Month: May 2025

“We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. “It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.”

Project 2025 and MAGA are trampling over well-established constitutional and legal boundaries. This is by now abundantly clear (including to the Republican justices on the Supreme Court). The Trump2 presidency represents a fundamental regime change (as set out in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise“). With the Roberts Court signaling last Thursday (a month after Levitsky’s assessment) endorsement of the unitary executive theory, it will become far tougher to restore a liberal democracy and commitment to the rule of law. This decision, when it comes, will represent a pivotal victory for the authoritarian vision that has captured the Republican Party.

Destroying the capacity of the federal government

In the first three months of Donald Trump’s second go-round in the White House, his administration has moved to dismantle — through wholesale closures of agencies established by Congress, mass firings in violation of laws enacted by Congress, and budget embargoes of funds appropriated by Congress — the capacity of the federal government to promote the public good. Elon Musk and DOGE, acting on the authority of the president, have led this reckless rampage.

[Set aside another objective of Project 2025, the coercion and harassment at the hands of Trump loyalists in departments (Justice, Homeland Security, …) and agencies (such as the SEC) to extract revenge against Trump’s (and MAGA’s) perceived political enemies, including elected officials, judges, law firms, media organizations, scientific establishments, nonprofits, outfits focused on campaigns and elections, as well as immigrants (including law-abiding folks authorized to be here). The Constitution and the rule of law have been swept aside to achieve these ends.]

Considering then just the deliberate demolition of federal infrastructure by shuttering agencies, purging staff, and blocking funds: It was clear almost immediately that the damage would be great and that rebuilding what was lost would be a steep, uncertain climb under the best of circumstances (beginning with MAGA opponents winning a handful of election cycles). That’s why the MAGA barrage was so rushed — to make recovery hugely difficult just in case anyone succeeded in putting a stop to it.

On Thursday, the Republican justices on the Supreme Court signaled that they will not put a stop to it and, more significantly, that they intend to ensure that recovery (even after a string of election victories by the MAGA opposition) will be next to impossible. First, some background:

The alphabet agencies and protecting Americans

In establishing independent agencies (the FTC, SEC, NLRB, CFPB, …) Congress has acted to promote the health, safety, security, and general welfare of Americans and to ensure that the agencies’ activities were shielded from undo interference by a president — limiting the power of the president to remove the appointed leaders of these agencies.

In 1935, after President Roosevelt challenged this limitation, firing a member of the Federal Trade Commission, the Supreme Court — in a unanimous 9-0 decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States — ruled that federal law prohibited FDR’s action. Thus, the court preserved the independence of these agencies, in contrast to executive agencies (Justice, Treasury, …) over which presidents possess greater control.

The enduring and often thwarted GOP agenda

Republicans loathe the independent agencies. Across many decades, the Republican Party has embraced two overriding goals: to lower taxes on the rich and to oppose federal regulations that constrain business (which impede the rich from getting richer). This remains so today, even though the first goal is unpopular even with the Republican base, while the second goal becomes unpopular when specifics are in play (rather than a general aspirational principle).

And since 1935 (and FDR and Humphrey’s Executor and the popularity of the protections that the alphabet agencies offer), a more powerful web of independent agencies have imposed more, and often more stringent, regulations on business. Republican presidents, and even Republican Congresses, have been incapable (or fearful) of shucking off the regulations imposed by the alphabet agencies. In fact, they have been unable even to appreciably reduce the size (and cost) of either the agencies or the federal government overall (ensuring that taxes remain too high for the tastes of the rich).

The scheme to undermine our democratic institutions

In response to Republican failures and frustration, the GOP, in a decades-long campaign funded by millionaires and billionaires, set out to achieve dominance of the third branch of the federal government: the judiciary. Republican-appointed justices have represented a majority on the Supreme Court for the past 50 years, but the party has been perennially displeased that too many Republican-appointed justices have been unwilling to stick to the party line; in this instance: to strangle the authority of the state to enact rules and regulations on business. A more radical agenda — something more draconian to achieve a lasting ideological victory — was born with the launch of the Federalist Society.

Set aside for now a comprehensive review of the activities of the Federalist Society, which has led the crusade not only to pack the federal bench, but to overturn established constitutional principles, federal legislation passed and signed into law, and judicial precedents going back decades (and even centuries). Make no mistake, this project is antithetical to the Constitution and our democracy.

This well-funded, meticulously planned campaign (like Project 2025) included manufacturing out of whole cloth an assortment of ideological ‘legal theories’ to give results-driven jurisprudence the patina of legitimacy. From originalism to the major questions doctrine to — in this instance — the unitary executive theory: all are ideologically-driven pretenses, though lacking in historical and textual support (whether in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers or other authoritative sources), that partisan Republican judges, lawyers, and constitutional scholars assert ought to guide the judiciary. Each purported principle can be appealed to, or ignored, to achieve the result that matches the agenda of the contemporary Republican Party. These theories mask partisan purpose.

