Totalitarian regimes are often created during a response to a security crisis. We’ve seen military juntas in Greece, the Phillipines, a number of South American countries, South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, Portugal, Pakistan. It is always claimed to be necessary to protect the nation from some declared crisis (often citizen protest against corrupt government) and to be temporary. It invariably ends up being brutally oppressive to perceived enemies of the state and with the totalitarian clinging to power. Of course it could “never” happen in the U.S.