In the ten days since my last post, Charlie Kirk, co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed. This is a tragedy for Kirk’s family (including two children so young they will have few memories of their father) and friends (including a number close to the White House).

It is also a severe blow to American democracy. Murder is wrong. Political violence, with its pervasive, malignant consequences, compounds the calamity.

I know more about Kirk today than I did a week ago, when I recognized his name just because of his affiliation with Turning Point USA. I was especially distressed to hear of his assassination because it is another mark of our democratic decline at a perilous time. And it brought to mind something I’d read a day earlier in Timothy Shenk’s Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics.

The passage resonated for me when I heard of Kirk’s death. Shenk relates an experience of Democratic political consultant Stan Greenberg, who was practicing his craft in Israel. Emphasis added:

The relentless pressure of Israeli politics was like nothing Greenberg had experienced before. It could be exhilarating, especially when you could leave it behind with a flight back home. But he thought voters were sick of it. After spending time in the country, Greenberg came to one overarching conclusion: “Israelis longed to be normal.” The subjects that came up in conversations with voters were the same ones he had seen with focus groups in the US and UK—jobs, schools, pensions. “Normal things,” Greenberg said. “That’s all they wanted.”

The US and much of the world in the more than two decades since Greenberg’s observation have by now become more like Israel. We are no longer normal, as Shenk noted within a dozen pages: “Wars for the national soul were breaking out across the globe. Israel wasn’t the exception. It was just ahead of the curve.”

Normal politics is essential for democracy. A whole bunch of stuff is required to make our democratic institutions work: respect for folks who disagree with us; acknowledging the legitimacy of their participation; and adhering to democratic rules of the road to guide our safe passage. Intense polarization, a closely divided nation, and fierce tribal loyalties crowd out what, until a couple of decades ago, was normal.

Without spelling out in detail the conditions and constraints of normal politics, it is clear that violence is antithetical to the enterprise. Bargaining, compromise, the willingness to accept half a loaf at times, and the determination to engage in the process again in the future — all this represents the give and take of politics.

That’s the way it works when it works. When things are normal.

Violence shatters these possibilities. It’s distressing to live in a time when we are so far from normal.

[La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz, June 11, 2025.]

Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ruling in favor of the Trump administration once again, the Roberts Court removed a stay placed by a district court that barred — until the district judge could decide the case on its merits — masked government agents from detaining anyone who looks Latino, speaks with an accent, and appears to have a low-wage job at (for instance) a car wash, Home Depot, or restaurant.

The majority offered no reason or explanation for its decision (Kristi Noem, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security, Et Al. v. Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, Et Al. On Application for Stay), though Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered a concurrence. Justice Sonia Sotomayer issued a written dissent (joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson). Her objections centered on the court’s abuse of the “emergency docket,” on the facts on the ground, and on judicial history regarding the Fourth Amendment:

During the raids, teams of armed and masked agents pulled up to car washes, tow yards, farms, and parks and began seizing individuals on sight, often before asking a single question.

The district court found that stopping individuals was unlawful because the basis for the stops failed to satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonable suspicion.

Instead of allowing the District Court to consider these troubling allegations in the normal course, a majority of this Court decides to take the once-extraordinary step of staying the District Court’s order. That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.

In defiance of prior judicial decisions and the plain text of the Fourth Amendment:

The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.

She rejects Justice Kavenaugh’s claim (in his concurrence) that agents were merely engaging in “brief stops for questioning,” pointing to evidence that American citizens have been roughed up and hauled away.

They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions. Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.
…
Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor. Today, the Court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.

The Republican majority on the United States Supreme Court continues to make decisions consistent with the policy preferences of the justices and in favor of the leader of the MAGA Republican Party. As usual in its shadow docket rulings, it offers no written opinion explaining the majority view.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Last week, Daniel Ziblatt (“Warning From Weimar: Why Bargaining With Authoritarians Fails”), reviewing a series of “catastrophic miscalculations—each rooted in short-term maneuvering and self-justification—[that] paved the way for Hitler’s ascent,” draws some lessons for the United States in 2025. “The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable.” It came about only after mainstream politicians thought they could contain or outmaneuver or compromise with Hitler.

No democratic constitution is self-enforcing, not even ones much older than the Weimar Republic was in the early 1930s. Citizens and leaders must defend democratic institutions whenever they are threatened and whatever the scale of the threat.
…
Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.