After 50 years of Republican majorities on the Supreme Court, finally a dutiful majority is in place. All six Republican justices are tied to the Federalist Society and its methods and mission. The five men on the court have been throughout their professional careers, operatives of the Republican party. They were hand-picked to ensure that there would be No More Souters. This majority is more highly committed to advancing the agenda of the Republican Party than any other Supreme Court in the past nine decades; it is at least as dedicated to the MAGA project as the GOP leadership in Congress and much more dedicated to the fortunes of the party than the sitting president, who is far too self-absorbed to care much.

The corruption of the Roberts Court

The Chief Justice has asserted that judges just “call balls and strikes.” At his confirmation hearing, John Roberts intoned, “…Judges and Justices are servants of the law, not the other way around.  Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules, but it is a limited role.”

The Roberts Court — especially as the Republican majority has grown larger and more ideologically extreme — has systematically contradicted this pledge. From Shelby County v. Holder (2013) through Trump v. United States (2024) the pattern couldn’t be clearer. The Roberts Court has strived to change the rules by brushing aside — for instance — judicial restraint, stare decisis, the Fourteenth Amendment, the separation of powers, and most of all the authority of a democratically elected Congress to work its will.

It is Congress’s job to legislate. The Republican majority on the Roberts Court, in case after case, has usurped the authority of Congress. This is an imperial court with a corruptly partisan mission: to change the rules, so that even when the opposition party, the Democrats, win elections, they are barred by hook or by crook from putting in place Democratic public policies.

There is considerable evidence in the Constitution opposed to the autocratic view of the presidency that underlies the Federalist Society and Project 2025 campaigns. Furthermore, the Federalist Papers (authored by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay) reveal concern regarding presidential power, commitments to the separation of powers and to checks and balances, and establishment of a robust legislative branch.

2025: the opportune time for the authoritarian project

Last Thursday, the Republican justices tipped their hand with an unsigned ruling on the shadow docket. With Trump v. Wilcox (2025) the court has signaled (as Justice Elena Kagan advised in her dissent) that it is prepared to overturn Humphrey’s Executor. The court’s Republican majority appears ready to tightly secure the Trump/MAGA Republican agenda — an authoritarian agenda — in law that will be immune to change even in the aftermath of Democratic victories in future elections.

This anticipated decision, as Don Moynihan explains, embracing the unitary executive theory (that is, “the idea that the President has king-like powers”) will make it much more difficult to rebuild after the teardown.

Because with unitary executive theory, there is no actor that can make credible long-term commitments to public servants.
With unitary executive theory, Congress cannot write robust new legislation that modernizes the civil service and stops politicization. A President could just ignore it. Even if Trump leaves office, and a new President looks to restore nonpartisan competence, their promises are only good for four or eight years before another President can come in and rip up the terms of their employment. And over time, why would even a good government President invest effort in restoring capacity if their successor can undermine it?
With unitary executive theory, the public sector becomes permanently viewed as an unstable and chaotic workplace that we are seeing now. The most capable potential employees decide its not worth the bother, and the workforce becomes a mix of people who cannot get a job elsewhere, and short term political appointees. (The irony here is that advocates of unitary executive theory say it is not just constitutional, but will improve the performance of the public sector, notwithstanding the omnishambles we are witnessing now).

This court has already granted Donald Trump extraordinary power (in the form of immunity for criminal conduct) unknown to all previous presidents; it is poised to go further still. The consequences of Trump and Project 2025’s demolition across the federal government (as well as the war against knowledge and expertise in civil society) will be disastrous. Americans will be ill-served by the lost capacity of the federal government to do the job that we have come to expect of it. People will suffer. People will die. 

The frenzied, wanton destruction wrought by Trump2 tramples on the Constitution, Congressional legislation, Supreme Court precedent, and contemporary American experience. It is a lawless endeavor. The Roberts Court’s willingness to change the rules of the game will offer the judiciary’s imprimatur to Trump2. The high court’s decisions become the law of the land.

Not yet the final reckoning

With the 2024 immunity decision and an anticipated 2025 unitary executive decision, recovery of our liberal democracy will be made enormously more difficult. That is the intent.

But, as my headline suggests, I regard this as match point, not game point. Americans committed to democratic governance, to the rule of law, to preservation of our freedom, and to a diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation must push back against the ugly MAGA vision of the United States — which undermines both our individual liberty and the vibrant institutions comprising our civil society.

Victories for democratic reform and a liberal society — harking back more than a century and a half — will be lost at the hands of the Trump2 administration and the Roberts Court. Many battles will have to be fought and won again.

