Yesterday, acting on an emergency appeal by the Trump administration, the Supreme Court vacated a pair of restraining orders issued by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. This unsigned opinion in Trump v. J.G.G, in which the five Republican men on the court comprised the majority in the 5-4 decision, gave a green light (at least for now) to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to permit continuing deportations of Venezuelans alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

There’s lots of messiness surrounding the deportations, the presidential proclamation (announced after a day’s delay), the evidence for gang membership, the back and forth in courtrooms, and even challenges to the legitimacy of the judiciary to weigh in on the controversies. Leaving all that aside, I wish to highlight a couple of commentaries since the high court’s ruling.

Adam Liptak, in this morning’s New York Times, begins his commentary with these words (my emphasis added):

The court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the last two decades has not been known for its modesty or caution. Its signature move has been bold assertions of power backed by sweeping claims about the meaning of the Constitution.
It gutted campaign finance laws and the Voting Rights Act, overturned the constitutional right to abortion, did away with affirmative action in higher education and adopted a new interpretation of the Second Amendment that protects an individual’s right to own guns.
But as the first wave of challenges to President Trump’s blitz of executive orders has reached the justices, a very different portrait of the court is emerging. It has issued a series of narrow and legalistic rulings that seem calculated to avoid the larger issues presented by a president rapidly working to expand power and reshape government.

Yesterday, in his newsletter Steve Vladeck began his commentary with these words:

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I tend to preach caution before folks read too much into what the Supreme Court does through its rulings on individual emergency applications—given that these rulings tend to be rushed, under-theorized, and, even when we actually get majority opinions, under-explained. Thus, I’ve always thought the real takeaways are to be had from the patterns of the Court’s decisions, not any one ruling.
But the more I read the Court’s Monday night ruling in Trump v. J.G.G., in which a 5-4 majority vacated a pair of temporary restraining orders entered by Chief Judge Boasberg in the Alien Enemy Act case, the more I think that this ruling really is a harbinger, and a profoundly alarming one, at that. To be clear, it’s not a sweeping win for the Trump administration; the Court did not suggest that what Trump is doing is legal, or, just as bad, that it might not be subject to judicial review. Indeed, the Court went out of its way to emphasize that individuals detained under the Act are entitled to due process, including meaningful judicial review.
But much like last Friday’s ruling in the Department of Education grants case, it’s still a ruling by a Court that seems willing to hide behind less-than-obvious legal artifices to make it harder for federal courts to actually restrain conduct by the current administration that everyone believes to be unlawful. As in that decision, here, a 5-4 majority has made it much harder for litigants to bring systemic challenges to what the Trump administration is doing. And especially in the broader context in which the Alien Enemy Act litigation, specifically, has unfolded, the justices in the majority got there by burying their heads in the sand.

The Roberts Court

I’ve been watching the Supreme Court — as an American citizen, not an attorney — for more than half a century. My understanding of the judiciary has been informed by the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, two undergraduate college courses in constitutional law, majority opinions and dissents of the court, and law review articles. I also follow legal and constitutional questions as reported in newspapers, journals, online commentaries, and books.

It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to recognize that the Roberts Court is corruptly partisan to the core. The five men on the court have all served, in various roles, as operatives of the Republican Party. This defining characteristic is central to understanding how and why the court’s majority acts as it does.

On February 19, I wrote a post titled, “The courts will not stop Trump and Musk from trashing the federal government,” in which I predicted flatly that there was no way the Supreme Court would stop Musk’s rampage. I didn’t address arrests by masked agents, deportations to Salvadorian prisons, bad faith appeals to national security, or denial of due process. But I’m consistent: the Supreme Court will not protect us from this rampage either.

As I wrote then: “The Republican majority on the Supreme Court ran roughshod over the Constitution to grant presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for laws intended to apply to everyone. This court will not stop Trump from his campaign of destruction, which no Republican dares question publicly.” And: “It is preposterous to think that the Roberts Court, after giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution — including for ordering the nation’s military to assassinate a political rival — would stand in the way of mass purges of civil servants and shuttering departments and agencies. That’s a nonstarter.”

In recent years, I’ve watched and read smarter people than I am, and certainly well-informed constitutional lawyers, make predictions about what the Roberts Court would do. In recent years, these predictions have been less and less reliable. By July 2024, with the immunity decision in Trump v. United States, the gap between expectation and outcome had become vast.

