The drift toward authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a bang; it begins long before the public recognizes the danger. It begins with language: the slow, deliberate reclassification of fellow citizens as lesser, suspect, or dangerous. Once a government convinces people that some among them are unworthy of rights or empathy, the rest becomes frighteningly easy.
We are watching that process unfold in the United States.
Earlier this month, after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good, senior Trump Administration officials responded not with the sobriety such a tragedy demands but with the most incendiary labels they could summon. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Good a “domestic terrorist.” Vice President J.D. Vance doubled down on Noem’s falsehoods, insisting that Good had been “brainwashed” and was part of a “broader left‑wing network,” allegations offered without evidence. He described her death as “a tragedy of her own making,” as though the state bore no responsibility for the bullets its agents fired.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s warnings about the “enemy within” have become the organizing frame for his broader political rhetoric. This year, he has vilified peaceful demonstrators as “thugs” and “paid agitators and insurrectionists.” In doing so, Trump has redefined dissent not as a civic act, but as an enemy force.
These comments are not isolated outbursts. They reflect a pattern history warns us to take seriously.
A few weeks later, the pattern became unmistakable. On Jan. 24, federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37‑year‑old ICU nurse, during an immigration enforcement operation. Video from multiple angles shows Pretti filming officers and helping a woman who had been pushed to the ground. He was pepper‑sprayed, tackled by several agents, and then shot while on the pavement. Independent review of the footage indicates that in the moments before he was taken down, he was holding a phone—not a weapon.
Yet before the facts were known, the administration’s response followed the same script. Noem again labeled the victim a domestic terrorist. Greg Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official, claimed—without evidence—that Pretti had arrived to inflict “maximum damage on individuals” and framed the shooting as a necessary act of self‑defense. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller escalated the rhetoric further, calling Pretti “an assassin” and insisting that the protests were part of a coordinated effort to undermine federal authority. And Vance, abandoning any pretense of restraint, described the scene as the work of “far-left agitators,” collapsing the distinction between peaceful witnesses and violent extremists.
In each case, the message was the same: these were not citizens with rights; they were enemies.
I have spent decades working at the intersection of law and human rights, serving as a U.S. Public Delegate to the United Nations and an appointee to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. In diplomatic chambers and historical archives, I have seen how regimes telegraph their intentions. Authoritarian systems rarely begin with mass repression. They begin by redefining who counts as a threat.
And that is precisely what we are witnessing now. Over the past year, the administration has repeatedly used the language of extremism to describe ordinary Americans. During a Chicago immigration raid in October, the Department of Homeland Security labeled Marimar Martinez, another U.S. citizen shot by a federal agent, a “domestic terrorist” in an official press release. In both her case and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, officials used terminology once reserved for mass‑casualty attacks to describe unarmed civilians attempting to drive away, film an encounter, or help a stranger to her feet.
This is not the language of a confident democracy. It is the language of a government seeking permission: permission to escalate force, evade accountability, and silence dissent.
A recent academic analysis found that Donald Trump has increasingly used the word “evil” not to describe foreign adversaries but to condemn domestic political opponents, journalists, and critics. No modern president has used the term this way. This is not mere name‑calling; it is moral delegitimization. It suggests that disagreement with those in power is not just wrong but wicked.
When leaders describe their critics as “evil,” “radicalized,” or “terrorists,” they are not trying to win an argument. They are trying to end one.
The Trump Administration’s language around immigration enforcement reinforces this point. Officials have warned of “violent efforts to shut down immigration enforcement” and claimed that “domestic terrorists” are using “extreme views” to obstruct federal operations. These sweeping assertions, often contradicted by video evidence and eyewitness accounts, serve a clear purpose: to cast any challenge to federal authority as inherently illegitimate.
Once dissent becomes synonymous with extremism, the state no longer needs to justify its actions. It only needs to point.
The rhetorical pattern after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti makes this plain.
When officials insist that Good was a terrorist, they are not describing what happened. They are justifying it.
When they claim that Pretti arrived to inflict maximum damage, they are not offering facts. They are manufacturing a threat.
When they declare that questioning the President’s narrative is “propaganda” or “anti‑American,” they are not defending the truth. They are attacking the very idea of accountability.
And when the administration labels its critics and its victims “evil,” “radicalized,” or part of a “terrorist network,” it is not engaging in politics. It is engaging in dehumanization.
History shows that once a government normalizes this language, the slide accelerates. The state becomes both narrator and arbiter of reality. Citizens become suspects. Violence becomes self‑defense. Democracy becomes optional.
Democratic norms can be fragile. They quickly erode when leaders decide that some people are no longer entitled to the protections the rest of us take for granted.
The danger we face is not only the violence we see in our communities or on video. It is the narrative that follows: the official insistence that the victim was not a victim at all, but an enemy of the state.
That is the moment when democracies falter. It is the moment when the government stops speaking about its citizens as citizens.
We can allow a government to describe ordinary citizens as terrorists, to treat dissent as extremism, and to use language as a shield for its own abuses. We can pretend this is normal, or temporary, or harmless.
Or we can recognize what history makes plain: once a government convinces the public that some people are enemies, it rarely stops there. After all, why would your enemies’ votes matter? Why would their lives matter?
The health of our republic depends on refusing that premise now, before the vocabulary of authoritarianism becomes the common tongue of American politics, and before more names are added to the list.
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