Trump’s Rule by Fiat Is a Grotesque Continuation, Not an Aberration

U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest defiance of the courts—this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations—has triggered another round of liberal outrage. Critics are calling it an authoritarian move, a blatant assault on the rule of law, and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs.

But if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands.

The central truth we keep missing—especially on the left—is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation. The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades of eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority. Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open.

If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere.

Consider the legal justification Trump has floated for ignoring the courts: The United States is “at war.” Therefore, he claims, wartime powers apply—even domestically, even over immigration courts. To many, this sounds like a dystopian twist. But it’s eerily familiar. Because the same logic has been used, repeatedly, by both Republican and Democratic administrations since 9/11.

After the attacks on the Twin Towers, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gave the executive branch sweeping powers to pursue terrorism around the world. That one document has served as the legal scaffolding for 20-plus years of undeclared wars and covert operations in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

No further congressional approval was needed. The public never had a say. The war powers clause of the Constitution became symbolic—if not obsolete.

Former President Barack Obama inherited that framework and expanded it. His administration developed the now-infamous drone kill list, justified targeted assassinations (including of U.S. citizens), and defended the government’s right to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects without trial. Obama didn’t officially suspend habeas corpus, but in practice, he upheld a system that made the writ meaningless for hundreds of detainees held at Bagram and Guantánamo. The position of his Department of Justice was clear: The executive has the authority to detain and kill, beyond judicial oversight, because we are at war.

This is the true bipartisan legacy that paved the way for Trump. The removal of checks and balances didn’t happen overnight. It was built incrementally, piece by piece, under the banner of national security—with the cooperation and silence of the same liberal establishment that now acts scandalized by Trump’s every defiance.

It’s worth asking: Why wasn’t there more pearl clutching when the executive branch was unilaterally deciding who lived or died abroad, without congressional debate or judicial process? Why didn’t more alarm bells ring when Democrats joined Republicans in handing over war-making powers and then refused to take them back? Why was it acceptable to rule by emergency decree when the emergency was foreign—but suddenly unacceptable when the same logic is turned inward?

Trump is now openly talking about “eradicating” the Houthis in Yemen—an aggressive military escalation that directly contradicts the MAGA-era promise of no new foreign wars. So much for populist anti-interventionism. In lockstep with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, Trump appears eager to resume the forever war posture. And once again, no one’s talking about congressional approval.

This is the cycle we’re caught in. Trump exposes the tools others helped create. He strips them of their moral veneer, revealing the ugly core. And rather than confront the system itself, liberals point at Trump as a singular villain—as if everything was working just fine before he came along.

The truth is harder to face: If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere. We need to reckon with the fact that our democracy has been undermined from within—by both parties, for years. We need to challenge not just the man, but the machine.

And that’s something the Democratic Party, in its current corporate and security-state-aligned form, seems unwilling—or unable—to do. It would require renouncing its own legacy, from the Clinton-era crime bill to Obama-era surveillance and drone wars. It would require fundamentally rethinking how power is distributed in this country, and how easily it can be abused.

Until that happens, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next Trump defies the next court order. We shouldn’t act shocked when the language of war is used to suspend due process. We shouldn’t cling to the fantasy that our institutions will save us, when those institutions have been hollowed out by decades of bipartisan compromise.

Trump didn’t break democracy. He just took the mask off.