Skowronek’s conclusion?
We stand today doubly exposed. We are vulnerable to an office that has been puffed up by the very institutions we depend on to circumscribe it. And for that, we are vulnerable to a rhetorical construction of our circumstance that otherwise bears little resemblance to reality. Navigating this moment and negotiating a safe reset is likely to prove harder than ever before.
Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford who has written extensively about American politics, shares many of Skowronek’s concerns, describing “the mass pardoning and sentence commutation for participants in the Jan. 6 storming of Capitol Hill as most worrying.”
“The pardons and commutations,” King wrote by email,
are historically and constitutionally consistent with how the U.S. federal state has operated since the Civil War but it weakens the perception of penalties for such actions.
This certainly encourages future activists to anticipate in such presidential pardons for federal crimes and may embolden some to engage in political violence — whether Republican or Democrat.
In addition, King pointed out, that
America’s civil rights state has endured some sharp hits since Jan. 20, 2025, particularly in reversing the 1965 order by L.B.J. to end discrimination in government contracting and setting in train affirmative action programs but including a weakening of anti-discrimination actions and investigations by the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Trump begins his second term with four advantages he lacked in 2017, King wrote:
First, he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College and is therefore in a position to cite a mandate (as he did in his inaugural address) to implement his manifesto. This gives him legitimacy to govern.
Second, many of his transformative measures — tougher trade, deportations of migrants with criminal records and undocumented migrants, the cancellation of D.E.I. programs, the pardoning program, halting of foreign aid, U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and WHO, the reversion to a more politicized federal civil service, political reorientation of the Justice Department and enhancement of fossil over green energy — were signaled during his campaign, so consistent with his mandate.
Third, his institutional and political base is formidably strong. He has an ardent and devoted electoral base which will mobilize at rallies and turn out in support of his measures; a primed ideational infrastructure of funded thinkers and organizations; and institutionally the alignment of the Senate, House of Representatives and U.S. Supreme Court creates an ideal setting for the development and exercise of unitary executive power
Last, the infrastructure of intellectual forums and ideas diffusion is rapidly evolving as deeply funded social media sorts information in new ways but — so far — consistently with America’s capacious First Amendment.
As Trump made clear throughout his first week back in the Oval Office, he relishes this moment.
By their very nature, democracies are fragile and vulnerable, a point Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, elaborated on in an email focused in part on Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to justify sending military troops to the border:
One of the perilous aspects of the fact that even liberal democracies carry within them the capacity to activate a state of emergency and, with it, a temporary hypertrophy of the executive into dictatorship, is that it puts a great deal of trust in the executive to relinquish those powers when the threat has passed.
There are, Slobodian continued,
worrying indications that Trump does not see himself as bound by conventional laws or courts. A sense of total impunity and the concentration of state power in one person certainly creates the conditions for the usual push-and-pull between branches of government to harden into something more like dictatorship.
The lack of coherent opposition to Trump makes his agenda all the more threatening.
Sidney Milkis, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, wrote by email:
Trump is a legitimate threat — and so far there has indeed been tepid outcry — nothing like the strong resistance that arose in 2017. I think there are two reasons for this.
First, Trump won both the Electoral College and the popular vote this time — and is doing precisely what he said he would do if elected. The signs at Trump rallies — Mass Deportation Now — have a lot of support, at least in theory, including from those who are skeptical or do not like Trump but are concerned about the historical border surge that occurred during the Biden presidency.
Second, and more systematically, many Americans think the system is broken and unaccountable — they think, somewhat unfairly, that Biden was a weak president in the wake of a porous border, high inflation and high interest rates. The claim of Kamala Harris that Democrats would protect institutions in the midst of this antinomianism did not resonate. Not only the MAGA base, but many independents (including young men of color), are attracted to the idea of a strong man who promises to cut through the Gordian knot, and get things done. This view has given Trump the honeymoon he did not have in 2017.
How should Democrats deal with Trump? James Carville, the Democratic strategist, suggested one possible strategy. “He’s just going to keep plowing through,” he told MSNBC viewers. “And what we have to learn as Democrats, just let him punch himself out.”
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at Brookings, did not mince words in her emailed comments:
We do not have an authoritarian form of government but we do have an emerging dictator. Many of his actions, such as eliminating birthright citizenship, firing inspector generals, and taking advantage of his election to personally cash in on his position, seem to me to be legally indefensible.
Sawhill added.
I read constantly that Trump is ignoring long-established norms. But it’s worse than that; he’s creating new ones. How can I suggest that? Because so far his norm breaking is not leading to his being sanctioned for his actions. By the time a court or a new election turns the tide, it may be too late.
Trump, Sawhill continued,
told us he would become a dictator but only on Day 1, and only on two issues. The first was the deportation of immigrants and the second was drilling for oil. What he didn’t tell us is that he would pardon all the Jan. 6 perpetrators, including those who have been convicted of violent crimes against the police.
What, to me, is most horrifying is Trump’s success in cowing most Republicans and a large and important part of the business community into accepting his actions. If our most important institutions fail to stop Trump’s dictatorial actions, the only recourse will be if the public turns against him, beginning with the midterm elections. But Trump’s almost unique ability to manipulate public opinion, and threats of retribution against those who oppose him, may make a public backlash a weak weapon in the fight for democracy.
Matthew Dallek, professor at the graduate school of political management at George Washington University, described Trump’s second presidency this way: “Donald Trump’s head-spinning first days in office bear some hallmarks of authoritarian rule, but ‘dictatorial’ seems a stretch.”
