Eroding the Guardrails: How Expanding Executive Authority Undermines Constitutional Democracy

Part 2

Bottom Line Upfront

1. The Authoritarian Playbook: Concentrate Power, Erode Checks

From Hungary to Turkey, expanding executive authority follows a familiar script: dismantle the separation of powers, weaken legislatures and courts, and strip away democratic guardrails one decree at a time.

2. Orbán’s “Illiberal Democracy”: Democracy in Form, Autocracy in Practice

Through constitutional rewrites, indefinite emergency powers, and control over universities and media, Viktor Orbán has hollowed out Hungary’s democracy while cloaking it in nationalist, Christian rhetoric.

3. Erdoğan’s Presidential Supremacy: Crushing Opposition and Capturing Institutions

By abolishing the prime ministership, purging 130,000 public servants, and jailing critics, Erdoğan has turned Turkey’s presidency into an unchallengeable power hub, making elections symbolic rather than substantive.

4. Project 2025: Unitary Executive Theory Comes Home

The same model is now shaping U.S. governance: prioritizing loyalty over competence, capturing agency authority, ignoring court orders, and issuing sweeping executive orders aimed at eroding checks and balances and centralizing power in the presidency.

5. Overreach on Overdrive: Governing by Decree and Defying the Law

From deploying troops in American cities and firing independent watchdogs to usurping budget authority and weaponizing federal agencies, the administration is expanding executive power beyond constitutional limits.

6. Weaponizing Emergencies: The Insurrection Act and Manufactured Crises

By labeling peaceful protests and low-crime cities as “insurrections,” the administration aims to gain unconstitutional powers to use military force domestically — a core violation of civilian rule.

7. Enablers of Authoritarian Drift: Congress Capitulations, the Supreme Court’s Permissiveness

Congress’s abdication of oversight and the Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential immunity have fostered a “regime of executive lawlessness,” enabling the unchecked erosion of democratic norms.

8. Can Civil Society Push Back?

As Project 2025 progresses and resistance from institutions wanes, historians warn that the U.S. faces its most serious democratic challenge since the 1930s — one that requires public mobilization, legal action, and a unified defense of constitutional democracy.

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Introduction

Last week, my newsletter discussed ten key elements that contribute to the rise of authoritarianism in any country. Each element on the list connects to multiple others. In this and future posts, I will highlight those connections.

Today, my focus is on the expansion of executive power. In countries like Turkey and Hungary, the expansion of executive authority by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkish prime minister from ’03-’14 and president since 2014) and Viktor Orbán (Hungarian prime minister since 2010) has gradually shifted. If you recall last week, I described this overreach as involving

a gradual concentration of power within the executive branch, while eroding the separation of powers and weakening the checks and balances provided by the legislative and judicial branches.

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Hungary and Orbán

Orbán characterizes his policies as “illiberal Christian democracy.” He asserts he’s a defender of Christian values and sees the European Union as anti-Christian.[1]

In his fifteen consecutive years in power, he has gleefully undermined democracy, weakened judicial independence, curbed press freedom, and incentivized corruption while establishing close ties with both Russia and China. In 2011, he and his party’s leaders drafted a new constitution behind closed doors and passed it as his party had a super-majority in Parliament.[2] The new constitution cut the number of parliament seats in half (from 386 to 199).[3]

In a speech he gave in 2018, Orbán said: “We do not want to be diverse and do not want to be mixed. We do not want our own colour, traditions, and national culture to be mixed with those of others.”[4]

In 2020, he worked with his party’s Parliament members to pass laws establishing a state of emergency without a time limit, giving him the power to rule by decree, suspend elections, and impose prison sentences for spreading ‘fake news.’[5]

In 2021, he took control of eleven state universities, turning them into organizations run by his allies, including one college where he allocated 1% of the nation’s GDP to train future conservatives.[6]

Does any of this ring vaguely familiar?

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Turkey and Erdoğan

Erdoğan has taken a different approach in Turkey. He eliminated the prime minister position in the Turkish government, leaving the president with full executive authority. This enabled him to issue decrees, declare states of emergency, and directly appoint top Cabinet officials. He has weakened the Turkish parliament in ways that increasingly make it a ‘rubber stamp’ for his policies.[7]

He has also carried out massive purges, cracking down on thousands of alleged opponents. “By 2018, more than 130,000 public employees were dismissed from the military, police, civil service, and academia.”[8]

He targeted journalists, academics, and human rights activists for imprisonment. He continues to use anti-terror laws to crack down on dissent and expand personnel purges. Erdogan essentially has direct or indirect control of nearly 90% of the Turkish national media. His 2022 disinformation law imposes prison sentences for spreading information the government considers false.[9]

His purges also target judges and prosecutors considered disloyal, replacing them with loyalists. Courts now handle cases against those accused of ‘insulting the president.’ [10]

Turkish elections, still nominally ‘free,’ are heavily skewed in favor of Erdoğan and his party because of media control, judicial crackdowns, and statistical irregularities.[11]

Again, are we seeing any glimpse of an overlap here in the U.S.?

