Trump's tactics that have been familiar with the authoritarian regime: nPR

Last year David Koranyi took part in his mother's 70th birthday party in Hungary, but the indirect route he took underlines the autocratic rule that inspires his homeland. Instead of flying directly to Hungary, Koranyi flew into the neighbors Austria and then switched off his phone and drove across the border, where there was no passport control and he knew that he could slide undetected.

Koranyi operates an organization called Action for Democracy, which Hungary has mobilized in overseas to coordinate at home. Political scientists say that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has added the electoral landscape to his government party. The government says Koranyi threatens the sovereignty of Hungary; Pro-Government media routinely call him an “enemy of the state”.

“Friends and even messages in Hungary … told me that it might be better if I didn't come back to Hungary so soon,” says Koranyi, who was concerned that the government of Orbán could try to hold it out.

Threats like this are one reason why Koranyi came to America and became a citizen in 2022 Human inlays back to America.

These include Michigan's lawyer, Amir Makled, who was stopped at Detroit Airport in early April when he returned from a family vacation. Makled, who said the agents asked to search his phone, he believes that he was targeted because he was a propalestinian demonstrator at the University of Michigan.

“I will not be a dictator”

“In a million years, I would never have imagined that the atmosphere of fear and the random search for border crossings and the consideration of people with people in my life in the United States would live through,” says Koranyi, who lives in New York.

Countless people have left authoritarian countries for the promise of freedom and security in the United States. NPR has turned to Koranyi and A dozen others to get their impressions of the Trump government for the first several months. Most – but not all – said some of the tactics of the administration reminded them of those used by the regimes they have fled.

A survey in February showed that hundreds of American scientists believe that the United States quickly moved by liberal democracy into a form of authoritarianism.

“This is obviously a elected government, which, however, behave as an authoritarian, “says Steven Levitsky, professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How democracies die. “It goes into a fast and systematic weapon of the government of the government and its commitment to punish competitors, to protect the allies and the bullying elements of the media.”

Some immigrants say Trump is the victim

Last autumn, President Trump insisted that he would not be a autocrate that would go beyond the day of inauguration when he said that he almost completed the southern border and the Green-Light hole for energy.

“After that, I won't be a dictator,” promised Trump, while the campaign in a town hall of Fox News applause.

Some US immigrants say from authoritarian countries that Trump had held his word. Lily Tang Williams, who runs as Republicans for the third time in New Hampshire for the Congress, said it was not Trump, but the former President Joe Biden, who reminded her most of the authoritarian leaders in her home country, China.

“Who censored us during the Covid Times [and] Do you put us in the Facebook prison? “, Tang Williams said in an interview with Npr.” It wasn't Trump. Trump himself was censored. “

Tang Williams says that she is responsible for the bidding administration to exercise pressure on Facebook and Twitter, to make certain contributions, including a MEM that she has posted through mask mandate.

The bidges administration has explained that it encouraged responsible measures to protect public health.

If the tactics of the Trump government have unsettled immigrants like Koranyi, they have given fear of others like Fulya Pinar, professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Similar authoritarian tactics by Turkey Erdogan

Pinar grew up in Turkey and said that she has Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's autocratic president, who attacks the scholar and consolidate the power through the news media. She says she moved to the USA in 2016 to study for her doctorate. and to have intellectual freedom.

“It was about survival as an academic,” recalls Pinar, “to think further, teach, without writing fear.”

Since taking office, Trump or threatens to hold back billions of dollars of federal contracts and research grants from universities, including Harvard, and said they hadn't done enough to combat anti -Semitism. In this atmosphere, Pinar fears that some students could report them. In this semester she teaches anthropologies from the Middle East and does it differently than in the past.

In her lectures, for example, Pinar quoted the number of fatalities for conflicts such as the war in the Gaza. Now she instructs the students to reads in which they can find answers themselves. It is a way to isolate yourself from prejudice.

Fear in College classrooms

“I try to be more careful,” says Pinar, who is not satisfied. “At the end of the semester, the students normally give feedback to professors, and then their promotion depends on it.”

According to the barometer of the Middle East, the concerns of Pinar are representative, which tracks the opinions of scholars who teach about the region. A survey in February showed that 57% of professors in the United States under the administration of Trump, when discussing Israeli-Palestinian problems, felt more pressure.

After Pinar had left Türkiye's autocracy for America's freedom, she said she never had a time like it.

“I feel quite fragile because I have the feeling that I can't work freely here,” continues Pinar. “It just feels like I am.”

In addition to the takeover of universities, the Trump government also targeted news organizations that critically treat the president. The Federal Communications Commission examines Broadcast News Networks – including ABC, CBS and NBC – because of allegations that they have preferred Democrats. Trump has also attacked public broadcasters. In a social media contribution, he called NPR and PBS “radical left monster” that violated the country.

Threat to roast licenses from TV news channels

The journalist Maria Ressa says Rodrigo Duterte, the autocratic president of the Philippines, used similar tactics. In 2020, the government of Duterte refused to extend and close the country's license of the country's largest broadcast.

Duterte left the office in 2022 and is now waiting for the trial in Haag for crimes against humanity because he allegedly approved tens of thousands of extrajudicial murders during his war against the country's drug trafficking. But Ressa says that the damage he caused the news media took.

“Even after the end of Duterte's reign, this network never got its license … back,” says Ressa, who once headed the broadcaster itself. “What is damaged during this time, what is destroyed remains destroyed.”

Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 because he was against Duterte's attacks on her and her news page Rappler. At some point, she stood that more than a century in prison on tax evasion and cyber-libelanks stood in prison that human rights groups were politically motivated. Ressa spends this semester at Columbia University. As a double citizen, she has a message for people here.

“The Americans are slowly answering, but I know what is afraid,” she says. “Don't be afraid because you are strongest now. Every day you do not act and consider the border to be your rights, you will become weaker.“