Trump’s America 2025

Is there a lesson in the Weimar history that resonates in the United States today? Plenty of observers (especially political scientists who have studied democratic decline) think so.

Norman Ornstein (“Our guardrails are failing us”) looks at “the brutal reality in America” today:

The movement of National Guard troops and armored vehicles into D.C. has nothing to do with an imaginary violent crime wave—underscored by the fact that the troops are generally nowhere near the areas where crime is more prevalent. It is a beta test for using the military to suppress dissent and intimidate political opponents and to create the conditions for invoking the Insurrection Act, suspending elections, and declaring martial law, backed by military force.
Meanwhile, critical entities of government have been blown up, public safety and national security are endangered, and the rule of law is in shambles as the federal government is used to intimidate and punish Trump’s adversaries and those whose policies he does not like; illegal rescissions eviscerate programs lawfully appropriated and authorized by Congress; and we’re witnessing a level of presidential corruption far greater than in every administration in history combined. Every characteristic of an authoritarian regime—from shaking down law firms and universities to hijacking culture to trying to erase and rewrite history to undermining free and fair elections—is underway.

Note Ornstein’s fear that Trump might suspend elections. In December 2024, Ziblatt (with co-author Steven Levitsky) surveyed the authoritarian threat posed by Trump. Things look much worse now than they did last December. Ziblatt voiced concerns about Trump “going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition.” Trump has attacked civil society and the opposition; has tried to undermine electoral competition; and has also sought to change the rules on elections and reapportionment. Ornstein’s fear is more credible in September 2025 than it would have been last December.

Yet, as Ornstein notes, the business community, Republicans in the House and the Senate, the press, the billionaires who own media outfits, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, and other institutions and individuals are either celebrating or shrugging their shoulders at what Trump is up to or just lying low to make the best of things.

It is unnerving for Democrats (who regard themselves defenders of democracy) how meager the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian moves has been. Civil society has proven to be more of a pushover, than a bulwark.

Ed Kilgore has recognized how far we’ve come (“Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Trump’s Creeping Fascism”) in the first few months of Trump’s second term. He suggests that Democrats cannot overlook Trump’s “criminal lawlessness” going forward (even if warnings about Trump’s “threat to democracy” didn’t resonate in 2024):

Trump no longer represents a prospective “threat to democracy” who might fail to follow through on his thuggish authoritarian rhetoric, just as he often did during his amateurish first term. Depending on how you view his trajectory, he poses at the very least an imminent danger to democracy and is arguably in the process of converting America into an authoritarian regime. Nearly every step he has taken since last November, from building an administration stuffed with MAGA shock troops, to relentless, almost hourly claims of new presidential turf, to unprecedented assaults on private businesses and universities, to the rapid development of a national police force, shows that something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary — formally still a democracy, but under rigid one-party control — is Trump’s goal. 

In that scenario, competitive authoritarianism, Trump might undermine free and fair elections without actually calling them off. He has tried a version of this, culminating in January 2021, and has continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections whenever the result might go against him.

And that’s not the half of it. As each of our critics have noted, Trump’s lawless, unconstitutional assaults have hardly been confined to undermining democratic elections.

What we’ve witnessed isn’t close to normal. Not close to the rule of law or to the Constitution as jurists and scholars have regarded it for decades. Not close to traditional views of checks and balances and a limited presidency.

Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-26T19:25:32.377Z

A divided nation

And yet, most Americans are hardly in an uproar about what’s going on. Seven months into Trump’s (second) first year, the country couldn’t be more divided.

Consider this Gallup poll (August 2025):

Three-quarters of Republicans — 76% — believe things are going well enough. They are fine with Trump’s autocratic rule. While only 0.4% of Democrats are pleased with the country’s direction, as are 25% of Independents.

In a polarized era, perhaps this isn’t surprising. But it’s scary that perhaps a third of the country is prepared to reject (what I regard as) traditional democratic rules and norms.

Our democracy is in trouble.

[Trump cabinet meeting – screen grab from AP video]

It was a cabinet meeting unlike any other in American history. It was very long — all three hours and seventeen minutes of the spectacle were televised — and brimming with extravagant praise for the MAGA leader. While such stuff would not be at all unusual in foreign regimes headed by dictators, this one was all American. In the Cabinet Room of the White House.

