IS AMERICAN AUTHORITARIANISM IRREVERSIBLE?

When I read this Axios piece by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, my first thought was to mock it for bothsidesism. VandeHei and Allen seem appropriately alarmed by Donald Trump's massive power grab, but they also seem to believe it's evolutionary -- a natural outgrowth of our recent preference for a strong executive branch -- and they think both sides will just keep doing what Trump is doing:

President Trump is asserting the right to unilaterally use the military wherever, whenever and be the sole judge and jury of his own actions.

Why it matters: Of all the unprecedented actions, these might carry the most sweeping consequences — not just now, but for future presidents....

Neither the conservative Supreme Court nor the GOP-led Congress has shown much interest in limiting this executive.

This dynamic frees Trump to use federal troops in U.S. cities over the objection of a state's governor, or kill people overseas without war authorization or scrutiny, or prosecute his critics in U.S. courts, or seize congressional powers over tariffs and spending.

It's important to reckon with the logic behind this, which will ultimately be validated or invalidated by the Supreme Court. Future presidents will be able to claim the same power Trump does.

They seem to be saying that the real danger is Omigod, a Democrat might be this powerful someday! As they wrote in an earlier piece:

Trump and future presidents hold the power, backed by precedent, to wield their vast authority to harm critics, help allies and chill free speech. Remember the payback precedent: When you get power back, at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, do unto the other what they've been doing to you!

Do you believe that a Democratic president elected in 2028 would rule like a king? I don't. I see who's leading the Democratic pack: Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They have some ideological differences, but they all believe in the rule of law. None of them seem likely to grab power and dare the system to stop them. And even if Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2028, congressional Democrats won't rubber-stamp what a Democratic president wants. There will be friction. With Democrats, there's always friction.

And our corrupt, partisan Supreme Court will undoubtedly take powers away from the Democrat that it recently granted to Trump. Everyone knows this, or should.

But maybe none of this is relevant. It seems increasingly unlikely that we'll have a fair election in 2028, or even in 2026. (David Graham's "The Coming Election Mayhem" in The Atlantic is a must-read on this subject; this gift link should work.) It could take a while before we exit the era of Trumpian authoritarianism. We might need a force or movement other than the Democrats to overthrow the Republican authoritarians.

VandeHei and Allen see Trumpism as part of a gradual evolution of executive-branch power. They write:

Trump is hardly the first president to stretch the bounds of emergency authority: President George W. Bush's administration relied on post-9/11 powers to wiretap Americans without a warrant. President Obama invoked 9/11-era powers to set new precedents for drone strikes. President Biden tried to rely on emergency powers to forgive student debt, but the Supreme Court stopped him.

It seems almost comical that VandeHei and Allen are comparing these limited power grabs to Trump's effort to seize absolute power in literally every area of political interest. Even if you're horrified by what Bush and Obama did in the War on Terror, note that they didn't try to fully upend democracy, remake the structure of the government by fiat, attempt to sue media outlets and universities into complicity or nonexistence, or militarize large swaths of U.S. territory.

If you see what's happening now as evolutionary, it's understandable that you might think, Oh wow, I don't want President Ocasio-Cortez to have these powers, duly given to her by a Supreme Court that sees nearly unlimited power as her due according to the Framers' wishes. That's not what's going to happen.

If, somehow, we have a legitimate election in 2028 and a Democrat wins, the Supreme Court will suddenly discover that presidents were never intended to have absolute power. Showboating contrarian Democrats will block even well-intentioned presidential efforts to use power aggressively.

But it's more likely that we'll have a couple of decades of Trumpists in the White House -- and after that, we might lose any muscle memory of rule-based governance. We might have one authoritarian regime following another, as in Russia or some parts of Latin America, because we've forgotten how to do it any other way.

If that happens, I guess you could say that VandeHei and Allen were half-right.