Things Are Going To Get Worse

The rails are off American authoritarianism.

Credit: Hadrian / Shutterstock

Last time, we saw that the United States has transitioned to a competitive authoritarian regime during Donald Trump’s second term. Under these systems, elections remain free enough that the opposition can participate and win. At the same time, incumbents structure the political environment to their advantage and violate civil liberties on a large scale.

Competitive authoritarianism is fairly common, with Hungary, India, Turkey, and Venezuela providing examples. It differs from full authoritarianism of the kind seen in Russia and China. There, regimes have forced the opposition underground while elections are stage-managed affairs with predetermined results.

Although full authoritarianism is off the table, we have not begun to see what Trump’s regime is capable of. That is because the old restraints that once served as checks on executive power have disappeared.

Today, we will examine how this process unfolded and consider its implications. As bad as things are right now, a lot worse is on the way.

The Judiciary

Traditionally, the courts served as an important backstop against an authoritarian president. Thanks to the power of judicial review, the federal courts—and the Supreme Court in particular—were able to rein in abuses of power by the other two branches as well as the states.

That was the theory, at least. The reality was different. For most of American history, the judiciary colluded with antidemocratic forces to maintain a racist order. Before the Civil War, the Supreme Court enabled the enslavement of Black people and stripped free Blacks of the right to citizenship. Afterwards, it treated the Reconstruction amendments as if they were optional, thereby legalizing white supremacy in the South.

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The fact is that the judiciary was never designed to stop a determined autocrat in the first place.

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Nevertheless, in key instances the Court did intervene to enforce the Constitution. It reversed Truman’s attempt to nationalize the steel industry, (eventually) expanded racial integration nationwide, (eventually) mandated an end to Jim Crow, acknowledged a Constitutional right to abortion, and ordered the release of the White House tapes that would lead to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

All of this would end around the time the Supreme Court’s right flank started tuning into FOX News.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked in The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” Mike replied. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

So went the readiness of the Supreme Court to defend democracy. The first milestone in this wretched saga was Bush v. Gore (2000). In that decision, the Court’s Republican majority—we may as well discard the “conservative” moniker and call them what they were—handed the presidency to George W. Bush on grounds that were flatly ludicrous.

The attack on democracy accelerated under Chief Justice John Roberts. Starting with 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts and his fellow Republicans began gnawing away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important piece of legislation in American history. Eventually, they would render it meaningless, permitting the former Confederate states to re-disenfranchise Black Americans—albeit with the proviso that state governments refrain from announcing “we are doing a racism right now.”

The coup de grâce was Trump v. United States (2024), in which the majority granted (Republican) presidents immunity from prosecution for pretty much any act undertaken while in office, effectively anointing them elected kings.

Gradually and then suddenly.

But the fact is that the judiciary was never designed to stop a determined autocrat in the first place. Lacking a police force of its own, it had no power to impose its will on a defiant executive—a flaw that Trump has repeatedly laid bare.

In truth, the judiciary’s authority always depended on the assent of the other two branches. Until recently, this was not a problem, since the president and Congress abided by its rulings. From their standpoint, disobeying a court order was something that just was not done. Any president who tried would run up against a bipartisan wall in Congress that was ready to stop him—if necessary, by impeachment and removal. Aware of the inevitable consequences, no president ever tried. (That includes Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who, contrary to popular myth, never flouted a Supreme Court ruling).

Forbearance

The unwritten rule mandating the president’s compliance with judicial decisions is an example of a norm. Both the Constitution and statutory law are vague and open to interpretation. As a result, they are ripe for abuse. In fact, no democracy, including America’s, would survive very long if the law-as-written were the only safeguard against executive overreach.

This is where norms come in; they constrain the powerful from acting in ways that would contravene the law’s purpose. Chief among these norms is forbearance. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain, forbearance demands that officeholders refrain from exploiting the full range of powers available to them.

Put simply, forbearance is a way of saying “f**k around and find out.”

Norms, you see, are not mere guidelines; they come along with sanctions in the event that they are infringed. This is what Nixon discovered when the White House tapes exposed the Watergate cover-up. After the transcripts’ release, he was bluntly informed—by the leaders of his own party, no less—that a bipartisan supermajority in the Senate was prepared to convict and remove him.

However, the norm of forbearance, much like the dignity of Republican Supreme Court justices, gradually dissolved over time. The culprit, unsurprisingly, was the Republican Party itself. Beginning in the early 1990s under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the GOP went on a political rampage. They exploited their power to the maximum, obstructing the Democrats at every turn, shutting down the government, and using the power of impeachment as a matter of routine. Importantly, they found that neither the Democrats nor the electorate would make them pay the price.