The Washington Post observed:

The meeting … bore similarities … to meetings of ministers in other countries where leaders have sought to exert strong, personal control over large stretches of national life, scholars said, including in Russia and Turkey. . . .
“It is definitely a widespread phenomenon with a lot of these personalist leaders,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, the director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and a former intelligence analyst in the first Trump administration focused on Russia. 
. . .
Nearly all presidents receive some flattery from their subordinates. The profuse nature of the praise for Trump, however, bore similarities to other countries where public displays of obedience are prized above all, Kendall-Taylor said.
Trump “is like the great puppet master that’s making all the things dance and therefore work for the country,” she said. “This is just such a clear display that loyalty and fealty is the number one currency.”

The New York Times observed:

There in the Cabinet Room — which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office — all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
That list is as ever-growing as it is specific to Mr. Trump’s pet peeves and political ambitions. It includes preventing “transgender for everybody” in American sports; using a heavy hand — perhaps the death penalty, the president said — to crack down on violent crime; the ongoing threat of windmills; the foul state of traffic medians; the speed with which water flows; and the attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to grow by the day.

Jan Psaki featured two minutes of the flattery (beginning at 1:38 when she says), “This is one of those things you really have to see for yourself.” See for yourself:

Henry Farrell, drawing on the work of another political scientist, Xavier Marquez (who coined the term “inflation flattery”), observes “Grotesque self-abasement can be entirely rational.” Farrell (with quotations from Marquez):

Marquez suggests that flattery becomes increasingly ridiculous when competition for rewards intersects with the dynamics of signalling personal loyalty.

loyalty signaling typically emerges when there is common knowledge that there are rewards or punishments arising from credibly and publicly recognizing (or failing to recognize) the leader’s exceptional qualities

If you are in a cult of personality centered on someone who has power, you want to reap the benefits of connection rather than suffering the penalties of disfavor. So how do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.

Voluntarily engaging in behaviours that incur peer disapproval or loss of dignity can credibly indicate one’s loyalty, as when people repeat obviously absurd flattery of the leader in public.

Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.

All hail the transformational president

Trump’s “big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor.”

The man (if we can believe what we hear) has made Americans safer and America more secure. He has brought the American dream back to life, revived all industries that were once lost, will save the whale on the East Coast, and has already saved college football. Huzzah!

• “You have brought us back from the edge. You have the overwhelming mandate from the American people.”
• “This is the greatest cabinet working for the greatest president.”
• “There’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about. Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody wakes up and realizes that.”

This is flattery hyperinflation. In Donald Trump’s executive branch, it is not knowledge or competency or a commitment to serving the country that matters — but loyalty to one man.

The folks in his cabinet know what’s up. Like presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs across the globe, they know how susceptible to fawning flummery Donald Trump is. They understand the man. They understand the MAGA base. They understand the Republican media bubble. They are more than willing to play their parts.

And they will say just about anything to establish their loyalty.

Donald Trump expects no less.

[For those interested: a simple Google search brings up links to free PDFs of The Mechanisms of Cult Production by Xavier Márquez.]

That’s the judgment of Garrett Graff. Whether or not we agree with his argument (which I’ll return to in future posts), he makes a compelling case for the conclusion he draws. He continues:

Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.

He points out (what many have noticed) that the mainstream media, doing its best to avoid stating this conclusion straightforwardly, softens its coverage of Trump with euphemisms. (He noted back in February this reluctance to report plainly and clearly what we have been seeing.)

The most powerful argument he offers for the loss of our democracy is a simple recitation of what we’ve all witnessed:

As the armed occupation of the District of Columbia continues, Trump, “exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power,” has mused about sending troops to Chicago and other blue cities.

There’s much more in Graff’s commentary. Corporate overlords paying tribute to Trump; the kidnapped and disappeared exiled to overseas prisons, while concentration camps are reopened at home; purges of folks with fidelity to the rule of law.

“It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.”

It has been abundantly clear for a while that the democracy we had on January 19 is long gone.

“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.”

That was April. The evidence is much stronger now and Trumpist authoritarianism appears much less mild than it did a mere four months ago.