Who counts as a real American? Who is a traitor or enemy of America? Populists — including Trump and the Republican Party — shrink and stretch their conceptions of the people (aka, Americans; that is, members of their own tribe exclusively) and of their enemies (traitors, liberals, Democrats …; in other words, their opposition) to disqualify their political opponents. Us vs. Them is the keystone of the populist worldview.

In a discussion with two New York Times colleagues, Carlos Lozada responds to a question about Donald Trump’s first 100 days. “What has mattered most?“

Lozada’s response [my emphasis]:

I think that one thing I’ve been thinking about is the notion, as you just put it, of “We, the people” — that’s how the Constitution begins. And what I’ve been thinking about with Trump is that so much of what he’s doing is limiting the universe of “We, the people.” He’s telling us that there are people who really don’t count in that world. And that could be federal workers — they’re expendable, their loyalties are suspect, we don’t need them. The U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants also don’t belong, aren’t really “We, the people,” should not receive citizenship at birth as the 14th Amendment tells us. Opponents of the president, former officials who have criticized him don’t deserve to be protected.
You know, it’s another one of the key aspects of populism that populist leaders purport to speak for the people, but the definition of the people is always malleable. It always changes, it’s always shifting. And inevitably it becomes smaller, it shrinks until the only people who are “We, the people” are the supporters of the leader. And to me that’s one of the through lines of the Trump era, certainly of the first 100 days of this second term.

In an October 2016 book review of What Is Populism by Jan-Werner Müller, Lozada cited three salient characteristics of populism offered by Müller:

First, populists are anti-elitists, meaning they criticize the established political, cultural and economic leadership. Second, they must be anti-pluralist, claiming sole representation of the people. When Trump says that “I alone can fix” what ails us, or assures supporters that “I am your voice,” he is asserting uncontested, unmediated leadership. Finally, populism is exclusionary, in the sense that “the people” are an increasingly circumscribed set; though they might begin as the white working class or another loosely defined group, they are quickly reduced to supporters of the leader. Otherwise, you are traitorous, inauthentic. “This is the core claim of populism,” Müller writes. “Only some of the people are really the people.”

Even before Trump and MAGA, this constriction of the people whose views counted as politically legitimate had become a trope of the Republican Party. In 1995, Newt Gingrich coached GOP House members on how to smear Democrats with Contrasting Words, such as traitors, sick, pathetic, betray, cheat, steal, greed, radical, and liberal. This approach found a home at Fox News Channel, launched in 1996.

By 2016, Trump and the GOP routinely reviled political opponents with name-calling and invective. Democratic constituencies were — and are — cast as unfit, unworthy of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the rule of law. Republicans regard election denialism, and the lie that Trump won in 2020, as justified because Democratic votes shouldn’t count. From Russell Vought to Elon Musk to the North Carolina supreme court majority, their contempt for Democrats justifies in their minds authoritarian behavior antithetical to our democratic institutions, including equality before the law, impartial justice, free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and much else, even political violence.

The other side of the coin

Things are equally chilling with a simple switch of perspectives. Just as populists insist on determining who counts as the people in We, the people, so too for the scapegoats designated as enemies of the people.

In a recent post, touching on the endemic corruption on display during Trump’s Mideast trip, Josh Marshall observed that while Marco Rubio has said that “Hamas supporters” are not welcome in the U.S.A., Donald Trump is eagerly making deals with the Qataris, who “are quite literally the top bankrollers of Hamas and they speak for them and help them negotiate with the Great Powers and with Israel.” Marshall continues:

It reminds me of a story about Karl Lueger, the populist Mayor of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century who was one of the key articulators of and arguably one of the creators of mass-politics political antisemitism. And yet Lueger would himself dine with and socialize with members of the capital’s Jewish elite. There’s a famous story in which someone asks Lueger: “You’re the big enemy of the Jews and yet you socialize with them and some are your friends. How can you justify that?” To which, Lueger is said to have responded, “I decide who’s a Jew.”
Like Lueger, like Trump. He’ll decide who’s a Hamas supporter.

In today’s Republican Party, few are willing to oppose the authoritarian stance of the president who decides who counts and who doesn’t, who is friend and who is foe. The national party is on board for the undemocratic ride in 2025. The GOP House and Senate majorities have chosen to embrace Trump’s lawless, reckless, corrupt regime.

[Cartoon by Jack Ohman via Politico.]

From the assessment of Donald Trump’s first hundred days (2025 version) by Michael Wilner of the Los Angeles Times:

The concept of marking a president’s first 100 days originated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used it as a goalpost to push through an extension of government employment to hundreds of thousands of Americans, and to work with Congress to pass over a dozen pieces of landmark legislation.
“The bookend to that seems to be Trump, whose focus has been on dismantling things,” said David Ekbladh, a history professor at Tufts University and author of “Look at the World: The Rise of an American Globalism in the 1930s.”
“Trump is asserting a particular theory about executive power, but that’s really all he has,” Ekbladh said, “and that has defined his first hundred days — disrupt, break, defund.”

