Jake Grumbach, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, and author of the forthcoming book laboratories against democracy, joined Democracy Works to examine some of the myths surrounding federalism and state politics.
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Workers hang a large photo of President Donald Trump next to a U.S. flag on the facade of the Department of Labor headquarters building in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 27, 2025.
For many, the evidence is in: Donald Trump wants to be an autocrat. If you haven’t read an op-ed or heard a radio, TV or podcast commentator make that case, it’s probably because you’ve tried hard to avoid doing so. It would require virtually never watching cable news, including pro-Trump outlets, because there are few things Fox News and its imitators love more than running clips of MSNBC hosts and other “resistance” types, not to mention Democratic politicians, melting down over Trump’s “war on democracy,” “authoritarian power-grabs,” etc.
Move further to the right, and you’ll find populists who want Trump to be an autocrat. They use terms like “Red Caesarism,” or “neomonarchism,” while others pine for an American Pinochet or Francisco Franco or compare Trump to biblical figures like the Persian King Cyrus or ancient Israel’s King David. I can’t really blame anyone for taking these pathetic Bonapartists at their word.
In fairness, Trump recently said “I’m not a dictator.” Though he did add that as president he can do “whatever I want.” Still, I know it’s a lot to ask, but let’s put aside the question of whether Trump actually wants to be a dictator.
There’s a lesser charge that is much easier to prove. Trump very much wants people to talk about him like he’s a dictator. Whether it’s cosplaying, trolling or something more sinister, his posturing is a surefire way to guarantee that people will talk about him and his strength because his detractors and defenders alike cannot resist it.
For instance, consider Trump’s executive order “banning” flag-burning. Friendly media covered it as an authentic ban and so did hostile media. The Associated Press headline blared, “Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it.” Fans cheered sticking it to the hippies, foes fretted about yet another violation of the Constitution by executive fiat.
But if you actually read the executive order, it’s not a ban. It’s almost entirely vaporous twaddle. It flatly says that the Justice Department should prosecute flag burning to “the maximum extent permitted by the Constitution” and state laws. It doesn’t criminalize flag burning because the president can’t do that.
The order has several possible purposes. Trump hopes friends and foes alike will believe he’s banned flag burning when he hasn’t. Strength! I suspect he also hopes this will goad protesters into burning the flag, giving him greater political pretext to use the National Guard to crush the longhairs.
Last week, a federal court — rightly — ruled that Trump exceeded his authority to levy some of his sweeping tariffs. In response, Trump claimed that, “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America” and “our military would be instantly obliterated.”
Now this is obvious nonsense. But if Trump believed it, there’s a very easy remedy at his disposal. He could simply ask the unprecedentedly pliant and obsequious Republican-controlled Congress to impose the tariffs he wants, thus saving the country from total destruction.
For the same reason the court vacated his tariffs — that power belongs to Congress — they would undoubtedly uphold them if Congress ratified them.
But Trump’s shown no interest in doing that. Why? Because then they wouldn’t be his tariffs anymore. Asking Congress for permission looks weak. It underscores the bedrock constitutional principle that American presidents aren’t autocrats, a principle he doesn’t want to seem beholden to.
Politically (and characterologically), this preference for the appearance of strength is perhaps Trump’s greatest weakness, because it prevents him from actually having a much longer-lasting impact. All of the executive orders — some good, some not — that his superfans think demonstrate his strength and dominance have a shelf life that ends with the next president. If he truly wanted to lay the foundation for a new “golden age” he’d be pestering Speaker Mike Johnson to put them all on the law books. But that would come at the price of looking weak in his mind.
Trump’s power grabs are not as unprecedented as his amen corner or his chorus of Cassandras believe. FDR and Woodrow Wilson declared war on constitutional and democratic “norms” arguably as often as Trump did. Nixon was no piker either.
But what does make Trump different is his desire to brag about it. Traditionally presidents seek to assure the public they are careful stewards of their constitutional oath.
Even if I’m right, none of this settles the issue of where all of this is heading. One of the consequences of pretending to be something is that, after a while, you’ll come to believe it yourself. Worse, a lot of Americans might decide they desire the fiction to become fact.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
What Makes Trump’s Power Grab Different? was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is republished with permission.
In a moment of bipartisan celebration, the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) will honor the winners of its 2025 Democracy Awards, spotlighting congressional offices that exemplify outstanding public service, operational excellence, and innovation in governance.