Political scientists who study democratic backsliding and authoritarianism may prefer competitive authoritarianism or personalist autocracy to straight up authoritarianism or fascism to describe the U.S.A in August 2025. But for small-d democrats, the direction we’re headed in and much of the damage we’ve already witnessed are unmistakable. Unlike the elite mainstream media, we need to be clear-eyed about it.

And as Graff concludes, though our success is hardly guaranteed, we must be prepared to fight back.

[August 28: mangled word choice in penultimate paragraph revised for clarity.]

Although the United States Constitution has been in place since 1789, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended Jim Crow and brought us into a new era, as noted by Jamelle Bouie in a column (anticipating the Roberts Court’s killing off the VRA).

This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society. Of a Black president and a future “majority-minority” nation. There was an ugly side — it’s no coincidence that state retrenchment from public goods and services followed the crumbling of racial barriers. But for all its harsh notes and discord, this was the closest the country ever came to the “composite nation” of Frederick Douglass’s aspirations: a United States that served as home to all who might seek the shelter of the Declaration of Independence and its “principles of justice, liberty and perfect humanity equality.”
It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.

Destruction of this America is the Trump/MAGA/Project 2025 agenda, embraced by a Republican Party in control of all three branches of the federal government.

An authoritarian regime

Daniel Ziblatt (coauthor of How Democracies Die) has observed

There is no question that American democracy faces its most severe test in my lifetime. The scale, scope and speed of the onslaught within the first year (of Trump’s second term in office) is like nothing I have seen among the similar recent cases of democratic backsliding that I have researched — Hungary, Turkey, Poland or India. The degree of lawlessness of America’s current democratic decay is particularly striking.

Ziblatt has affirmed a critical role of civil society, which has

the civic resources to confront this challenge. America’s vast civic infrastructure includes labor unions, religious organizations, business, universities, the nonprofit sector, not to mention an opposition party that is better organized and more well financed than opposition parties in other 21st-century cases of democratic backsliding.
Yet I worry. The question is not whether these groups exist but rather whether civic leaders will develop the courage to work collaboratively and effectively to reverse America’s authoritarian turn.

We have every reason to worry. The failure of civic leaders has been astonishing, not the least leadership of the Democratic Party.

The opposition party

On January 22, Josh Marshall wrote:

Right now Republicans control Washington. They’re going to push through their nominees. They can pass a lot of laws. The only sensible and dignified course of action is to accept that Republicans are in charge and to focus in on making their unpopular actions as painful as possible. Every Republican member of the House owns all the pardons. Susan Collins owns all the pardons.
Not complicated. It’s sitting right there. There’s no need for one big strategy. Everyone should be doing everything, always on the attack. We live in an era of a thousand cuts. The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose. Get to it.

Yes. The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose. And without any power in Congress, that means to accept that Republicans are in charge and to focus in on making their unpopular actions as painful as possible.

Democrats’ belated recognition

Yet, seven months later, it is clear that the opposition party, living now in a fundamentally different regime than before, has been slow to recognize the new reality. Democrats cling to procedures, norms, rules that signal legitimacy, as Julia Azari suggests.

Since January 2025, American politics has shifted decisively away from being based on legitimacy, and is instead now mostly a game of power. In other words, the Trumpist GOP – which controls the federal government and much at the subnational level – uses whatever power is available to them, without much concern about legitimacy. Typically, in a democracy, uses of power would be limited by what can be justified in terms of democratic values, accepted practices, and norms like reciprocity. This viewpoint about how politicians treat power in a democracy builds on some of what Levitsky and Ziblatt argue about forbearance and mutual toleration. In the pieces I’ve written on democratic values, I’ve emphasized the importance of recognizing legitimate opposition – similar to Adam Przeworski’s definition of democracy as a system in which “parties lose elections.” We’re all saying different versions of the same thing.
Democratic rhetoric plays an important role in a politics that is based on legitimacy. Politicians justify their actions in terms of shared values and practices – not by vilifying their opponents, or, by the righteousness of their cause.
Much of this has gone by the wayside as the Trump administration asserts its right to – for example – reinterpret the 14^th amendment by fiat, undermine due process, and ask states to redistrict to gain more Republican seats.

And that’s hardly the complete list of transgressions. This context, for Azari, explains why governors (J.B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom) are better positioned to step up to the challenge than members of Congress. Governors wield power independently of the federal government. And they are freer from the constraints of representatives and senators.