The subhead of Adam Liptak’s NYT piece reads: “In a series of narrow and technical rulings, the justices have seemed to take pains to avoid a showdown with a president who has challenged the judiciary’s legitimacy.” I predicted in my February post that Roberts would take pains not to stand in Trump’s way. I suggested that we might see “feeble roadblocks (which will invite workarounds) to Trump,” but no significant — Stop right there — challenges from the court to Trump. The Republican majority on this court is on board with Trump and, moreover, pragmatic enough not to stand in his way.

Professor Vladeck quotes from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent — “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.” — before commenting:

That the Court is not, in fact, “better than this” may come as little surprise to folks who have come to view everything this Court does with cynicism. For as harsh a critic of the Court as I’ve been, especially with respect to its behavior on emergency applications like these, it still surprises me.

Habits, including intellectual and professional habits, die hard. The professor’s surprise is understandable. It is one thing to ascribe injudicious impulses to one or two justices (say, Thomas and Alito) on the court without deciding that the whole enterprise has become corrupted. But for a number of years (before Trump), in a range of cases, decisions have become increasingly results-driven. Partisanship has become a much better predictor of the outcome of cases before the court than original intent, or stare decisis, or any other conservative legal principle or practice.

As the Roberts Court’s majority has increased, the Republican-appointed justices have become bolder, less restrained in their decisions. And the partisan corruption of the court has become more extreme.

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the United States. And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions predating Trump’s ride down the golden escalator, has deliberately paved the way. Look again at the list of sweeping rulings by the court in Litptak’s second paragraph. I regard the campaign finance, voting rights, and gerrymandering decisions, aimed squarely at disadvantaging the Democratic Party and its constituents in campaigns and elections, as especially noxious. Much else has happened along the way. And by July 2024, we arrive at the immunity decision.

This perspective is not cynicism; this is just the way things are. All three branches of the federal government are controlled by an authoritarian political party. Our liberties, checks on presidential power, the rule of law — all of this stands in the balance. It’s past time for an unflinching look. The Roberts Court will continue to pave the way for Donald Trump.

[Note: the final paragraphs were revised for clarity on April 9.]

The New York Times notes that the president was doubled-booked this weekend (“Trump Family’s Cash Registers Ring as Financial Meltdown Plays Out”). All quotations (apart from Trump’s Truth Social account) are from the NYT :

“The Trump family monetization weekend” featured:

At the Trump National Doral resort:

• a Saudi Arabian backed LIV golf tournament (the fourth LIV tourney at Trump’s course), which feature all-day parties with food, music, wine and beer
• a full house at Trump’s 643-room hotel (featuring suites at up to $13,000 a night and a stakehouse bar with $130 porterhouse steaks)
• an American Patriots Gala fundraiser
• three merchandise shops, hawking $3 Sharpies (similar to the one Trump uses to sign his executive orders) and “everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China”

At Mar-a-Lago:

Another in a series of $1,000,000-a-head dinners, benefiting Trump’s MAGA, Inc. (“as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights”). The program goes like this:

Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!” the president proclaimed on Truth Social.

Grifts Я Us

What is undeniable is the golden opportunity for corruption. The power to enact tariffs is in the hands of a single man who always has his hand out — a man who has shown himself to be influenced by flattery and tribute, and willing to exact retribution against anyone who defies him. Whatever the impact of tariffs, it is abundantly clear that the million-dollar dinners invite what is indistinguishable from bribery. Easy money.

Congress has granted the power to impose tariffs on the president. The Supreme Court that has made the president virtually immune from prosecution for criminal activity. So much for checks and balances. This is a setup for the perfect grift at the highest level of government.

And regarding the world economy, Trump’s infliction of global pain provides a compelling incentive for the powerful who can pay him protection money. How convenient. Trump re-posted this message on Truth Social: “Trump is Purposely CRASHING The Market.”

Don’t miss previous posts on Trump’s cashing in on the presidency (which began even before he was sworn-in for his second term):

• Donald Trump’s Christmas message, a second look (December 22)
• Billionaires, corporations, lobbyists, et al. offer tribute to incoming president (January 6)
• Transactional Trump continues to set records for raking in money (January 19)
• Trump meme coin is “the most brazen act of corruption of the modern presidency” (February 21)

[Images from my neighborhood this afternoon.]