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Project 2025: The Installation of Unitary Executive Theory

These foreign leaders subscribe to different forms of Unitary Executive Theory, long promoted by far-right activists in the U.S. — the claim that the President has exclusive authority over the executive branch, which overrides all other branches.

We see this in Trump’s burst of executive orders and his frequent challenges to the courts. He does this by hiring solely for loyalty, intimidating political opponents, making nonpartisan agencies politically dependent, and possibly disregarding the U.S. Supreme Court when necessary.

How exactly, then, is Trump following this playbook? By defying three key elements: the Constitution, the checks and balances within our democratic system, and, when necessary, the law. Through this comprehensive and systematic approach, he aims to eliminate as many guardrails as possible from his executive authority.

During the first Trump administration, certain White House officials known as the “adults in the room” often stopped similar actions. This time, there are no such adults in the room… or anywhere in the entire administration. They are all passionate loyalists. Ultimately, without cause, the White House dismisses anyone who isn’t a loyalist.

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The Overreach Thus Far: Clear Signals

It’s astounding to see the range of executive orders and actions that Trump has taken in his first nine months. This is unitary executive theory in rabid action. Let’s get specific: He has:

• Sent federal troops into the America’s city streets

• Allowed masked federal agents to raid homes and workplaces

• Sought to rewrite the Constitution’s definition of citizenship

• Retaliated against colleges, law firms, and school systems

• Illegally and wantonly slashed the federal workforce

• Stripped union rights from 500,000 federal workers across 22 agencies

• Impounded billions in Congressional appropriations, often to Blue states and cities, usurping Congressional control over the budget process

• Fired independent inspectors responsible for stopping corruption

• Defied court orders that blocked the deployment of National Guard troops

• Bombed boats departing from Venezuela [and killing dozens on board] because they are allegedly trafficking drugs

• Attempted to oust leaders of independent agencies like the Federal Reserve, etc.

• Imposed tariffs because the nation is allegedly experiencing an economic ‘emergency’ [aka, “an unusual and extraordinary threat”]

• Posted partisan messages across federal government websites blaming the shutdown on Democrats, in violation of the Hatch Act (prohibiting the use of taxpayer money for partisan political purposes)

• Threatened to meddle with the territory of sovereign nations (Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada)

• Enacted political retribution against the former director of the FBI, the New York Attorney General, a former national security advisor, and potentially members of Congress

An exhausting yet not exhaustive list. But sufficient for our purposes.

The administration, led by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—both names you should become familiar with if you’re not already—has pushed the president to use Article II of the Constitution to justify the executive office’s total power and authority instead of a government divided into three coequal branches.

Trump claims that Article II grants him the authority to bypass Congressional statutes and court precedents. According to the administration’s view, Article II justifies deportations without due process, the arbitrary firing of civil servants, control over budgets and spending, and the ignoring of judicial orders related to international affairs.

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The Impressive and Fierce Opposition to Executive Orders

The administration has encountered fierce opposition to many of these executive moves.

According to Just Security,[12] a nonprofit organization that is tracking legal challenges to the administration’s executive actions and orders, through early October, we’ve seen:

• Cases blocked: 29

• Cases temporarily blocked: 83

• Cases blocked pending appeal: 119

• Cases awaiting court ruling: 195

• Cases not blocked but pending appeal: 33

• Cases temporarily blocked in part or denied in part: 10[13]

There’s no precedent for the enormous volume of executive orders the administration has issued, nor for how many have ended up in court. Trump is trying to push his agenda through temporary (often illegal) orders, flooding the courts with flawed directives that receive little or no review from government experts or members of Congress.

In the months ahead (hopefully), courts will continue to block or overturn many more of his unethical … or illegitimate … or anti-constitutional orders.

Stay tuned.

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Can He/Will He Invoke the Insurrection Act?

Invoking the Insurrection Act is yet another egregious example of executive overreach.

Over the past two months, Trump has considered invoking the Act, which would grant him emergency powers to install U.S. troops on American soil. He aims to do this to counter multiple governors, mayors, and judges trying to block these deployments.

His justification is that cities like Portland and Chicago, he says, are disaster areas. Or, in Portland’s case, it’s been “on fire for years.” He claims these situations rise to the level of “criminal insurrection.” Yet, federal law typically forbids the use of the military as a domestic police force.[14]

Essentially, the Act allows the president to federalize the National Guard and use the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement.[15]

A state, like Oregon for example, can use it when it requests help to suppress a local insurrection; or if an insurrection makes it nearly impossible for local officials to enforce federal law; or if a state deprives residents of that state of their constitutional rights in ways and cannot or will not protect them.[16]

No such thing is happening in any of our cities.

