🔒 Trump's actions threaten democracy

Key topics:

Trump’s actions challenge democratic norms and threaten US checks and balances.
GOP’s passivity and Trump’s control over media embolden authoritarianism.
Courts and citizens may be the last defence against Trump’s unchecked power.

By Francis Wilkinson ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Is Donald Trump’s rampage through the US Government, including those parts outsourced to Elon Musk in open contempt of the law, evidence that the president is weak — limited by narrow majorities in Congress, institutional constraints on the executive and courts asserting constitutional prerogatives? Or proof that he is strong — untouchable by law or politics?

The question has been kicked around by columnists and political analysts for a couple of weeks now. It’s more than an academic discussion. The answer points either to a future of US authoritarianism or one in which democracy and constitutionalism yet cling to life.

“The threats to American democracy in the United States are now immediate, serious, and mounting by the day,” democracy scholar Larry Diamond wrote this week. “Multiple illegal and unconstitutional acts are happening, and the guardrails that check and restrain authoritarian abuse are rapidly falling away.”

The case for weakness is a small-d democratic one. If Trump were a strong executive, this analysis goes, he would forge legislation, get it passed by his party’s majorities in Congress and sign it into law.

As Ezra Klein has written:

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan advanced the “Green Lantern” theory of the presidency as a satirical response to complaints that Obama lacked the will or savvy to get his way. Adherents of the Green Lantern theory, according to Nyhan, seem to believe that if a president only tries hard enough, he can magically overcome the constraints of popular opinion and the constitutional order. Klein’s analysis flows from his appreciation of Nyhan’s joke. Obama wasn’t actually constrained by a lack of desire or skill, as Green Lanternists seemed to believe; he was constrained by the Constitution, the force of competing power centers and the restrictive range of public opinion. Push any one of those too far, and it snaps back with a vengeance. While Trump is obviously less faithful to law than Obama was, he is, by this reckoning, nonetheless similarly constrained by the polity and the Constitution.

But strength, in a complex federal system with separation of powers, is always relative. To assess Trump’s power, it’s also necessary to gauge the power of rivals.

In Washington, Democrats are obviously struggling. They have minority blocs in the House and Senate, where their leaders appear out of their depth in the new authoritarian waters. Across the nation, the party controls a minority of statehouses. At the Supreme Court, the Republican-appointed majority has increasingly taken the form of a partisan political operation, pushing through GOP agendas on everything from regulation to Trump’s newfound immunity for a wide breadth of crimes he might — or possibly already has — committed in office, while the court’s minority of Democratic appointees is often left howling in the wind.

Democratic control of key states and cities remains a potential source of strength. Attorneys general from blue states have sued the Trump administration. And Trump’s assault on immigrants will be countered — it’s still unclear to what degree — by various Democratic mayors. Blue states, which are typically more affluent and disproportionately fund the federal government, may ultimately decide they have no choice but to interrupt the flow of their own money to Washington. That’s likely every bit as harrowing and difficult as it sounds. No one seems to be pursuing such a course yet. But when MAGA attacks on Democratic constituencies become more targeted, forceful and lawless, such a response seems inevitable.

Beyond government, civil society is likewise in distress. Universities, nonprofits and private corporations are busy scrubbing from their websites, grant applications and org charts words that MAGA dislikes. Trump’s executive orders and indiscriminate firings have left the entire scientific backbone of America in danger of snapping. Much of the legacy press is docile, depleted or overwhelmed, and, in some instances, compromised by ownership’s desire to appease Trump. Social media has capitulated to bad-faith Republican claims of “censorship,” ending efforts to police disinformation and inviting exploitation by the kinds of extremists who thrive on Elon Musk’s X.

