‘This Is a New Dimension’

On Friday morning, hours after Don Lemon was apprehended in a Beverly Hills hotel lobby by a team of federal officers, two dozen agents arrived at the Minnesota home of independent journalist Georgia Fort, with a warrant for her arrest.

“This is all stemming from the fact that I filmed a protest as a member of the media,” Fort told viewers on a Facebook live stream announcing that agents were at her front door. “It’s hard to understand how we have a Constitution, constitutional rights, when you can just be arrested for being a member of the press.”

Lemon and Fort, who covered an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a St. Paul church earlier this month, were charged by the Department of Justice with violating two federal laws against interfering with exercising religious freedom—charges rejected last week by a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota.

By Friday evening, both Lemon and Fort had been released with orders to return for future court hearings. But the extraordinary arrests of two journalists for their coverage of a protest marked a profound and dangerous escalation of Donald Trump’s assault on the press, who he has denounced as the “enemy of the people,” exiled from official briefings in favor of chosen propagandists, and filed outrageous lawsuits to silence.

As news organizations, press freedom groups, and constitutional experts denounced the arrests as a brazen First Amendment violation, authoritarian experts viewed them as unmistakable evidence that Trump had entered a new, more dangerous phase.

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” told Status that the arrests showed Trump is going further in his crackdown on the press than strongmen around the world.

“This is a new dimension,” Levitsky said in an interview. “In democracies, journalists don’t get arrested. In authoritarian regimes, journalists get arrested.”

Levitsky said the administration’s tactics are, in some respects, more overtly aggressive than those used by well-known strongman leaders abroad, going beyond that of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists,” he said. “And in Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.”

After Trump’s reelection, some of America’s wealthiest men who control the country’s technology and media platforms—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others—fell in line behind him, a powerful visual that helped cement his consolidation of power. Levitsky said the speed and severity of the administration’s intimidating actions flowed directly from the lack of early resistance by these leaders and institutions who have long upheld America’s democratic norms.

“It encouraged—it empowered the Trump administration to do much more than it might have otherwise, to reach further and eventually overreach,” he said. That acquiescence, he argued, sent a powerful signal well beyond Washington.

“If the most powerful D.C. law firms and Disney and Columbia University and Jeff Bezos can’t stand up to Trump, how do we expect everyday American citizens or smaller businesses or colleges or universities?” he said. “People watched the most powerful and privileged members of our society get on their knees and they said, ‘Whoa, we better not mess with this.’”

That silence Levinsky said, emboldened the administration to go further in its assault on the press, breaking through boundaries that had long been considered off-limits in a democracy.

“The early abdication of this country’s elite sent a powerful signal to both the Trump administration and U.S. society that Trump was going to be able to get away with a lot,” he added. “And we paid a price for it. That’s why things went so far so fast in 2025.”

Marci Shore, an expert on authoritarianism who previously taught at Yale University and recently moved to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto, said Trump’s strategy relies on both overt censorship and fear-driven silence.

“It’s almost too obvious why an authoritarian or fascist regime doesn’t want truth-tellers around to tell the truth,” Shore told me. “There’s nothing subtle about the way in which the Trump administration is going after journalists: it’s all happening right in front of us. This administration is counting on the fact that when faced with threats, most people will put their heads down, grow quiet, and get in line. And it’s the job of journalists (and arguably of all of us) not to do that. Journalists are on the front-line.”

Levitsky cautioned that while the U.S. retains stronger courts and electoral institutions than many countries that have slid into authoritarianism, the damage done by Trump will not be easily undone.

“Even in the best case, we throw these guys out electorally, I don’t think we’re going to go back,” he said. “We’re not going to step back to a democracy with strong constitutional guardrails. The democratic norms have, at this point, been shattered and on the floor, and rules have been violated, twisted, manipulated.”

And the administration’s decision to begin arresting journalists, he said, is likely only the beginning of its abuses.

“We’re going to see three years of this,” Levitsky said. “It’s pretty clear that this government is going to continue to abuse power. It may be checked a bit more as it loses public support—particularly if it loses control of Congress—but these guys are going to continue to use power in multiple ways until they’re removed from office.”