In Portland, protesters have maintained peaceful demonstrations against ICE for many weeks, restricting their activities to a single city block outside ICE headquarters. Chicago has experienced fewer homicides in the past nine months than at any point in nearly fifty years. In these two cities, and in any other large or medium-sized city in the country, nothing is occurring that even approaches the lowest threshold for invoking the Act.

Despite that, Trump’s intimidations continue.

During a speech to hundreds of military leaders gathered for an emergency meeting summoned by Secretary of Defense Hegseth, Trump escalated his threats towards U.S. cities.

At the meeting, Trump said, “It’s a war within. We’re under invasion from within,” and that Democratic-run cities are in “bad shape … [with a need to] straighten them out, one by one.” Later in the speech, he added that he told his Defense Secretary that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard.” [17]

Suffice to say, this is unconstitutional.

The Posse Comitatus Act (1878) limits the use of the military to enforce domestic laws unless authorized by the Constitution or Congress, maintaining a clear separation between civilian law enforcement and the military, and Trump’s plan to deploy military troops and the Guard (if these forces are placed under presidential control) in these ways goes against it.[18]

Invoking the Insurrection Act is simply one tool in Trump’s authoritarian toolkit.

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How is This Rapid Slide Being Enabled?

The administration uses a false narrative to justify all these actions, claiming he won in 2024 by a massive landslide, even though he did not even secure 50% of the popular vote.

Trump claims his victory over Kamala Harris is “the most epic political victory our country has ever seen,” insisted he received far more than the 77 million votes he actually obtained.[19] He presents these falsehoods as proof he has a mandate to implement the changes we’re witnessing.

What the administration has done to the federal workforce is unconscionable. I completely support any effort to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of government. But this is not what has happened since January.

What Elon Musk and DOGE started nine months ago by proposing and carrying out draconian cuts had little to do with reducing waste and inefficiencies and was mainly about being deliberately disruptive, cruel, and intimidating. That is not how you run any public or private enterprise

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization, estimates that the administration has reduced the federal workforce by about 200,000 employees as of late September.[20]

The federal Office of Personnel Management expects that by New Year’s Day, the federal workforce will be down 300,000 workers total.

These are extreme levels of reductions in force, and those carrying out the reductions within government have done them mostly in haphazard, arbitrary, and unsystematic ways that will no doubt have critical repercussions in government performance in the months and years to come in emergency management, health, and housing, to name a few.

Meanwhile, this month, Trump continues the unethical cuts by using the shutdown to push Vought’s Project 2025 agenda, aiming for more and permanent layoffs of thousands of federal employees.

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The Enabling Role of Congress

The Republican-led Congress has largely capitulated to Trump on nearly every issue, neglecting many of its Constitutionally mandated responsibilities.

Without their intervention, Republicans permitted DOGE to be installed solely to enforce the strict federal personnel cuts I just mentioned. Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their authority, causing chaos in departments, among personnel, and with large amounts of proprietary data. DOGE now continues its work (legally, I might add) under the umbrella of the U.S. Digital Service inside the White House.

However, Congressional Republicans’ clearest abdication of authority has been with the power of the purse. Instead of maintaining that power, they have allowed the administration to implement spending cuts—known as rescissions—that Congress had already approved for the Fiscal Year 2025 (Oct 1, ’24 - Sept 30, ’25).

The rescissions included nearly $8 billion for international aid and $1 billion for public media.

Republicans have also permitted several federal agencies to be shut down or significantly weakened, which cannot be enacted without their approval.

These agencies include USAID, Voice of America, the Department of Education, the Centers for Disease Control, and billions of dollars in cuts to federal grants for major universities, clean energy infrastructure projects, and mass transit programs.

Remember, these are funds that Congress approved the previous year. Keep in mind that Congress is (supposedly) coequal with the Executive branch in our constitutional framework.

Yet, it has refused to act accordingly all year.

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The Enabling Role of the Supreme Court

We must think back to last summer, when the Roberts-led Supreme Court made the landmark decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gave the U.S. president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaged in official acts.

This, more than any other factor, has emboldened this administration from Day One to pursue an authoritarian and anti-constitutional agenda.

The Court went further earlier this year when it ruled, tentatively, that district courts couldn’t issue nationwide injunctions, thereby giving the Trump administration yet another green light to pursue orders that run counter to the Constitution. Until then, district judges could issue injunctions to at least temporarily halt an order. This has been true for a long time, and Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden all had to abide by these injunctions, whether or not they liked it.

We will see how much further the Court will proceed with enabling the president in its new term (started October 1) as it will hear cases on birthright citizenship, voting rights, tariffs, free speech, and independent agencies.