Josh Marshall has noted that the states are “a sovereign authority that is separate from the hierarchy of federal power even as its law is inferior to federal law.“

As the courts now interpret the law, the president is an absolute monarch within the federal government. He can fire anyone at will. He can set aside statutes under the guise of enforcement that is “aligned” with administration “vision” and policy. No one anywhere in government that is plausibly part of the executive branch can enter into a contest or struggle with the president. If they do, he simply fires them, sends them to the ersatz constitutional cornfield as the boy Anthony did in that famous dystopic Twilight Zone episode.
But the president can’t fire governors or mayors or secretaries of state or anyone else in a state government.

Historically unpopular president

The basic task for the opposition remains constant: to make MAGA’s unpopular actions as painful as possible. Whether from the vantage point of a member of the House or the Senate — with limited formal power, or a governor or state attorney general — who can command the levers of power.

Trump won the 2024 election, but he and the bitter disorder he has brought us are highly unpopular. There are millions of Americans who won’t get fooled again.

The task is to blame Trump and his enablers for the ugly, dispiriting reality he has created. To pin Trump’s rampages, from the cruelty and greed of the Big Beautiful Bill to the hateful militarization of immigration policy, on the Republicans who have enabled him and his agenda.

We no longer live in the democratic America of 2024. MAGA is an antidemocratic movement. We have fewer freedoms, shrinking rule of law, and less security than before. The American regime in 2025 is competitive authoritarianism.

The Democratic Party supports democracy, in contrast to MAGA Republicans. It is the role of the opposition to oppose. Every day. As persistently and strategically as possible. With an eye toward winning elections in 2026 and 2028.

In a broader sense … today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

This is from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association: a 5-4 decision staying an appellate court ruling to restore NIH funding withheld by the Trump administration.

The judgment regarding the corruptly partisan Republican justices comprising the Supreme Court’s majority is hardly confined to this case. This majority, discarding the Constitution (along with the rule of law, separation of powers, history, precedents, and any semblance of judicial restraint) has supercharged the authoritarian rampage of Trump’s second term.

The MAGA Republican Party dominates all three branches of the federal government. Without that total domination, our democratic institutions would not be so highly vulnerable now. And note well: John Roberts, though dissenting in this instance, has paved the way for the wannabe strongman in the White House going back more than a decade — that is, even before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator.

Thank you, Justice Jackson, for clearly and plainly expressing the depth of this court’s lawless corruption.

Texas Republicans (after getting their mid-decade gerrymander) will “owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude,” notes Adam Liptak.

In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.

And, as Liptak explains, the court has signaled that there’s more to come — through more gutting of the VRA and further undermining the Fourteenth Amendment, which struck with a vengeance in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. This and other decisions represent a power grab by the Republican majority on the high court to deny Article I authority of the most democratic branch of the federal government to enact legislation to protect voting rights. John Roberts has made a career out of the Republican Party’s opposition to the VRA — beginning with a stint as a 20-something attorney working for the Reagan Justice Department. A key battle he lost then, he reversed three decades later with the Shelby decision.

In 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause the Republican majority struck down lower court rulings that restricted gerrymandered redistricting schemes and, further, forbade federal courts from consideration of constitutional violations in such cases. The chief justice, after a bit of handwringing about the unfairness of the schemes and dithering about why the courts couldn’t possibly adjudicate notions of fairness, sided with the schemers. Justice Elena Kagen was unmoved by the reasoning:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.
And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.
. . .
Maybe the majority errs in these cases because it pays so little attention to the constitutional harms at their core. After dutifully reciting each case’s facts, the majority leaves them forever behind, instead immersing itself in everything that could conceivably go amiss if courts became involved.

The Republican majority on the Roberts Court, after trampling on voting rights, supercharged extreme gerrymandering — landing us in an undemocratic partisan battle, which will harm voters in every state that enters the fray.