In the past, intra-party politics has sometimes served as a check on a president’s power. There’s little sign of that occurring in Trump 2.0. As in the first Trump administration, Republicans sometimes equivocate over Trump’s most egregious acts — his pardon of Jan. 6 rioters, for example. But such feints have zero effect. Republican senators have rubber-stamped a string of flagrantly unfit Trump cabinet nominees. An anti-vax crackpot and serial liar will lead the nation’s health bureaucracies. A Putin apologist with a sketchy past will lead the nation’s intelligence services. A rabid conspiracy crank committed to vendetta politics will lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The exception to that litany of disgrace, however, is informative. Former Representative Matt Gaetz, whom Trump first nominated to be US attorney general, was no more derelict a choice for high office than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, or Kash Patel — and Gaetz is hardly the only MAGA leader to have a skeevy history with women. Republicans scuttled Gaetz’s nomination not because he was manifestly unfit — who in this crowd isn’t? — but because too many personally dislike him. Many Republican politicians no doubt fear violence at the hands of Trump’s mob, as former Senator Mitt Romney has explained. But voluminous evidence indicates that the GOP is also largely on the same authoritarian page as its president.

Even authoritarian parties have rifts, of course, and the GOP’s narrow House majority makes the fault lines consequential. Republicans need to pass a budget reconciliation package and debt-ceiling increase, both of which will be complicated by the large number of political nihilists in their own party. Those members oppose government per se.

But autocrats have more tools to resolve such disputes. Trump not only has the ability to unleash a MAGA mob on recalcitrant legislators, he wields the threat of endorsing primary opponents, turning his cult of personality into near-certain political death for the disloyal. Musk now has his own online mob, saturated in the propaganda and hate speech that he promotes on X. When Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa expressed qualms about putting the wildly unfit Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon, the right-wing propaganda-hate complex strongly encouraged her to fall in line. She did.

The great obstacle to Trump’s juggernaut is now the courts, which have been flooded with cases filed by or against the Trump administration. Many argue that the judiciary is holding the line against autocracy, and so far, that’s largely true. It’s heartening, for example, to hear Republican-appointed judges denounce the dishonest arguments of Trump administration lawyers claiming that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship.

But at the pinnacle of the legal system is the US Supreme Court. You could argue that the debate over Trump’s power ended the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts invented criminal immunity for a president who is a magnet for criminal indictments.

Trump’s eagerness to cut legal corners — or ignore laws altogether — also gives him wider latitude than a normal politician in a healthy democracy. There is reason to worry that Trump will simply ignore rulings he dislikes. Congress passed a ban on TikTok. The Supreme Court upheld it. Trump unilaterally postponed it. Although he has yet to openly defy a court ruling, his Vice President JD Vance has fantasized about the possibility and a cadre of right-wing legal theorists is no doubt prepared to explain why it’s all perfectly okay.

Given the significant shift in the US political landscape toward Trump’s authoritarianism, it’s hard to see how Trump, for all his blundering and ignorance, is actually weak. He is currently overseeing what could prove to be the most consequential foreign policy realignment in modern American history, subverting a century of alliances with European democracies while seeking new ways to accommodate and empower Vladimir Putin’s thugocracy.

The only power center that might forcefully contest Trump’s authoritarian impulse is the American citizenry. Trump’s game of turning the federal government into a Frankenstein experiment for Musk and his post-adolescent vandals is already harming citizens, targeting Department of Education programs for special education, neutering consumer protections and arbitrarily slashing vital health programs.

At some point, an alliance of pro-democracy and anti-harm Americans could achieve political potency. But that prospect remains uncertain. In the meantime, American authoritarianism is no longer hypothetical or futuristic. It is here.

Americans themselves paved the way for Trump. No healthy political party nominates for president a convicted criminal who has previously attempted to overthrow the republic. No healthy electorate puts him in the White House. The 49.8% of American voters who decided to take another spin of the roulette wheel may have varied motivations for their choice. But all chose an obviously pathological candidate and a sick adventure.

While democracy is under full-scale assault, resistance is not futile. But neither is it self-activating. The survival of US democracy depends not on the Constitution or Congress or the judiciary. It won’t be saved by superior universities or profitable corporations or an embattled press. It relies first and foremost on the democratic energy and goodwill of American citizens.

Americans made Trump strong. Only Americans can make him weak.

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