He’s arbitrarily dictating terms of private sector business transactions, one after another, from Intel to Nvidia, without any clear legal authority, prompting cries of “socialism” from traditional conservatives. More to the point, Harvard economist and adviser to former Republican presidents Gregory Mankiw calls it “crony capitalism”.

Trump is not the cause of the “third wave” of autocratisation. He’s a symptom of it. And now a leader of it. An expert on democracy and extremism, Lydia Khalil, points out that there are three essential ingredients for democratic erosion: conditions that provide an opportunity; political actors who exploit these conditions; and pathways for their campaigns against democracy. Trump didn’t supply the conditions. America did that without him, setting up polarisation, inequality, dysfunction, an anti-government ideology, discontent with immigration, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness that improvement could be possible.

Democracy was on the defensive. Joe Biden liked to say that the government “needs to show democracy can deliver”. It was too little, too late. Trump was the political actor to exploit these conditions. He’s now walking the pathway to centralise power in an autocratic presidency.

Khalil points out that democracy is not a fixture or a practice. It’s a system. Trump is the culminating point of America’s democratic system failure. This week, Khalil launched a new interactive online tool for the Lowy Institute to explain how the democratic system works. And how it fails.

“I want people to recognise that we all play a part, you can’t just blame the media or an autocratic leader, it’s made up of many interconnected parts.” And, as it happens, this week illustrated how the Australian system is under attack from powerful antidemocratic forces: “It was a big week,” says Khalil, Lowy’s program director on international challenges. “A very big week.”

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There were two events that dominated the news. One was Iran’s covert interference program, exposed by ASIO. The intelligence agency concluded that Iran paid local criminals to conduct violent attacks on Jewish institutions in Sydney and Melbourne.

Why? To foment division, suspicion and unrest. The Albanese government responded by expelling Iran’s ambassador to Canberra and proscribing as a terrorist organisation Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. These actions, however, won’t prevent Iran from continuing its malicious campaign against Australia. Tehran will just need to be more circumspect to get away with it.

The second was the violent outburst of a so-called “sovereign citizen”, a local radicalised in Australia. Under the influence of a fringe American-made ideology that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the state, he ambushed police officers seeking to serve him an arrest warrant. He murdered two and injured a third. It’s the second set of police murders by so-called “sovereign citizens” in Australia in three years.

“Foreign interference and violent extremism are becoming much more intersected,” Khalil explains. “Fomenting the conditions to lead to violent extremism is a strategy of foreign interference.”

The leading practitioner is Moscow: “Russian information operation campaigns in the US and Europe use bots to polarise, to confuse, to sow discord, and to pollute the information environment. People get confused and lose their epistemological certainty.” In other words, they can no longer tell conspiracy from reality.

“Any events that are highly divisive – Israel-Gaza, transsexuals, COVID – the Russians promote the divisions and sit back and watch the results.”

The growth of the self-described “sovereign citizen” movement is, itself, an example of these foreign influence campaigns turbocharging local suspicions and divisions. This ideology was born in 1970s American anti-government conspiracy mongering and lingered on the fringes of society, but “when COVID hit, it went gangbusters”, says Khalil.

The enforced isolation and sudden state repression triggered people who might have been vulnerable to conspiracy thinking. Including in Australia: “A lot of people were captured by these ideas during COVID, and it didn’t recede.”

“With foreign interference and domestic political violence, it’s not either or, it’s not one or the other,” Khalil says. “It’s both.” Both are sources of – and the product of – the rising tide of far-right ideology that is tearing communities apart. And helping create conditions for the rise of dictators.

Democracies are especially vulnerable to these harms. Open societies with free speech and open internet access are ready targets for online disinformation and exploitation, whether they’re state-driven by Russia, Iran or China, or whether they’re profit-driven by Meta, Google or X.

Australia, which remains one of the final 25 full democracies long after the US, France, Hungary and South Korea have been relegated by the Economist Intelligence Unit to the ranks of “flawed democracies”, is a pioneer in trying to protect itself from the worst online harms. Its law to deny under-16s access to social media, to take effect in December, will be a major test.

Australian democracy is in relatively good health. But we are enjoying the calm before the storm. Lydia Khalil is troubled by the emergence of what she calls “facilitating conditions”. Specifically, growing inequality, notably intergenerational inequality as the younger generations feel left behind, and the polarisation that it can create.

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And every existing problem is about to be intensified by AI. For example, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has said that school nurses reported last year that kids of 10 and 11 are spending five to six hours a day addicted to AI companions. These were sexualised chatbots inciting them to commit sexual acts. And if online conspiracy theorists today are having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, how will they cope with high-quality deepfake video?

Australia’s last line of defence is the eSafety commissioner. And she is about to become the prime target of the great wannabe dictator, Donald Trump. He said this week that any country seeking to regulate US technology companies will be hit with “substantial additional tariffs on that country’s exports to the USA”, plus export restrictions on high-grade US semiconductors.

Khalil counsels against despair. Democracy, she reminds us, is a process, and one that can renew itself. “If you can catch democratic erosion early enough, it’s like seawalls against a rising tide – you can put up the wall before your house collapses.” And beware of the dictators riding the crest of the third wave, determined to sabotage yours.