Trump's Coup d'Etat

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Anyone who has seen the overthrow of a country’s government, either peacefully or by force, must be watching the United States with an uneasy sense of familiarity. In less than two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump and his zealous staff have committed offenses typically associated with a sudden takeover of an unstable autocracy.

Is this what most voters who elected Trump wished for? While stopping short of arresting political opponents (so far), the new regime has threatened criminal investigations of disfavored officials, begun ideological purges in government agencies, ordered federal workers to inform on colleagues, yanked security details from former officials who criticized Trump, risked the health of millions by halting worldwide humanitarian programs, erased essential medical information from government websites, pressed colleges to report on foreign students’ supposed antisemitism, undone rules against racial and gender discrimination, dictated that schools nationwide indoctrinate children with a “patriotic” curriculum, and more.

 The widespread destruction of norms and institutions, aimed at creating immense vacuums to be filled with a new belief system, has never before been seen in the United States. It reflects an aspiration that might be called totalism—not totalitarianism, which connotes complete subservience of the population to the will of the state. But rather, an effort to infuse both government and civil society, as totally as feasible, with a comprehensive ideology. Part of that is borne of a distaste for government itself, except when used to expand raw presidential power.

This cannot be accomplished within the confines of the Constitution’s separation of powers and the republic’s decentralization of authority to the states. Therefore, Trump has been ignoring the legislative branch—the laws passed by Congress—and in one case so far (not shutting down TikTok), ignoring both the legislative and judicial branches. He also seems poised to bully recalcitrant states by withholding federal aid.

Whether either branch rises to defend its key role in America’s ingenious constitutional system remains an open question. Voters might not care or be aware. Fewer than half of Americans surveyed in 2022 could name the three branches of government, whose checks and balances devised by the Framers have been a critical bulwark against authoritarianism since 1789. Yet in Trump’s Republican Party, only an occasional murmur of concern has been heard from legislators, who seem indifferent to their emasculation.

Nor is the judicial branch dependable now. Two federal judges have stopped two Trump orders with temporary injunctions—one halting the freeze in domestic spending, the other blocking what he called Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” elimination of birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14^th Amendment. But Trump in his first term installed plenty of right-wing extremists in the federal judiciary, right up to the Supreme Court, with more to come. The country is now in a state of profound uncertainty.

Predictability is a cardinal principle of the rule of law, which is critical to a functioning democracy. Transparency and stability are elements in the definition of the rule of law as devised by the World Justice Project, a creation of the American Bar Association to monitor countries around the world. Significantly, the US ranked only 26^th in the project’s 2024 rule-of-law index. Under Trump, its standing will surely plummet. (Denmark, by the way, was No. 1. That includes Greenland, which better hope it can hang on.)

On day one of his administration, Trump damaged the rule of law by his sweeping pardons of about 1500 rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, hundreds of whom had been convicted of violence against police officers. As long as they were acting to support Trump, he considered them political prisoners and “hostages,” as he put it. Releasing prisoners of the former regime is a salient feature of a coup-like takeover of government.

In the area of civil law, Trump as president has been a serial violator. He fired the inspectors general of a dozen agencies, ignoring the federal law that requires that he give Congress 30 days notice and specific reasons for dismissing the officials who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump clearly wants no neutral oversight to check corruption that he and his minions will commit.

He has fired Democratic commissioners of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, paralyzing or politicizing the agencies and ignoring laws that require him to make various findings of cause, such as malfeasance or negligence.

By freezing spending on foreign aid and temporarily pausing domestic spending, he ignored the fundamental role of Congress in budgeting and appropriating funds—a role chiseled into Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution—and also the 1974 Impoundment Control Act requiring the president to spend appropriated funds unless he gets Congress to review and approve his move. Trump simply evaded Congress, possibly setting up a legal challenge in which he apparently hopes the Supreme Court will find the law unconstitutional.

In fact, that seems to be the overall strategy of his legal advisers: to push and push executive power as far as possible to see where the right-wing Supreme Court finally draws the line. The administration will probably win a few to expand presidential authority. Since most “conservative” justices have shown their inclination to make policy instead of judgments, they might approve executive branch authority where they like the policies, even though they’re eager to overrule its authority on policies they dislike. The Court recently reversed longstanding precedent giving regulatory agencies broad latitude to interpret amiguous statutes to regulate private industry, in line with traditional conservatism’s view that such power usurps the legislature’s role. By that reasoning, Trump is clearly on the wrong side, yet it’s not certain that the “conservative” justices will see it that way.

“Conservative” isn’t the right term any longer. We need updated vocabulary. What do Trumpist “conservatives” want to conserve? Not the constitutional separation of powers. Not the rule of law. The Trumpists bear little resemblance to the revolutionaries who forged a democracy. They are more like counterrevolutionaries.

If the pendulum eventually swings and the counterrevolutionaries are defeated, a big question would arise. Once restraints are eroded under Trump, the freedom to abuse can pass to anyone in power. Trumpists might ask themselves whether Democrats will do the same things when (if) they regain the White House. Will they be less civic-minded than they have been, less devoted to the democratic norms that they have honored? Will they exploit for themselves whatever enhanced authority Trump has acquired for the presidency? Will they purge, prosecute, freeze, and destroy whatever Republicans have created? Will they mimic Trump’s movement and proceed as if they have overthrown the government?

If so, if the system is too fragile to withstand the Trumpists’ onslaught, too brittle to correct itself, then a new, tragic chapter of American history will be written.