute force.
Now, I’m painfully seeing this exact script play out, word for word, in my own beloved country—the land of the free, the home of the brave.
Again, as always, the tactics are exactly the same:
Labeling protesters as “paid insurrectionists”: It’s not merely inflammatory. It mirrors actions used by leaders like Orbán in Hungary, who dismantled municipal autonomy under the guise of order. Duterte in the Philippines also conflated protest with criminality. These leaders did not seize control all at once—they tested the system’s limits, escalating their overreach step by step by step.
Deploying federal forces without state consent: Trump bypassed Governor Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass to deploy a military presence. This move not only defies democratic norms but echoes the centralization of coercive power seen in many historical and contemporary authoritarian regimes, where federal force is used to override local autonomy.
Manufacturing a ‘security crisis’ to justify exceptional measures: While this is commonplace in today’s militarized world, Trump’s invocation is extraordinary because he is using law-and-order rhetoric against such a broad swath of fellow Americans, despite evidence that protests have been largely peaceful. This mimics authoritarian strategies where a sense of chaos is deliberately inflated to rationalize militarized crackdowns and suspend usual political processes and local authority.
This moment in Los Angeles is not the first warning sign we’ve seen of executive overreach.
One of Trump’s earliest experiments with this authoritarian power grab was on January 20th when he came after the greatest ‘unheard of’ agency in the federal government: The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
USAID was established and funded by Congress to advance US foreign policy abroad—not through tanks and lethal weapons—but through something we like to call ‘soft power’.
As attacks and libelous slanders hailed down on USAID from the administration as well as Elon Musk and former allies in Congress, our nation’s leaders across the public and private sector all fell quiet.
With each day that passed in glass-shattering silence, the resistance within USAID waned. Fear of retribution rose to a deafening pitch. Ultimately it was the heartbroken, defeated public servants from within who finally destroyed the last elements of one of the strongest pillars of the U.S. National Security.
The President’s experiment worked.
He found he could, in fact, bypass Congress to shutter a federal agency. And we let him. With each test he passes, it will be monumentally harder to retrace our steps and reclaim the freedoms we’ve forfeited.
It is with this personal experience that I ask: What are you going to do?
Will you as an individual, as a city and as an institution define what is right based upon the values you know to be American?
Will you share it widely and collectively and proudly?
Or, will you incrementally let these acts of authoritarian overreach turn into the bending of your actions, or ultimately the making of an America into something that it is not? Into something that the greatest experiment in the world—the American experiment—was never intended to be?
From my experience within USAID, we’re already late as a nation in defining well what we are willing to resist. But it’s not too late, if we act now.
Governor Newsom’s speech yesterday is a step in the right direction. As is using the courts to attempt to check executive overreach. Growing, ongoing peaceful collective action is also beginning to redefine public narrative. But, beyond this, perhaps most important is the depth of your personal commitment to protecting your American values and freedoms.
Why LA is the perfect ‘next step’ for Trump’s power grab, if we let it
Comparative scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have documented how democracies often erode not by dramatic coups, but by small legalistic maneuvers that accrue power over time, exploiting public apathy or polarization.
Trump’s decision to bypass California Governor Gavin Newsom and send troops uninvited into Los Angeles is the first such federal intrusion since 1965. As Mayor Karen Bass noted, Los Angeles is being used as a “test case” for undermining state sovereignty and consolidating executive power.
The legal pretexts—like the Insurrection Act or federal command over National Guard units—rely on political restraint. In bad faith, they provide cover for authoritarian escalation.
This is a textbook move, where legitimacy is claimed, not seized, and where extraordinary powers are activated not in response to crisis, but to manufacture one. Believe me, I’ve seen it before from my time overseas with USAID, where I saw these exact moves play out in countries at the brink of authoritarianism.
And Los Angeles, with its diversity, progressivism, and symbolic weight, is the ideal backdrop for such a test. If the administration can normalize military occupation here, it can normalize it anywhere.
The images—of armored vehicles on city streets, of protestors met with tear gas—are not incidental. They are designed to recondition us, to erode our sense of normalcy.
As legal scholar Philippe Sands reminds us, this is the slow drip of democratic erosion: not through grand gestures, but by redrawing the bounds of the acceptable, day by day. It echoes the findings of comparative authoritarian studies, which emphasize that control is often consolidated by testing the public’s thresholds and adjusting strategies accordingly.
To be clear: this is not yet authoritarianism fulfilled. Courts still hold. Protest continues. But we are watching that line blur in real time. Unless reversed, it won’t be a single moment that tips us over—it will be our inaction. Read this excellent piece from CAP on what can be done to resist.
This is the moment to act, and act in whatever way you can.
Civic organizations must raise alarm, legal institutions must hold the line, and communities must organize.
We must double down on democratizing at the local level—through citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, public oversight boards, and transparent municipal governance. These are not abstract ideals—they are real bulwarks that empower communities, are central to the American democratic experience and will be part of how we define our future.
Our cities must become strongholds of democratic practice, not laboratories of federal intrusion. To ensure resilience, local governments must be supported in developing participatory infrastructures that make it harder—not easier—for authoritarian tactics to take hold.
Los Angeles is not just telling us something—it is asking us something:
Will we let this become the new normal? Or will we meet this moment with a renewed commitment to democratic resistance, civic innovation, and collective action?