Trump's Heritage Foundation allies have provided him with a framework of legal gymnastics justifying his rule by fiat, specifically the specious "Unitary Executive Theory", but Trump needs no legal basis for his authoritarianism, it's his default method of governing. His style of leadership derives from two sources: (1) Being the head of a family-owned private business and (2) Being a rich kid.
We Americans regularly fall for the idea that a successful businessman will make a successful mayor, governor, president etc. I wrote about it here and again here. The main difference between the head of a government and the head of a business is accountability. The owner of a privately owned business answers to no one. He can make decisions that will cause the business to lose all its customers, but no one has the authority to stop him. Even in publicly traded companies, boards of directors usually don't get involved in the day-to-day operations. Trump, after pushing out other family members, inherited his father's business and remolded it in his own image. He made decades of bad decisions, bankrupting multiple businesses, but kept on making them because no one had the power to stop him. The idea that as president he would have to cooperate with Congress, defer to the courts, and work within a system, was entirely foreign to him. If he had been a self-made businessman, that would have been bad enough, but he was a rich kid who never wanted for anything, never had to work a day in his life, and had everything in life handed to him. What could possibly go wrong?
The promulgators of the Unitary Executive claim that the phrase in Article II Section 1 - "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." means that everything related to how laws are executed, how laws are interpreted, how laws are enforced is under the unquestioned authority of one person: the president. I'm sure that this would surprise the nation's founders, who were very specifically against entrusting supreme power to one individual. In fact, Article II Section 3 states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed"...no exceptions are mentioned. Throughout Article II, virtually all responsibility and authority of the president is contingent upon concurrence of Congress. The Constitution lays out the framework where Congress writes the laws and the president executes the laws. It's true that for a bill to become law the president must agree (by signing it) before it becomes law, but it's the Congress where all laws and policies and budgets originate. A president can suggest, a president can send a proposed budget request to Congress, but it's Congress that writes the rules.
Something not fully anticipated by the founders was the growth of what right wingers call the administrative state. As the country grew, and especially as government took a greater role in protecting its citizens Congress created regulatory and enforcement agencies. Once Congress passes a law, there has to be some mechanism to determine whether the law is being followed and what to do about it if not. It's fine and good to pass a law requiring workplace safety, but it's the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that writes the regulations defining what that specifically means, enforces the consequences laid down in the law. Congress has created and funded all of these agencies, services and administrations, but they are all technically part of the executive branch. This is where is gets a little muddy. Some of these regulatory agencies were set up to be independent, or at least semi-independent, in order to allow them to do their jobs outside of partisan considerations. The president appoints the head of the agency with Senate approval, who usually has a term that includes multiple presidential terms. Most of these agency heads cannot be replaced without cause. The theory of the Unitary Executive rejects that and posits that the president has authority over every aspect of every government department. Trump, latching on to that theory, has eliminated whole departments, fired thousands of employees, cancelled contracts and neutered whole swaths of Congressionally approved programs...unilaterally.
The problem with these unilateral actions isn't whether or not they're good ideas...okay, whether or not they're good ideas is relevant, but not germane to whether they're dictatorial. Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, put these words into the mouth of Sam Vimes, one of my favorite characters.
“If you did it for a good reason, you'd do it for a bad one. You couldn't say 'We're the good guys' and do bad-guy things.”
It doesn't matter if you believe that the Department of Education should be eliminated, or that there's too many people working for the government, or that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs are discriminatory, or if you believe that a trade deficit means we're losing money or tariffs are the best way to balance the budget. It doesn't even matter if Trump is actually right about anything, he is governing by fiat, he is ruling by executive order. What makes it worse is that Congress has abdicated its role out of fear of Trump's ability to end their careers and the Supreme Court has largely acquiesced to his actions. State and local Republicans obey his commands.
We are not becoming a dictatorship, we have been one since January 20, 2025.
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