How Wikipedia made Trump an ‘authoritarian’

Is President Donald Trump an authoritarian? Over the past year, a handful of partisan Wikipedia editors have built a narrative making precisely this claim.

Adversarial editors have seeded this highly charged claim across numerous Wikipedia articles, using verbatim language and identical sources, at least one of which is tied to a left-wing activist group. The effort has trickled down to ChatGPT, which cites these Wikipedia articles as “evidence” that Trump is authoritarian.

The most visible effort in this campaign is the main Wikipedia article on Trump. The “Donald Trump” article mentions the term “authoritarian” no fewer than seven times, as of Oct. 3, including in the article’s all-important lead section, where it states that the president’s “actions, especially in his second term, have been described as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding.”

While the sentence neglects to specify who “describes” the president as authoritarian, a closer look sheds light on this question. Lower down in the article, in a section titled “Second Presidency,” Wikipedia editors claim that Trump’s “actions against civil society were described by hundreds of legal experts and political scientists as authoritarian.”

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Wikipedia provides just three sources to back up this sweeping claim. One is an April article in The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, as part of a series on “Democracy and justice” sponsored by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

The Guardian cites Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, who alleges that Trump “has a strikingly authoritarian instinct.” But the UK newspaper, rated “Left” by Allsides, fails to disclose a potentially serious conflict of interest—Levitsky serves as advisor to a political NGO called Protect Democracy—whose website prominently features a campaign called “The Authoritarian Threat” —founded by former Obama White House Associate Counsel Ian Bassin.

The Wikipedia campaign to cast Trump as authoritarian comes on the heels of a similar effort—painting him as a “fascist.” As I reported in October, part of the “fascism” campaign included the creation of a new article, “Donald Trump and fascism,” published six weeks before the 2024 presidential election. To shore up its chief claim, the article refers prominently to a book, “How Democracies Die,” whose co-author is none other than Professor Levitsky.

This approach reflects one of the main strategies Wikipedia editors use to build a narrative: the creation of a web of articles, or a “networked narrative,” designed to push the same key point. The repetition across multiple articles is what drives the narrative.

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This is exactly what we see with the “authoritarian” effort, with no fewer than six major articles involved— including ones seemingly created just for this purpose.

In May, an article with the ungainly title “Targeting of political opponents and civil society under the second Trump administration,” makes a claim identical to the one in the main Trump article, stating: Trump’s “actions against civil society were described by legal experts and hundreds of political scientists as authoritarian.” The article even cites the same Soros-sponsored article in the Guardian.

The article was created by editor BoostED, who is responsible for over 95% of its content. Far from crowdsourced, as Wikipedia famously claims to be, this is the opinion of just one person. But BoostED isn’t any ordinary editor.

An entirely separate article, “Second presidency of Donald Trump,” lifts the same language from the article mentioned above: Trump’s “actions against civil society were described by legal experts and hundreds of political scientists as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding.” The same sources are used as references, including the Guardian article. That’s not a coincidence—the sentence was added by BoostED.

Another article, “Trumpism,” mentions the term “authoritarian” more than 20 times, including in the lead, where it claims the Trump-inspired movement “features significant illiberal, authoritarian and at times autocratic beliefs.” This claim was added by BoostED as well.

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The “Trumpism” article also claims that the movement has been described as “right-wing authoritarian populist.” The source for that assertion is Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA who specializes in critical theory, a Marxism-inspired academic field. 

Yet another article, “Unitary executive theory,” cites a slight variation of the same statement made above: “several of Trump’s actions ignored or violated federal laws, regulations, and the Constitution, were authoritarian, and contributed to democratic backsliding.” This claim was added by BoostED, who cited the same sources—including the Guardian article.

BoostED is also responsible for adding the term “authoritarian” to another article, “Rhetoric of Donald Trump” — an article that BoostED is the top editor on. BoostED made this addition weeks before the 2024 election. BoostED’s top six articles (by the number of edits the account made to each) all relate to Trump.

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The campaign to call Trump authoritarian gets thrown into stark relief when compared to articles on other, actual authoritarian leaders around the globe.

The article on Iran’s Ayatollah Khameini—a dictator who, as the country’s Supreme Leader, exercises total control of every aspect of life—does not once mention the term “authoritarian.” The same is true of the article on Cuba’s communist dictator, Raúl Castro.

Despite the contradiction, the “authoritarian” campaign has filtered downstream. Ask ChatGPT if Trump is an authoritarian and it answers in the affirmative, citing three of the Wikipedia articles mentioned above—and mentioning Harvard’s Steven Levitsky by name as evidence.

Wikipedia purports to be a crowdsourced encyclopedia and this, its proponents have long argued, is part of the key to its heralded neutrality. 

The reality, however, is that it’s astonishingly easy for a handful of bad-faith editors — even, as we’ve seen, a single editor — to create damaging narratives concerning figures as powerful as the president of the United States, with no one noticing.

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