MAGA Trump über alles

Donald Trump is busy seizing power through executive orders and letting Elon Musk and his gang of racist DOGE bros run amok through America’s government agencies. It’s an unprecedented upending of the separation of powers, an authoritarian reshaping of America.

While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.

  Public Notice

I wonder where they got that idea, John Roberts.

Executive orders are meant to tell the executive branch how to implement existing laws. However, in part because Congress is now so routinely deadlocked, every president in the 21st century has issued scores of them that attempt to implement policies outside of the legislative process.

But executive orders aren’t laws, and the authority of presidents to issue them is not absolute. They can’t contradict or overturn existing statutes. Subsequent presidents can undo executive orders just by issuing a new executive order saying so.

That's only if we get a subsequent president.

A mere three weeks into his presidency, Trump has taken multiple actions that openly defy existing laws and explicitly encroach on legislative authority. But Republicans seem content to do nothing except sit on their hands and let Trump take a torch to democracy.

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[T]he administration’s argument that Trump’s sweeping changes to border enforcement are constitutional is based only on the assertion that if Trump thinks existing immigration laws are ineffective, he has the authority to basically make new ones on his own. This level of overreach is truly wild, and if Republicans in Congress were not fully in thrall to Trump’s dictatorial dreams, it would be a five-alarm fire in both the House and the Senate.

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Instead, we have the feckless speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, saying that destroying agencies is just “stewardship” and “an active, engaged, committed executive branch doing what the executive branch should do.”

Since congressional Republicans shrugged off the shuttering of USAID, why not just keep going? That seems to be Trump’s plan, as it appears now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is being demolished. Russ Vought, a Project 2025 ghoul heading the Office of Management and Budget and the CFPB, just zeroed out the agency’s funding for the next quarter and instructed CFPB staff to stop working.

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[And] Republicans didn’t bat an eye as Trump issued massive spending freezes, essentially giving him unilateral spending authority.

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The CFPB is an agency so loathed by the GOP that every Republican state attorney general joined a lawsuit alleging its funding scheme was unconstitutional. With Congress holding the power of the purse, it would be free to defund the CFPB. With Congress holding the authority to create and abolish agencies, it would be free to close the agency entirely or to radically limit its pro-consumer mission. But Trump has shown no inclination to approach lawmakers on this, and congressional Republicans don’t seem to care either.

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Why go through the charade of making policy and negotiating budgets if the president can just ignore laws when he wants to? This view makes Congress nothing more than an advisory body.

He has his cabinet and QAnon for that. Why not just abolish Congress?

Russ Vought has been explicitly arguing for years that Trump should not have to worry about whether something is legal, whining about pesky lawyers who “come in and say it’s not legal, you can’t do that, that would overturn this precedent, there’s a state law against it.”

So what is the role of the judicial branch in this brave new world? What happens when a federal court holds that Trump doesn’t have the power to do anything he wants? Dozens of lawsuits over Trump’s overreach have been filed, and federal courts have already blocked his birthright citizenship order, paused his spending freeze, and delayed the deadline for mass federal employee resignations.

But Vice President JD Vance is already floating the idea that the administration should simply ignore those lawful court rulings.

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Sen. Tom Cotton, meanwhile, called for the Obama appointee who issued [the recent ruling staying Trump/Musk's spending freeze], Judge Paul Engelmeyer, to be “forbidden by higher courts from ever hearing another case against the Trump admin.”

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If Congress and the judiciary no longer check or balance the executive branch, no separation of powers is left. That’s a complete rewiring of America. That’s tearing democracy down to the studs and rebuilding something entirely different and much worse in its place.

As much as it might seem overly dramatic to say, this sounds a lot like dictatorship, and a despotic one at that.

Senator Mullin: Heil Mein Fuhrer!  

Me: My penny collection just went up in value!