President Donald J. Trump is presented with a 10th Combat Aviation Brigade challenge coin following an air assault and gun rain demonstration at Fort Drum, New York, on August 13, 2019.

One journalist and author said Americans have reason to fear their country is rapidly slipping into authoritarianism, given President Donald Trump's approach to deploying the National Guard to double as a law enforcement entity across the country.

During a Wednesday podcast episode hosted by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, longtime journalist and author Radley Balko — who covers policing in the United States — said that Trump is showing several signs that he aims to have a state-sponsored security force exclusively loyal to him to use against his political opponents. Klein began the episode by saying that Trump was "creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control."

"What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force," Balko told Klein. "They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president."

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Balko opined that the ongoing military occupation of Washington D.C. — which he justified by insisting that crime in the capital city necessitated a heavy federal presence – was a precursor to Trump sending military to other cities across the U.S. in Democratic-run states like Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, Illinois and Oakland, California. And he observed that when analyzing crime data in the cities Trump has identified, the justification falls apart.

"Incidentally, all three cities have seen dramatic drops in crime. Baltimore is in, I think, a 30- or 40-year low in violent crime. Oakland has dropped pretty dramatically. Chicago has dropped a little bit," Balko said. "...This isn’t about federalism or keeping the nation’s capital safe. It’s not about immigration enforcement. These are all very blue cities. They’re cities with large Black populations, with Black political leadership and they’re cities that Trump has been disparaging for his entire political career."

Balko told Klein that Trump's reliance on the military to carry out law enforcement is a common tool among authoritarian regimes around the world, and that he personally didn't predict that an American president would ever exhibit similar behavior on American soil. He also argued that the politicization of the military was a dark omen for Americans in the near future.

"It’s hard to describe what is actually going on right now without sounding crazy: The idea that the president is going to deploy the military into cities and states that didn’t vote for him because he’s angry at them for that — or he is going to stop sending them disaster relief because they didn’t vote for them — that is clearly the stuff of totalitarian regimes," he said.

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Click here to read the full transcript of Klein's interview with Balko in the New York Times (subscription required).