After Senator Corey Booker’s 25-hour indictment of the Trump administration, Ed Kilgore observed:

Booker didn’t concentrate on Trump’s potential Medicaid cuts, illegal deportations, cruelty to public employees, abandonment of Ukraine, violations of civil liberties, reckless tariffs, usurpations of legislative powers, rampant corruption, or thuggish threats to federal judges. He talked about all this and more as a way to dramatize the ongoing assault on both democracy and the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.
It’s the sheer avalanche of bad policies, bad administration, and bad faith that makes the current situation such an emergency. 

At the beginning of last week, Jonathan V. Last shared a recent insight. He explained that he had been “wrong about one big thing in 2024.” He had regarded the Republican Party’s surrender to Trump as due to failings unique to the party and so he did not anticipate the rapid capitulation after the election of institutions in sector after sector. Media, law, business, higher education, tech — institution after institution folded. How quickly they’ve rushed to accept the yoke! All turned out to be weak-kneed when confronting an authoritarian administration.

Last continued:

Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.
The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.

No institutions, Last argues, not business, not the courts will protect us. Only people power can achieve this.

The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.

Today — with the Hands Off! protests — we saw the beginnings of what could be a successful democratic movement. We’ll see. America is at a fork in the road. An authoritarian party controls every branch of our national government and many state governments; small-d democrats are losing ground. Our liberty, the rule of law, and a government that serves working- and middle-class Americans are being lost. The elites making deals with Trump sure aren’t looking out for us. Nor are the Republicans. The Trump train is quite comfortable enough for well-off people who don’t give a fig about our democratic institutions and have no concerns for folks less well-off than themselves.

I agree with Last that while the opposition party will be “the vehicle through which people wield power,” the Democratic Party cannot be counted on to act decisively on its own initiative. Or reliably to act on our behalf.

Last concludes: “The movement must be, at some level, oppositional to the status quo. It cannot only be a defense of democracy and our institutions, it must be a challenge to them.”

This effort can’t help but be an uphill battle. Or rather, a winning campaign will require fighting many uphill battles extending over a number of years. But we don’t have a choice if we wish to preserve American democracy.

From Senator Chris Murphy via Bluesky, an explanation of Trump’s anti-democratic powerplay (my emphasis):

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.
No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.

1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

2/ This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense.
That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.

3/ You see, our founders created a President with limited and checked powers. They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature.
Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects.

4/ British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent.
Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance.
The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing.

5/ Trump knows that he can weaken (and maybe destroy) democracy by using spending and taxation in the same way.
He is using access to government funds to bully universities, law firms and state and local governments into loyalty pledges.

6/ Healthy democracies rely on an independent legal profession to maintain the rule of law, independent universities to guard objective truth and provide forums for dissent to authority, and independent state/local government to counterbalance a powerful federal government.

7/ But the private sector also plays a rule to protect democracy. Independent industry has power.
The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence. Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.

8/ What could Trump demand as part of a quiet loyalty pledge?
Public shows of support from executives for all his economic policy. Contributions to his political efforts. Promises to police employees’ support for his political opposition.

9/ The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry.
As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.

10/ And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very hard for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. It’s the playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever.

11/ The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons.
But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs.
The people still have the power.

[End of thread.]

= = =

Trump’s plan, thus far, is working. The appearance of chaos here-there-and-everywhere has obscured the significance of a relentless crusade against our democratic government. Many people are just starting to pay attention. No one has managed to slow things down. And, for the most part, Democratic leaders have been caught flatfooted.

So, better late than never, what’s the Democratic plan to push back?

Congressional Democrats are locked out of power — a result of losing elections in November 2024. Governors, attorneys general, and other state and local officials have only limited means to block federal policy. What the opposition party has is a challenge — an opportunity — to change public opinion.

The plan for Democrats is to communicate as effectively as possible to Americans about what is going on. Donald Trump is waging a savage assault on American democracy and on the wellbeing of working- and middle-class folks across the country.

In a matter of months the consequences will be clearer, but we can’t afford to wait months. It’s on Democrats — and not just those in Washington or in office — to get the attention of folks who haven’t been paying attention. To speak persuasively to people who haven’t yet caught on to the damage that’s being directed by Trump and company. (Addendum: Let’s say, rather, it’s on democrats to persuade others. We can work through a political party, even though we can’t rely on the Democrats to lead the way. See the following post.)