Well, yeah, what we have seen is mostly “disrupt, break, defund,” but there is a particular logic to the destruction: it is (as Wilner suggests) targeted:

On March 17, Inter-Con, a Pasadena-based security firm, faced a stark choice that would later be documented in court filings: Allow staff from Elon Musk’s government efficiency program into the U.S. Institute of Peace, or face the elimination of its federal contracts. The firm relented. What had been an independent, congressionally funded agency was overrun.
It was a common scene unfolding across Washington throughout Trump’s first days back in power. Under Trump’s direction, Musk’s workers had already infiltrated much of the federal government in a lightning operation designed to overwhelm. The first marked for cuts were aid workers, educators, scientists, researchers, refugee officers and other civil servants who had served across Democratic and Republican administrations. The very notion of an independent government workforce had become the target.

And not only is independent government the target, so too are independent institutions across the country (and the globe): universities, scientific labs and research projects, hospitals, law firms, humanitarian and human services organizations, media outfits, cities, states, and more. Trump has signed executive orders targeting individuals (such as Chris Krebs, for telling the truth about the 2020 election) and Act Blue (part of the infrastructure for funding the opposition political party) for federal investigations.

The corruption of the Department of Justice (as well as Homeland Security, Treasury, and other departments) and the Trump pardons of criminals across the country have been as visible as they are shameless. That visibility is essential for the MAGA project to instill fear: to raise the cost of opposing the autocrat in the White House and his cronies.

Meanwhile, the president — while expressing doubt about the right of Americans to due process, enshrined in the Fifth Amendment — clearly has no qualms about veering from the Constitution and the rule of law.

Observations

A. The Authoritarian Playbook: The Trump2 administration is moving furiously, relentlessly to squelch institutions, groups, and individuals with the capacity to act independently in opposition to MAGA/Republican domination. Trump’s threats and transgressions are raising the cost of standing up to him. This is exactly what scholars of authoritarianism predicted before Trump began his second term — that he would wage a war on civil society and his political opposition. In December, Steven Levitsky dismissed a Putin-style takeover:

But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.
So I think this government will, far more than the first Trump administration, politicize key state agencies and wield them in ways that raise the cost of continued opposition. There may be a handful, dozens, of exemplary cases, but those cases have the potential to signal to thousands and thousands of other people that it’s just not worth engaging in politics the way they used to before. And so, young lawyers will not jump into politics, but rather stay in the law firm. Young journalists will decide to stick to the sports beat rather than cover politics. Young CEOs will decide that it’s better just not to donate to the Democratic Party. It’s very difficult to gauge how consequential that will be, but that tilting of the playing field is coming.

B. The Cruelty is the Point: Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Donald Trump have gleefully embraced DOGE’s rampage, which has resulted in great harm to Americans inside and outside of government. Vought has celebrated inflicting harm:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”

C. Wreaking Havoc: The goal is to tear down not just institutions, but the fabric of life of people who oppose MAGA. Trump is seeking, in Franklin Foer’s words, “to crush the power and authority of whole professions, to severely weaken, if not purge, a social class.”

The target of the administration’s campaign is a stratum of society that’s sometimes called the professional managerial class, or the PMC, although there’s not one universal moniker that MAGA applies to the group it is now crushing. That group includes society’s knowledge workers, its cognitive elite, the winners of the tournament that is the American meritocracy. It covers not only lawyers, university administrators, and professors, but also consultants, investment bankers, scientists, journalists, and other white-collar workers who have prospered in the information age.

Further:

Animosity to the PMC is a propulsive force in Trump’s second term. Rather than merely replacing its ideological foes—by installing its own appointees in federal agencies—the administration is bent on destroying their institutional homes, and the basis for their livelihood.

D. The Enemy Within: Authoritarians must always create an internal enemy to oppose. There must be an Us vs. Them. The right (even before MAGA), in Foer’s words, “zeroed in on the PMC as the enemy within.”

Us vs. Them has been a consistent theme of Donald Trump. He has never embraced the country as a whole. At the beginning of his first term in 2017, when we weren’t sure what would transpire, this much was clear. He did not intend to represent the whole country in its breadth and diversity. MAGA’s ‘real Americans’ excludes much of America.

From Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Fox News Channel, the right has demonized nearly half of the country. Enemies of America, in this view, must be crushed. Trump’s MAGA base — perhaps 40% of the country — has been coached to hate and fear the other.

With the advent of Trump2, the MAGA Republican Party has control of all three branches of the federal government. We’re living with the result.

Fear

For those of us outside of MAGA, Trump’s message is: Fear. Fear me. Fear the federal government. Fear the true believers and even the violent criminals willing to act on my behalf.

We have every reason to take heed.