America’s Drift Toward Constitutional Authoritarianism

Over the past year, the Trump administration has demonstrated a distinctive governing logic: Democracy need not be destroyed to be neutralized. It can be preserved in form while altered in function. Authority is exercised through existing institutions rather than against them; legality is reinterpreted rather than discarded; emergency powers are normalized rather than declared. The result is a system that still appears constitutional but increasingly operates on executive prerogative.

One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, U.S. democracy has not collapsed. Elections still take place. Courts still sit. Congress still legislates, albeit at a glacial pace. The U.S. Constitution remains intact. Yet the system now functions differently—not through rupture but through recalibration. Power has been centralized, norms hollowed out, and constraint redefined. What is striking is not what has been abolished but what has been absorbed, suppressed, or quietly overridden.

One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, U.S. democracy has not collapsed. Elections still take place. Courts still sit. Congress still legislates, albeit at a glacial pace. The U.S. Constitution remains intact. Yet the system now functions differently—not through rupture but through recalibration. Power has been centralized, norms hollowed out, and constraint redefined. What is striking is not what has been abolished but what has been absorbed, suppressed, or quietly overridden.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has demonstrated a distinctive governing logic: Democracy need not be destroyed to be neutralized. It can be preserved in form while altered in function. Authority is exercised through existing institutions rather than against them; legality is reinterpreted rather than discarded; emergency powers are normalized rather than declared. The result is a system that still appears constitutional but increasingly operates on executive prerogative.

This pattern is visible across domains. Domestically, federal agencies have been reorganized around loyalty rather than professional autonomy. Inspectors general and career officials have been dismissed or sidelined. Legal authority has been selectively deployed against perceived political adversaries or officials deemed insufficiently compliant, including independent institutional actors such as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Immigration enforcement has been militarized in both posture and practice, culminating in fatal encounters such as the killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents—an incident that officials described as lawful, procedural, and tragic, and which nonetheless illustrates how state violence can become routinized within bureaucratic norms rather than framed as exception.

Abroad, the same logic has unfolded with fewer restraints. The Trump administration has pursued the forcible removal of Venezuela’s president, attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities while openly contemplating intervention to support domestic unrest there, and revived territorial ambitions toward Greenland, a territory of a NATO ally. These actions are not aberrations but expressions of executive will operating with minimal regard for international law, which Trump has explicitly dismissed. When he told the New York Times that the only limit on his authority was his own morality and mind, he was