At this stage, we still possess an arsenal of freedoms. While billionaires, CEOs, law firms, universities, media companies, and others are bending the knee — and paying tribute to Trump — it’s up to the rest of us who don’t want to live in an autocratic version of America to push back.

Not the plan you wanted? Sorry, but there’s no magic bullet. Welcome to our imperfect democracy, which will be preserved — if at all — by the efforts of those of us who treasure it. By raising our voices, individually and collectively.

Fox6 – Milwaukee:
Election Results — Wisconsin Supreme Court:

Susan Crawford ………………………………………1,301,128 (55%)
Brad Schimel ………………………………………….1,063,244 (45%)

Precincts reporting: 99%

Voters in Wisconsin, the swingiest of swing states, are not so different from voters across the country. Millions of folks have had enough of Elon Musk’s antics.

But not all. He is still popular among the fanboys on X (though not as popular as the hijacked algorithms would suggest). Lots of Congressional Republicans still covet his money. The Project 2025 radicals are swooning over DOGE’s destructive assault on federal departments and agencies.

And then there are Trump’s most devoted sycophants:

JD Vance straight up lies on Fox & Friends, claims 40 percent of people calling the Social Security hotline are "actually committing fraud."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-04-03T13:16:05.146Z

JD Vance is spouting lies. We haven’t seen evidence of fraudulent grants, or 150-year-old Social Security recipients, or SSI fraud approaching 4-percent, much less 40-percent.

The vice president could be, if he chose to be, in a position to make knowledgeable assessments about this stuff. But he’s not even trying. It’s just lie after lie after lie.

When elected officials and a political party must lie to make the case for their agenda — that’s a tell. That’s a sign that their objective is, as Vance put it, to “thwart the will of the American people.” Of course loyalty to their leader is the guiding principle for Republicans today. The lies follow from this imperative.

The New York Times reported this morning: “The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers on Tuesday in a purge that included senior leaders and top scientists charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.”

While Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggested that eliminating 10,000 jobs would relieve the budget deficit, health personnel make up less than 1% of HHS spending; most funding goes to hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes.

Last Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks, resigned under pressure. Marks accused the secretary of trafficking in “misinformation and lies” in his campaign against vaccines, adding, “This man doesn’t care about the truth.”

Unfortunately, Kennedy, who has promoted vitamin A to ward off measles, has a following among parents who take him seriously.

The partial quotation in the headline above this post is from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. From Nature: “This will go down as one of the darkest days in modern scientific history in my 50 years in the business. These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”

And Americans will suffer and die as a consequence. This policy is worse than senseless. It is recklessly, callously harmful. All because Donald Trump craves attention and deference and the Kennedy aura, and Robert Jr. — after being rebuffed by Kamala Harris — offered his support for Trump’s campaign in August 2024.

Politics is often transactional. But seldom as stupid and destructive as Trump has made it. For years to come, Americans who could have lived and thrived, will be struck by diseases and many will die as a result of Trump and Kennedy’s misrule.

In 2023, 107,500 people — mostly children — lost their lives to measles, a highly contagious respiratory virus. In 2025, kids in Texas and New Mexico have died from measles. Yet the disease was considered eliminated in the United States in 2000 as a result of the MMR vaccine and high vaccination rates. Vaccine skepticism, now boosted by the nation’s cabinet official overlooking the health agencies, is taking a toll, as vaccine rates plummet.

And of course the harm of the misinformation and lies extends much further and wider than measles, a single infectious disease.

Whatever Make America Great Again conjures up for the true believers, this can’t be it, can it? A return to the good old days (before the vaccine became available) when there were tens of thousands of hospitalizations due to measles in the U.S. and hundreds of Americans, mostly children, died from the infection each year?

For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.  

This quotation is often attributed to strongman Oscar R. Benavides, who rose from Field Marshal to President (1933-1939) of Peru. We North Americans (in the United States) are seeing a version of this in the second presidential administration of Donald Trump, but it’s not exactly a law and order regime that we’re watching.

Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig recently wrote:

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Obviously, the law reserved for Trump’s enemies veers sharply from the rule of law envisaged in a constitutional democracy. A recent discussion by Aziz Huq of The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, written by Ernst Fraenkel more than eighty years ago, suggests a critical distinction.

Fraenkel observed firsthand the erosion of constitutional and legal foundations of Germany and the rise of strongman rule under Hitler. But, in Huq’s words, “the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.”

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. 