The actions of the Court and the inaction of Congress have enabled, thus far, a “regime of executive lawlessness.”[21]

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No King’s Rallies to Prevent the so-called Second American Revolution

I mentioned earlier that the administration has been following the Project 2025 agenda since Inauguration Day, almost to a tee.

It is important, then, to know that the co-architect of Project 2025, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, said a year ago after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity: “We are in the process of a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

That revolution officially began in January and hasn’t slowed down.

This so-called revolution will continue to have repercussions throughout Trump’s second term.

Rogers Smith, a Pulitzer Prize winner in history, wrote last month:

“No peacetime president has remotely approached the Trump Administration’s campaign to control the conduct of all the major institutions that comprise American civil society as well as its governments. This is comparable to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s … [and] now all who do not take positions on American politics, policies, and history that comply with the Administration’s views are in danger of being denied funding, subjected to lawsuits, and derided by the White House in ways that can inspire violent private attacks. All this has precedents, but not in America’s peacetime history.”[22]

What can you do?

Besides signing petitions, supporting organizations contesting the administration in court, and backing elected officials who articulate an economic agenda that genuinely buoys the middle and working class and not the 1%, I hope you will join a “No Kings” protest march this Saturday, no matter where you live. Organizers have already planned more than 2,000 marches. You can find one near you here:

https://www.nokings.org/.

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Footnotes

[1] “Hungarian PM sees shift to illiberal Christian democracy in 2019 European vote”. Reuters. Reuters, July 28, 2018.

[2] Margit Feher, “Hungary Passes New Constitution Amid Concerns”, The Wall Street Journal, 18 April 2011.

[3] Dagmar Breitenbach, David Levitz, “Hungary’s parliament passes controversial new constitution”. Deutsche Welle. April 18 2011.

[4] Kakissis, Joanna (13 May 2019). “In Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban Has a Rare Ally in the Oval Office”. NPR.

[5] Bayer, Lili (30 March 2020). “Hungary’s Viktor Orbán wins vote to rule by decree”. Politico.

[6] Hopkins, Valerie (28 June 2021). “Campus in Hungary is Flagship of Orban’s Bid to Create a Conservative Elite”. The New York Times.

[7] “Turkey votes to expand presidential powers,” PBS News, April 16, 2017, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/turkey-votes-expand-presidential-powers

[8] Carlotta Gall, “The Coup Attempt That Set Turkey on a Path to Authoritarianism,” The New York Times, October 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/europe/fethullah-gulen-erdogan-turkey.html

[9] Emre Kizilkaya, “Turkey: Erdogan’s grip on media threatens fair elections, Chatham House, May 11, 2023, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2023-04/turkey-erdogans-grip-media-threatens-fair-elections

[10] Andrew O’Donohue, “Why Türkiye Is at a Tipping Point Between Democracy and Authoritarianism,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 26, 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/03/turkey-protests-erdogan-democracy-authoritarianism

[11] Klimek, et al, “Forensic analysis of the Turkey 2023 presidential election reveals extreme vote swings in remote areas,” PubMed Central, November 15, 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10651024/

[12] “Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions, Just Security, October 9, 2025, https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Chris Cameron, “What is the Insurrection Act that Trump says he’s considering?” The New York Times, October 6, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/us/trump-insurrection-act-national-guard.html.

[15] Joseph Nunn, “The Insurrection Act Explained,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 10, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained.

[16] John Cardinale and Kelly Kosuda, “Get the Facts: What is the Insurrection Act and when has it been used? KCRA3 News, October 8, 2025, https://www.kcra.com/article/insurrection-act-trump-national-guard-deployment/68888109.

[17] “Speech: Donald Trump Addresses Military Leadership in Quantico, Virginia – September 30, 2025, Roll Call, https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/.

[18] Safiya Riddle, “The 150-year-old law that governs military’s role in local law enforcement, AP News, September 2, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/posse-comitatus-act-trump-national-guard-california-0f9239e76a5abb2e2a, 1b74be284ea8f8.

[19] Donald J. Trump Transcripts, “Speech: Donald Trump Holds a Political Rally in Washington - January 19, 2025,” Roll Call, https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-political-rally-washington-january-19-2025/.

[20] Kayla Epstein and Nardine Saad, “Trump administration starts laying off thousands of workers,” BBC, October 11, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mxd1g71vxo.

[21] “Executive Lawlessness: Leah Litman on the Supreme Court Enabling Presidential Overreach,” The Intercept, July 18, 2025, https://theintercept.com/2025/07/18/litman-scotus-executive-overreach/.

[22] Thomas Edsall, “The Mind-Boggling Intrusiveness of Donald J. Trump,” The New York Times, August 19, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/opinion/trump-intrusion-lincoln-roosevelt.html.