The Republican justices — acting with more fidelity to the agenda of the Republican Party than to the plain text of the Constitution and the separation of powers that grants Congress the authority to legislate — are deciding cases based on political preferences or feelings or, as Leah Litman puts it, vibes. From Chapter 3 of her book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes:

Vibes don’t have to, and shouldn’t, cannibalize the law entirely. What has been happening over the last decade and change differs, at least in degree, from what was happening before. Voting rights decisions have become more nakedly partisan as more recent Republican appointees have more reliably reflected Republicans’ pro-minority-rule and anti-voting-rights agenda. There are no more John Paul Stevenses or David Souters who aren’t into nullifying voting rights protections because they think voting rights are too woke. They Rehnquist Court had its lawless moments, such as the remedy in Bush v. Gore, which ordered  a state to cease and desist its efforts to accurately count ballots. Over time, more and more decisions have looked like that. Between misleading ellipses, recycled political talking points, letting feelings matter more than whether people’s votes are counted, and inventing prohibitions on voter discrimination into protections for voter discrimination (just to name a few), the Court has descended into no law, and just vibes. 

Welcome to MAGA America courtesy of the Roberts Court. It began paving the way for the wannabe authoritarian in the White House even before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator. And the Republican justices are still at it.

Photo from Donald J. Trump Truth Social.

He has paved over the Rose Garden, erected a pair of 88-foot flagpoles, and plans a $200 million 90,000-square foot project to place a ballroom atop the East Wing — almost doubling the size of the White House. And there’s more gold by the day.

Update: A May 27 op-ed by Emily Keegin in the New York Times (“Trump’s Oval Office Is a Gilded Rococo Nightmare. Help.”) offers more substantive commentary, history, photographs, and even a six-second GIF from a movie featuring Trump’s apartment.

In 2017 the journalist Peter York called Mr. Trump’s aesthetic “dictator chic,” likening his New York penthouse to Muammar el-Qaddafi’s homes. Others have looked further back in history for an analogue. Many concluded not only that Mr. Trump’s style is the stuff of kings and despots but also that it’s French.
On one level, they aren’t wrong. The decoration Mr. Trump has splattered across the Oval Office is inspired by European Baroque and Rococo of the 1600s and 1700s, when power was shown through ornate displays of grotesque abundance. Gold leaf moldings and large mirrors filled Baroque palace walls from Versailles to the Peterhof Palace. But in the early 1700s Rococo, an even gaudier style distinct for its asymmetry, swirling tendrils and gilded seashells, was born. Often criticized for being purely decorative and intellectually vacuous, it would become a perfect visual metaphor for the European royal courts of the 18th century: unserious people draped in gold baubles and ruffled pastels.

At the beginning of 2025, even after the Roberts Court’s majority abandoned the Constitution to grant Donald Trump virtual immunity from criminal prosecution in Trump v. United States last summer, there was more or less a consensus among commentators that SCOTUS would uphold the rule of law. Many commentaries looked to the court (some with expectation, others with hope) to reign in Donald Trump’s lawless activities. (Even this mistrustful blogger, who was not part of this consensus, hoped to be proven wrong. Alas, it was not to be.)

After months of watching the Republican majority enable Trump’s trampling over generations of political norms, legal precedents, and an understanding of Congressional authority the Roberts Court is no longer getting the benefit of the doubt. This week in the Atlantic (“This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built”), legal scholar Peter M. Shane (who has written two books warning that presidential aggrandizement is eroding American democracy) points to a collection of Supreme Court decisions written by Roberts that have legitimized the extraordinary expansion of executive power wielded by Trump.

After a review of opinions authored by Roberts, Shane writes:

Going beyond the precise holdings in these cases, Roberts’s superfluous rhetoric about the presidency has cast the chief executive in all-but-monarchical terms. The upshot is a view of the Constitution that, in operation, comes uncomfortably close to vindicating Trump’s: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Shane adds, “What America is witnessing is a remaking of the American presidency into something closer to a dictatorship.”

On the Roberts legacy:

In the two decades of his tenure thus far, his opinions on executive power have created what might be called a proto-authoritarian canon, lending constitutional legitimacy to a kind of presidency that brooks no dissent, treats Congress as a subordinate institution, and need answer to no one except possibly to the Supreme Court itself.
It is hard to overstate how much is wrong in Roberts’s narrative of the presidency. It muddles constitutional text. It flouts constitutional history. It is willfully ignorant of the risks of authoritarianism in a polarized, populist age.

In a previous post, I referenced Trump v. United States:

In April 2025 we’re living with the inevitable consequences of that reckless ruling. The Supreme Court won’t check Donald Trump because the Republican majority has deliberately paved the way for Trump’s lawless assault on our democracy. Trump is the “bold and unhesitating” president this court has lionized.