Trump and his administration, prominently including his DOJ, have created the prerogative state right before our eyes. It is a lawless zone where resentment and grievance rule, retribution is directed at enemies, while friends and family are rewarded and corruptly acquired payoffs buy immunity from the feds.

This is a perversion of a democratic America. For most folks, life can go on more or less as normal (though we have lost an ample measure of our freedom and security) — unless we attract the ire of the strongman or his lieutenants. Then, we may find ourselves subject to unlimited arbitrariness (and in some cases violence) — as thousands of people (civil servants, university and medical researchers, students receiving financial aid, demonstrators whose viewpoints offend MAGA, Democratic law firms, families with transgender kids, legal immigrants, et al.) have experienced in the first two months of rule by the Trump 2 administration.

This (hardly exhaustive) list will keep getting longer.

In a report last week in the New York Times (“‘This Is Worse’: Trump’s Judicial Defiance Veers Beyond the Autocrat Playbook,” Amanda Taub highlights the assessment of Steven Levitsky.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”
“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orbán forced out hostile judges and packed the courts with allies — over many years. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey purged thousands of judges — over several decades. Both used subterfuge. Trump has been in office barely two months and his methods have been transparent.

Mr. Levitsky said he was struggling to find a precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.
“The zeal with which these guys are engaging in increasingly open, authoritarian behavior is unlike almost anything I’ve seen. Erdogan, Chavez, Orban — they hid it,” Mr. Levitsky said.

The Trump 2 administration is much different than Trump 1. Trump’s allies have had four years since the attempted insurrection on January 6 to prepare for this moment. The Project 2025 guys paved the way with a master plan. Trump cronies who populate the second administration hit the ground running. While their advances have often been clumsy, they’ve charged ahead at full speed.

MAGA has seized control of the federal government and is racing to remake it — just as Donald Trump promised during the 2024 campaign. The assault is degrading our democratic institutions.

Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault. 

That’s from a report by kenneth Vogel and Shane Goldmacher in the New York Times on a concerted campaign to use the power of the state to cripple the ability of the Democratic Party to raise funds, to organize campaigns, and to rely on legal and organizational support critical to winning elections.

The report is replete with details of the crooked onslaught to tilt the playing field to favor MAGA Republicans — or, to put it another way — to rig American elections so Democrats can’t compete.

This is straight out of the playbook of authoritarians — Putin and Orban are among the most prominent today — to wound their political opponents and undermine civil society. MAGA Republicans have openly praised both the men, revering them as role models.

Trump pledged throughout his 2024 campaign to seek retribution against his political foes. He has whined incessantly about the weaponization of the justice department, while directing DOJ attacks on folks (“horrible people,” “thugs,” “scum”) who dare oppose him. Trump is intent on seeking personal vengeance, exacted through the coercive power of the federal government.

The course Trump is following is exactly what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — authors of How Democracies Die –predicted Trump would do (when interviewed last December, a month before he reentered the White House).

I quoted from the interview in a previous post; first Ziblatt: “So, it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition.”

Levitsky predicted that “we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior,” and he foresaw “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.”

There’s nothing new here. Trump, the White House, the DOJ, and MAGA activists are literally following the path trod by foreign authoritarians (past and present).

Americans haven’t seen this before — not here. But it’s happening right before our eyes. The institutions that undergird our democracy and our civil society — associations separate and independent of state power — are being dismantled. Our president is grasping for unchecked power, in direct violation of the constitutional restraints that preserve our liberty.

Our rights as Americans, public policies that serve and protect us, and limits on the power of a single man to direct the government to inflict harm on us are being smashed to bits.

Meanwhile, scholars and commentators have been debating for weeks about whether we have, or at what point we might, encounter a constitutional crisis. This may be a significant question for theories of constitutional law or political philosophy, but it is hardly clear that it has much import for the rest of us.

In this morning’s New York Times Adam Liptak highlights the views of several legal scholars who shift the focus. For instance:

Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”
“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Professor Huq said. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”

The Project 2025 folks and the billionaires who back them are getting their way. Add Leonard Leo and his funders, countless MAGA enthusiasts on social media, and Republicans in Congress (who are ducking responsibility, but happy to stand back as the destruction unfolds). And let’s give a shout out to the five Republican men – all of whom have devoted their professional lives to advancing the agenda of the Republican Party – in the supermajority on the Roberts Court.

The deliberate destruction continues apace. The harm to Americans and to our country continues to metastasize.