Dominic Sandbrook — the brilliant historian from The Rest Is History — recently joined Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on The Rest Is Politics to weigh Donald Trump’s behavior against the authoritarians of the past. Sandbrook, who has studied the Nazi regime in granular detail, noted that for all of Trump’s authoritarian impulses, he lacks the coherent ideological framework of a Hitler. The German dictator, after all, left behind an explicit body of writing and speeches that mapped out a racial and political vision long before the worst horrors of the regime emerged.
Sandbrook’s historical distinction is accurate. But it may also be less reassuring than it first appears.
He certainly recognizes the peril of our current moment. The Trump administration has displayed an authoritarian gravity that has rapidly reshaped the media landscape, sidelined independent journalists, and secured the functional — if often quiet — accommodation of major technology firms, corporate boardrooms, portions of the legal profession, and much of Congress. Yet because Trump lacks a rigid, overarching doctrine, many observers continue to treat his excesses as performance rather than governance.
To be sure, Trump’s record on race is a matter of public record: the housing discrimination lawsuits of the 1970s, his campaign against the Central Park Five, his habitual use of “low IQ” insults, and a career-long tendency toward xenophobic rhetoric. Yet one cannot find a systematic racial philosophy in his speeches comparable to the ideological frameworks that animated the twentieth century’s great dictatorships. Trump is entirely willing to embrace Black, Muslim, Jewish, or Latino supporters — provided they flatter his ego or serve his immediate political utility. His worldview is transactional more than doctrinal.
That distinction matters. But perhaps not in the way many assume.
Some of the policy frameworks surrounding Trump — including elements associated with Project 2025 — reflect a more structured ideological ambition than Trump himself often displays. Yet even that may be secondary to the larger question.
Where Sandbrook’s argument risks understatement is in the assumption that ideology is the primary warning sign.
Authoritarianism does not require a manifesto. It requires an appetite for power and the infrastructure to enforce it. The willingness to deploy masked federal agents, construct large detention systems, pressure institutions, or systematically discredit electoral outcomes behaves much the same regardless of the leader’s internal motivations. A democracy can be weakened just as effectively by a businessman protecting his interests as by a zealot pursuing a vision.
History often teaches us to watch for ideological blueprints. We search for manifestos, grand theories, and explicit declarations of intent. But power does not always arrive wrapped in doctrine. Sometimes it advances through improvisation, personal grievance, loyalty tests, and institutional accommodation.
Even in the 1930s, many observers convinced themselves that rhetoric was merely rhetoric and that existing institutions would impose natural limits before genuine danger emerged. History proved otherwise. The lesson is not that every modern leader resembles the dictators of the past. It is that free societies often underestimate how much can change before the danger becomes unmistakable.
We may not be looking at Germany in 1936. In important respects, the mechanics of our erosion are entirely different. Technology, media concentration, and the speed of modern communication allow institutions to adapt, comply, and self-censor at a pace twentieth-century authoritarians could scarcely have imagined.
Donald Trump does not need ideological fervor to produce damaging outcomes. He needs only a system increasingly willing to accommodate his impulses.
The greatest danger may not be the arrival of a grand ideology. It may be the slow habituation to conduct that would once have seemed extraordinary. Democracies seldom surrender themselves in a single act of abandonment. They adapt. They rationalize. They grow accustomed. And by the time the boundary between the acceptable and the unacceptable has shifted, few can remember precisely where it once stood.