That's a weird framing making for a very odd conclusion, given that he is expanding the powers of the government, claiming those powers vest directly in him, and increasing the number of enforcers of that power. It's like the CEO of a company eliminating the R&D department, cutting everyone else's pay, and bulking up on security guards to perform random searches looking for pretexts to fire more people. From my perspective, the bureaucracy was an ever growing amount of administrative overhead, but it was at least moderating authoritarian power and keeping the worst impulses of autocracy at bay.

I do agree they are not the same - reverting to autocracy is throwing the towel in on the American experiment. Previous elites in power at least had the decency to view their looting as a symbiotic parasitic relationship. What is the same is the dynamic of distracting the rubes with feel-good populist outrage while shamelessly robbing them blind.