CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the days after Donald Trump’s reelection as president, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky was despondent.

“I was in the fetal position,” he said. “I just wanted to put on sweat pants, eat ice cream and watch hockey.”

Levitsky had spent two decades studying authoritarian regimes in other countries, but during Trump’s first term, he had turned his attention to the United States. A book he co-authored, “How Democracies Die,” had become a surprise best-seller. It chronicled Trump’s autocratic tendencies — his attacks on the press, the judiciary and the electoral system — and warned that one of the world’s oldest democracies was in peril.

Trump’s reelection “felt like a gut punch,” Levitsky said. “I took it personally. I had been working for eight years to prevent this from happening.”

Eventually, Levitsky switched off the hockey and changed out his sweat pants.

In recent months, Levitsky has resumed his mantle as a leading public intellectual raising alarm bells about Trump. He had long warned that, during a second term, Trump would adhere even less to democratic norms — a prediction based in part the president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and block a peaceful transfer of power.

Still, Levitsky said he has been shocked by the speed at which Trump has moved in his second term to gut parts of the U.S. government and eliminate democratic guardrails — from attempting to deport international students for political speech to refusing to comply with court orders, such as the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the administration “facilitate” the return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador.

“We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy,” Levitsky said.

This time, Trump’s attacks are hitting close to home, as the White House dives into the affairs of several of the country’s top universities, including Harvard.

On Monday, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in grants because Harvard refused to comply with various administration demands, among them that it shut down diversity programs, root out “ideological capture” in a variety of academic programs and stop admitting international students “hostile to the American values.”

The Trump administration says it seeks to restore balance to universities, which it argues have been hijacked by the left, and to eliminate anti-antisemitism on campus.

Levitsky, who is Jewish, believes the administration is using anti-antisemitism “as a pretext,” and said that attacking academics is a classic tactic of strongmen.

“Authoritarians go after universities,” he said.

In March — after Trump launched similar broadsides against Columbia University but before it made its demands on Harvard — Levitsky and fellow professor Ryan Enos authored a letter, co-signed by 800 of their colleagues, calling on Harvard to defend itself and academic freedom more broadly by mounting “a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”

Their pressure seems to have helped Harvard President Alan Garber stand up to Trump. On Monday, Harvard announced that it would not comply with the administration’s demands, which it said “invade university freedoms long recognized by the Supreme Court.”

Hours later, the administration announced that it was freezing the $2.2 billion in grants. On Tuesday, Trump threatened to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

The issue will almost certainly end up in court. Meanwhile, Levitsky and many others on campus breathed a sigh of relief.

“If we’re going for going to mobilize, it’s going to be the most prominent, the most well-endowed, the most privileged and protected of us in civil society who have to take the lead,” Levitsky said. “Because state colleges are not going to be able to absorb a blow from Trump the way that Harvard can.”

Before he became obsessed with the workings of authoritarianism, Levitzky grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., the son of a professor of psychology at Cornell University.

In his late teens, he grew interested in Central America, where the U.S. was funding military efforts against leftist guerrillas in El Salvador and the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua. A couple of college trips to those countries transformed him from an activist into an academic: As much of Latin America exited a dark period of authoritarian rule, Levitsky decided he wanted to study democracy: how it thrives, how it declines and what happens when it is absent.

Levitsky attended Stanford and then UC Berkeley, and likely would have spent his career in relative obscurity, writing academic tomes about political parties in Argentina. Then Donald Trump came to power in 2016.

Levitsky and his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, an expert in the breakdown of democracy in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, started talking, comparing Trump’s actions with those of the authoritarian leaders they studied. “We felt this was a movie we had seen before,” Levitsky said.

It was no accident, Levitsky said, that many of the first political scientists to raise alarms about Trump were not those who studied the U.S. but experts in authoritarian regimes elsewhere.

“Americans have been slow to recognize this because we’ve never experienced it as a society,” he said.

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s 2018 book, “How Democracies Die,” argued that autocrats don’t always announce themselves with tanks and a coup d’etat. In recent years, they have often come to power via legitimate elections, then stacked the deck in their favor by weaponizing the state against their enemies and rewarding corrupt allies.

The book was a surprise hit, embraced by liberals who found it gave voice to their fears. Joe Biden carried the book on his 2020 campaign for president, often quoting from it.

Levitsky became something of an academic rock star, appearing on CNN, briefing foreign leaders and Democratic members of Congress.

Many conservatives dismissed Levitsky as, he says, “a partisan hack.” Some accused him of overlooking the Democrats’ role in subverting democratic norms, citing, for example, President Obama’s embrace of executive power, or the Democratic attempt to filibuster Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

“Democracies aren’t destroyed because of the impulses of a single man; they are, instead, degraded in the course of a partisan tit-for-tat dynamic that degrades norms over time until one side sees an opening to deliver the death blow,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Willick.

But while Levitsky acknowledges that he is a registered Democrat, he said his research is not partisan.

On a recent rainy afternoon in Cambridge, Levitsky strode up to a lectern in a hall crowded with about a hundred students. The class was called “Democracy and Authoritarianism” and the lecture titled “How Modern Dictatorships Work … and Why they Persist.”

Levitsky discussed truisms across authoritarian regimes: that strongmen benefit from a sturdy economy, that they often place their family members in positions of power, that their biggest threat may come from other elites rather than from mass protest below.

He talked about Rwanda, Venezuela and China — and occasionally dropped in references to the United States, at one point name-dropping Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“If you’re in power because of your ties to the leader ... you have an incentive to remain loyal no matter what,” he said.

As Levitsky exited the hall, several students and a group of retirees who are auditing the course thanked him for pushing the university to stand up to Trump. He nodded his head, and told them to keep resisting.

Levitsky says there are several factors that could hamper Trump. For one, he said, Trump is unpopular, with only about four in 10 Americans approving of his performance as president, according to many polls. And then there’s the stock market, which has quivered amid Trump’s on-again, off-again threat of global tariffs.

A recession would hurt Trump and maybe the worldwide economy, Levitsky said, “But ultimately, it’ll probably be good for democracy.”

At his heart, Levitsky says, he is an optimist. On a global level, he doesn’t think democracy is in decline. He pointed to Brazil and South Korea, which have histories of dictatorships and which in recent years have rejected anti-democratic threats.

“Most of the countries that became full democracies after 1975 are still democracies today, despite the rise of China, despite (Vladimir) Putin, despite Trump,” he said.

And the United States, he said, has a powerful civil society, with very wealthy individuals, powerful universities and independent journalists.

“We have more than enough muscle to push back,” he said.

Harvard is about to test that muscle.

On Monday, Levitsky read the university’s response to the Trump administration to his students, who erupted in applause.

“It looks,” he said, “like Harvard has decided it’s time to fight.”

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