The New York Times recently published an article Are We Losing Our Democracy? where they looked at various signs of dictatorship or autocracy and whether we had crossed that line. (I also provided the text in a Facebook post for those without NY Times access). I am going to look at each segment in turn and provide my own thoughts.
#3 Bypassing the Legislature
This is one area where the Republican majority in Congress has enabled Trump's authoritarian tendencies, refusing to rein him in by asserting their authority. The Constitution makes clear, in Article I, that Congress alone has the "power of the purse".
From the NY Times article:
His administration has violated federal law at least six times by withholding funding authorized by Congress for libraries, preschools, scientific research and more, the Government Accountability Office found. He has gutted or dismantled congressionally authorized agencies like the Department of Education and U.S.A.I.D. He has also imposed new taxes — his tariffs — without congressional approval. Since the current government shutdown began, he has used donations from billionaires to pay troops and finance the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Anyone who paid attention in social studies class, or even watched Schoolhouse Rock, knows that laws, including annual budgets, originate in Congress and are then sent to the president for his signature (or veto). Once the president signs, the bill becomes law and it's the president's responsibility to carry out that law, including implementing the budget. It's true that the president has wide discretion regarding how the laws are executed, but he does not have the discretion to ignore the law. He especially does not have the discretion to ignore the Constitution.
Contextually, presidents have been chipping away at Congress's authority for quite a while now. The issuance of executive orders in lieu of Congressional action has become almost routine. Most of the time, executive orders are statements of policy, or formalize a president's priorities, but Trump's executive orders, starting with the blizzard of them on Day One, go far beyond that. The most egregious of them is the executive order overturning part of the Constitution! He actually issued an executive order claiming that the part of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to children born here would no longer be interpreted that way. He was editing the Constitution by fiat. I wrote an article about his Day One EO's where I looked at each one.
In addition to attempting to reinterpret the Constitution, the bulk of his executive orders circumvented the law by empowering The "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) to gut whole Congressionally authorized departments, fire thousands of employees, cancel contracts, eliminate inspectors general, and make it clear that previously passed laws and budgets don't apply to him. In the recent government shutdown he decided who would get paid and who wouldn't, even withholding available SNAP benefits. Of course, there's the tariffs, aside from the sheer idiocy of how they're applied, ordinarily tariffs, like all taxes, are set by Congress, not the president. Trump has declared an economic national emergency in order to justify usurping this authority.
Some of the blame lies with the Republican leaders of Congress, who have failed to fight his power grabs. Their complicity does not change the fact that these power grabs have been illegal.
In full autocracies, legislatures often formally transfer some of
their authority to the executive, and some congressional Republicans have proposed
such changes.
Trump supporters seem to have no problem, either ignoring the authoritarian nature of his actions, or rationalizing that he "getting things done".
It's still illegal, and it's still dictatorial.
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