Shane is on the same page: “Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.”

Allowing Trump’s defiance of trial and appellate courts

Public policy professor Don Moynihan observes that fears that Trump would defy the courts have receded as “six Republican-appointed justices” repeatedly swoop in to overrule the lower courts:

A couple of months ago, the major concern was what would happen when Trump defied the courts. A more complicated picture is now emerging. One that mixes quiet but unmistakable defiance of court decisions by the Trump administration with encouragement from the six Republican-appointed Justices who sit atop the judicial branch. This is an arguably worse scenario, since it provides a veneer of legalism even as it replaces the rule of law with rule by law, where Trump is allowed to determine the nature of that law.
The emerging pattern is that the Trump administration is checked by the lower courts, slow-walks compliance, and sometimes asks SCOTUS for help, which they usually provide via poorly reasoned opinions or no opinions at all. The Supreme Court often does not feel the need to explain what are effectively constitutional amendments that rebalance the separation of powers, feeding perceptions of the court as a partisan actor.

A partisan actor indeed. I recommend Moynihan’s analysis (“When you’re a star, the Supreme Court lets you do it”), which illustrates how the court has diminished Congressional authority, enfeebled the lower courts, ruled inconsistently (based on the political party that holds the White House), and undermined the capacity of civic institutions to oppose to a lawless president.

Resistance to an authoritarian regime requires collective action and a judiciary willing to protect the rule of law. By empowering Trump above all branches, SCOTUS has weakened the environment for such resistance. And the Roberts court literally has argued that Trump, as President, “alone composes a branch of government.”
It would be a mistake to treat unitary executive theory as a coherent legal framework. It is an effort by Republicans to empower Republican Presidents, now being implemented by a Chief Justice who has long held such views. Here is how Trump understands it: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Six days ago I wrote, “It’s possible the Republican justices haven’t yet agreed on any specific rationale to put forward in McMahon; they simply agree on the result, which empowers Trump. They’ll construct their story later.”

This morning on NPR, Nina Totenberg said that getting five or six justices to agree on a rationale could prove difficult and “they don’t have the inclination.” She remarks that

the court’s critics, including often its own members, have repeatedly called out the practice of essentially leaving in place big, new policies without explaining its reasoning. The dirty little secret here is that if you’ve got the votes, you’ve got the votes. And if the justices actually wrote the whys and wherefores, the likelihood is that they wouldn’t agree. Writing an opinion for nine justices, or even six, or even five, can be very hard. And to put it bluntly, they think they don’t have the time and they don’t have the inclination.

Trump’s transformation of our democracy into an authoritarian regime (consistent with the Project 2025 plan) relies on the coordination of all three branches of government. Without the acquiescence of a compliant Congress willing to do Trump’s bidding and a Supreme Court sweeping aside a Constitution built on the separation of powers it would be possible to put a stop to much of what we’ve experienced in the past six months.

What we’ve lost

The dirtiest little secret — though it is quickly, unmistakably coming into focus — is that the Republicans on the Roberts Court have greater fidelity to the MAGA vision than to the Constitution of the United States. This is a shamefully partisan court. Due process, the rule of law, the authority of Congress to work its will, limits on presidential power, and individual liberty as widely understood before John Roberts became chief justice — the Republican supermajority has trashed all of this in service to an authoritarian ideal.

The cost to American democracy has been enormous. Article I established a democratically elected Congress. What are Americans to think when independent agencies, established by Congress to serve the general welfare, are diminished or wiped out with the stroke of a pen? Expertise and resources to sustain public health, scientific research, financial protection, national parks, … even timely, lifesaving weather reports — diluted or cast off altogether.

The institutions of civil society capable of checking (in some measure) the colossal power of the state — attacked by the executive branch. Organizations that convey news and information, necessary to hold government to account — harassed until the president receives a payout. Universities, law firms, advocacy groups, even individuals — threatened and tormented by the government of the United States.

That, and more, distressingly characterizes the new regime, which the Roberts Court has whitewashed with “the veneer of legalism.” We would not be confronting this undemocratic, unaccountable state had not the Republican justices defied the plain text of the Constitution, choosing instead to favor a MAGA perversion of America.