By the time Trump came along, forbearance was mostly a thing of the past. But it had not disappeared entirely. This became evident when Trump fired FBI director James Comey shortly after taking office in 2017. While there was no formal law prohibiting him from doing so, he did violate a longstanding tradition by which presidents allowed FBI directors to serve out their full terms—the rationale being that an incoming president should not put a loyalist in charge of the country’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

The reaction was swift; bipartisan hostility to the move led Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel to take over the investigation into Russia’s election interference.

This was the norm of forbearance in action. Trump f**ked around—and then he found out.

Institutionalists

The reason Comey was a problem for Trump in the first place was that he was an institutionalist—someone in authority whose primary allegiance was to the formal duties of his office instead of to Trump personally. In this regard, Comey followed in a long line of civil servants who did their jobs instead of kowtowing to their political masters. Nor was he alone; most members of the first Trump administration were also institutionalists, as were at least some Senate Republicans.

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Norms are not mere guidelines; they come along with sanctions in the event they are infringed.

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Together with forbearance (or what remained of it), the institutionalists were the last surviving backstop preventing the slide into authoritarianism. Trump wanted to prosecute his enemies but the institutionalists in the Justice Department and the White House said no. He wanted to overturn the 2020 election but his attorney general, scores of Justice Department officials, and his own vice president refused to go along with it.

Not that they deserve a cookie for that; refusing to abet a coup d'état is the bare minimum we should expect of our civil servants. The point is that enough institutionalists remained at the time that Trump, despite his best efforts, could not use the state as a nightstick to whale on his opponents.

Institutionalists and forbearance traditionally acted in symbiosis with one another. To the extent that forbearance still meant anything during Trump’s first term, it was because there was a critical mass of institutionalists who were willing to enforce it. The institutionalists, for their part, continued exercising forbearance because they either believed it to be good in itself or expected consequences for violating it—consequences imposed by other institutionalists. As a result, the norm of forbearance persisted, which meant that even an irredeemable shitbird like Trump had to observe it.

Authoritarianism Without Limits

If Trump has managed to install authoritarianism this time around, it is because the guardrails described above have ceased to function. Thanks to Trump v. United States, he has the Supreme Court’s blessing to crime to his heart’s content. Forbearance too has vanished. As for Republican institutionalists, the very notion is laughable. Trump’s cabinet is chock-full of MAGA oberführers while the GOP institutionalists in Congress have been replaced by inflatable blow-up dolls capable of uttering two phrases: “woke antifa BLM” and “I have not seen the president’s Truth Social post.”

The upshot? Trump is now free to f**k around without finding out.

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With the old guardrails gone, Trump will continue upping the ante unless and until we develop alternative means of stopping him.

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Again, this does not mean he will be able to crush all dissent like he is Kim Jong Un. The obstacles to full authoritarianism in the U.S. are simply too great for him to overcome. But his powers are vast—and so, therefore, is the havoc he can wreak.

This raises the question of what exactly authoritarianism will look like in the years ahead.

In some ways, it will involve a continuation of the trends we are already seeing, only on a larger scale and targeting a wider array of actors. Investigations into Trump’s rivals have thus far not amounted to much in the way of concrete actions. But soon enough they probably will, as FBI raids, subpoenas, regulatory fines, and criminal charges against his opponents become a frequent occurrence.

The defiance of the federal judiciary will likely escalate as well. It is not hard to foresee a day when court orders amount to little more than scraps of paper deposited in the White House suggestion box.

Unlawful arrests of foreign nationals will eventually rope in citizens too—journalists, bloggers, legislators, mayors, trans rights activists, and “woke” professors—especially if they happen to be Black, Brown, or wind up featured in a disparaging segment of Fox & Friends.

Other outrages have yet to materialize but will shock the senses when they do—think assassinations of government critics, secret torture sites, and the mowing down of protesters with live ammunition.

Still more innovations could arise as byproducts of current measures once those measures really start to expand. For instance, mass roundups of “subversives” may eventually require a network of black sites where they can be held without charge—concentration camps, in other words.

The point is not that these things are inevitable; rather, it is that they are realistic under the circumstances. With the old guardrails gone, Trump will continue upping the ante unless and until we develop alternative means of stopping him. Just what these other means might be is the topic of our next installment. As it turns out, there is cause for optimism.