If one were to design a path to authoritarian rule, it would be what we have seen in the first weeks of the Trump administration. For my book “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” I studied how democracies die and are replaced by authoritarian regimes. Almost always the rulers are elected rather than coming to power through a coup, and then they consolidate authority and silence their critics.
Where are we on the path?
Checks and balances are being destroyed
The quintessential legislative power is control over the purse. But President Donald Trump and those around him have asserted that he can control that by refusing to spend money appropriated by federal statute. The newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, at his confirmation hearings, was explicit that the president could refuse to spend funds notwithstanding a federal law — the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 — that prohibits this.
And the president already has done this on a large scale, by signing an executive order freezing a massive amount of federal expenditures ( enjoined by two federal courts ), and by all but eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was created and funded by federal statutes.