The ceremony, scheduled for this Thursday, September 18, 2025, in Washington, D.C., will recognize both Republican and Democratic offices across multiple categories, reinforcing the idea that excellence in Congress transcends party lines.
“These offices demonstrate that excellence in public service is not only possible, it is already happening,” said CMF CEO Jen Daulby. “These winners remind us of what Congress can be at its best”.
Among the categories and winners are:
Best in Bipartisan Engagement & Collaboration
These offices demonstrated that meaningful progress is possible through cross-party cooperation.
Best in Innovation & Modernization
Honored for implementing groundbreaking strategies that improved efficiency and responsiveness.
The full list of the 2025 Democracy Awards winners can be found on the CMF website.
The Democracy Awards are more than accolades—they’re a blueprint for what effective, citizen-centered governance can look like. Offices self-nominate and undergo a rigorous evaluation process, culminating in selection by an independent committee.
The Bridge Alliance Education Fund, which funds the Fulcrum, is a co-founder of CMF.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
The Washington Monument is visible as armed members of the National Guard patrol the National Mall on August 27, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Almost fifty years ago, the film Apocalypse Now showed Americans the horrors and damage done when the military is used for immoral purposes. It highlighted the sheer destructiveness and lethality of American military power during the Vietnam War.
Talking about the movie in 2019, the film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, worried that its “stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people” would “rev up people to be warlike.” And he acknowledged that Apocalypse Now served to “glorify war.”
Glorifying violence and “rev(ing) up people to be warlike” may be why, on Saturday, President Trump posted to Truth Social a meme showing him as the starring figure in a film, “Chipocalypse Now.” Above that image, he wrote “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” echoing what the actor Robert Duvall said in Coppola’s movie, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
And if that wasn’t enough to get the president’s message through, he added, “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR,” accompanied by three helicopter emojis, reminiscent of the helicopters attacking Vietnamese villages in Apocalypse Now.
Politico rightly said that it was “among the president’s most aggressive language targeting an American city.” In Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., the president presented himself as a peacemaker, using the military to restore order in disorderly places.
No more. And while the day after his Truth Social post, he insisted he was “not going to war” on Chicago, a president imagining the possibility of using the American military to make war on an American city is an American nightmare.
It should be an unthinkable thought. Trump had that thought because Illinois Governor JB Pritzker refuses to bend his knee to the president.
Trump’s fantasy, if it was that, would undo two hundred and fifty years of military history in this country.
It threatens to turn our military from one of the most respected institutions in the United States to one that, if Trump has his way, will be feared and reviled by the very people it is supposed to serve and protect. And as Paul Rieckhoff, Founder & CEO of Independent Veterans of America, put it in an appearance on Friday night on MSNBC, “Among all the chaos and drama, I think this is the most important story in America and maybe in the world.”
Rieckhoff explained that Trump has focused particular attention on bringing the Pentagon to heel because “that’s where all the power is.” That’s why he appointed Pete Hegseth to lead it and purged some of the military’s top brass.
Renaming the Department of Defense into the Department of War, and using military might as an expression of Trump’s power, Rieckhoff continued, resonates with so-called bro culture and appeals to many young men who are not “going to Harvard.”
The prospect of using soldiers to make war on an American city recalls the way British troops were used before the Revolutionary War. Substantial garrisons of redcoats were stationed in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
In the latter place, they even fired on and killed civilians. Elsewhere, their mere presence terrorized the colonists.
That is why, prominent in the list of grievances against the British King that were elaborated in the Declaration of Independence were the following: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures….protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”
Not surprisingly, the people who wrote the Constitution were deeply suspicious of standing armies, seeing them as a threat to the liberty and well-being of the American people. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton warned, as if anticipating Trump’s war on immigrants, “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.”
The “alarm attendant on a state of continual danger,” Hamilton observed, “will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights…. The military state becomes elevated above the civil.”
That is what is unfolding in Trump’s America.
In the past, the fear that a military state would threaten liberty led Congress to pass laws forbidding or limiting the use of the military in the United States itself. But more importantly, the idea that the military should serve the people has informed the ethos of the military itself.
From time to time, that ethos has broken down, but not often and not for long. When it has, it has given way to the imperatives of wartime.
Think of Union General William T. Sherman's burning of Atlanta during the Civil War or the military’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
A decade after the internment, President Dwight Eisenhower, a former general himself, used his farewell address to warn of the rise of what he called “a military-industrial complex.” He urged his listeners “to comprehend its grave implications… (and) potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power…”
Misplaced power could be a slogan for President Trump’s administration and especially his vision of the role of the military in American life. Recall his tendency to refer to military leaders as “my generals” and his statement, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
But why is the prospect of using his generals to make war on Chicago now so appealing to the president?
It would be a way of making Governor Pritzker pay for refusing to play nice.
He has stood up to Trump, repeatedly calling him out as a “wannabe dictator.” And months ago, he used his State of the State address to sound the alarm, comparing what is happening in this country to what happened in Nazi Germany.
At that time, he said, “I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately… Here’s what I’ve learned—the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed—a seed of distrust and hate and blame…I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. “
“It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes,” he noted, “to dismantle a constitutional republic….After we’ve discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women, and the minorities—once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends—After that,” Pritzker asked, “What comes next?”
The president’s ominous warning that “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR” offers an answer to Pritzker's question. That answer should alarm all Americans and the military who would be used to turn the president’s fantasy into a reality.
Writing in 1944, in the wake of the internment of Japanese Americans, Supreme Justice Robert Jackson echoed the Founding Fathers when he noted that “the existence of a military power resting on force, so vagrant, so centralized, so necessarily heedless of the individual, is an inherent threat to liberty.” He warned that the courts could only do so much to control that power.
“If the people,” he said, “ever let command of the war power fall into irresponsible and unscrupulous hands, the courts wield no power equal to its restraint.” That’s why it is on all of us to help stop our “irresponsible and unscrupulous” leader from using the military to burn down the Republic.
Governor Pritzker got it right when he concluded in his State of the State address with this admonition: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity… and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to the media while signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on September 05, 2025 in Washington, DC.
In the theater of American politics, promises are political capital. Most politicians make promises cautiously, knowing that if they fail to fulfill them, they will be held accountable
But Donald Trump has rewritten the script. He repeatedly offers sweeping vows, yet the results often don't follow; somehow, he escapes the day of reckoning.
How can that be?
Examples are abundant. From pledging to end the war in Ukraine "before taking office" to claiming he alone could denuclearize North Korea. And what is particularly unique is that Trump's declarations are rarely modest. Yet for some inexplicable reason, when his outcomes fail or when summits stall, walls remain unfunded, or health care reform collapses, he magically pivots, reframes, or moves on.
Through 12 years of Donald Trump, the spectacle continues, uninterrupted and many of us drown unfulfilled promises. The outrage and emotional venting flood the media, but strategic analysis is what the moment demands.
First, let's face the facts. Trump's actions are not just political bravado. His actions are a strategic recalibration of how promises function in public life that the opposition has not fully come to terms with.
With respect to the political calculus, it is essential to understand that Trump's supporters often don't measure him by policy outcomes, but rather by his emotional resonance. Those who voted for him didn’t do so just to see him manage effectively; he's a symbol of defiance, dominance, and disruption and as such results sometimes fall by the wayside. In this frame, broken promises aren't failures; they're part of the process of fighting "the swamp."
Donald Trump is a cult figure and thus success is measured by different standards.
Additionally, Trump's understanding of media saturation plays to his advantage. Trump floods the daily news cycle with constant messaging, burying yesterday's unmet pledge under today's provocation. The news cycle rarely lingers long enough for sustained accountability. And in a fragmented media landscape, tribal loyalty often trumps factual scrutiny. This all plays into the chaos theory that I have previously written about in the Fulcrum.
The ultimate cost to our democratic republic remains to be seen. When symbolic politics eclipse substantive governance, public trust erodes. Ultimately will the electorate care? Traditional theory suggests that success in politics is dependent on fulfilling promises and that words matter, and leaders are accountable to them. If that expectation collapses, we risk replacing deliberation with performance and policy with personality.
Will this traditional theory of accountability collapse under the weight of Trump's theatre? For the short term, it has, but the long-term ability for Trump to avoid accountability remains unclear. Historically, Americans tend to separate charisma from competence and when they do they demand accountability.
Of course, I might be old-fashioned in my thinking, believing that honest politics matters. Yet it is my faith in the American people that gives me hope anchored by civic awareness, a diligent media, and just basic common sense.
Whether I am a blind optimist or a fool will be apparent within the next three and a half years.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
