Coping with the imperial presidency

In my local diner the other day, two college students were sitting next to me talking about the 2028 presidential elections. They weighed and measured each potential candidate – Vance, Newsom, Cuomo, Ocasio-Cortez, Buttigieg, etc. – with bright, well-reasoned arguments, for all the world sounding as if it would be like any other election of the past.

I was outraged: Don’t they know we’re facing the potential end of American democracy? Then I caught myself: They’re just trying to cope. What’s going on now is not only outside their experience but also beyond their imagination. If they had to face the damage that Trump is causing all around the world, they’d be shocked beyond words – and words are all that college students really have.1

Americans are trying to find ways to cope. A therapist-friend tells me that her patients are all expressing their fear, disorientation and depression under Trump 2.0. Grown-up children of parents like me are considering taking foreign citizenship or moving to Canada: both my kids have Danish passports and are giving expatriation serious thought.

On both ends of the political spectrum, people – at least those who can bear to follow the daily news – are numb. Even Trump supporters can’t quite believe what they’re seeing. In interviews I’ve heard and seen on the media, they seem hyped-up, uneasy, a little dazed; they didn’t think he could go this far this fast. And though there is some pushback from both Democratic and Republican voters, the Democratic party is in disarray. Their support of Trump’s spending bill robbed them of their major bargaining tool – the power of the purse – and now their long-term Senate leader Chuck Schumer is in danger of being deposed.

Before one tries to find substantive ways to react against Trump’s ‘new order’, the more immediate question is how to grapple with the turbulent feelings we’re experiencing every day – especially how vulnerable we feel. No matter what coping mechanisms we use, sooner or later we have to confront the emotional shock of the Trump presidency – those aspects of his agenda that keep us in a state of constant anxiety and evoke scenarios of a nightmarish future.

The joy of destruction

Two days after Trump’s inauguration, I went into hospital for an emergency procedure. Fortunately, I’m now on the mend. But whether I should attribute my increased emotional rawness to the medical incident or to the weird synchronicity between my body and the Body Politic, I can’t say. All I know is that I’m walking around with my head buzzing, and a heightened sense of danger and doom.

What has stood out the most for me in the past two months is the chilling joy that Trump and his minions have shown as they set about dismantling the federal government, making it more and more dysfunctional.

One can view their actions as a consolidation of executive power unequalled in US history – though in many ways it is modelled on the two terms of Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favourite predecessor.2 Elon Musk and the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) argue that their purges are streamlining the government, but slapdash recklessness has thus far only created chaos, thousands of unemployed bureaucrats and the spectre of major slowdowns in government agencies. There’s also Trump’s flawed rationale for privatizing sections of the government like the Post Office and Medicare, which nonetheless doesn’t account for the randomness of firings and lockouts of agencies like USAID that have saved millions of lives.

The truth is that for the past two months we’ve been watching sadists at work. The chainsaw Elon Musk brandished at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February is the operative metaphor, menacingly reminiscent of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other Trump operatives look a bit like diabolical teenagers; behind their poker-faces flickers a look of sheer delight, combined with a sly awareness of newfound power.

It feels like there’s a difference, however, between the motives of Trump’s henchmen and that of his own. The president’s demeanour is vindictive and retaliatory. It’s as if, party to his psyche, we’re watching him act out old, unresolved resentment. His behaviour toward judges is particularly troubling; his past is littered with court decisions that went against him and ugly denouncements of presiding judges. The president’s tight-lipped sarcasm and petulant expression are those of a hurt boy.

Faith in Congress, Judiciary or People

Depending on whom you read, the US is either fast approaching or has already arrived at a constitutional crisis. The Trump administration has only minimally complied with a fraction of over 60 court orders, and even usually taciturn Chief Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court is growing impatient.

Apart from an obscure paragraph in the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution, experts agree that there are three safeguards against the executive seizing absolute power: the Congress, the Judiciary, and the People. And the prospects of all three are less than encouraging.

After the Kennedy assassination in 1963, Congress ratified the 25^th Amendment to address the possibility of a president dying or becoming incapacitated in office. Paragraph 4 of that Amendment requires that to replace a president ‘unable to discharge the duties of the office’, a majority of his cabinet and two-thirds of the Congress must declare him unfit to continue. Trump has been so good at finding loyalists willing to overlook his peculiarities that it seems highly unlikely a hand-picked cabinet and a Republican Congressional majority in both houses would turn against him.

Congress has the power to impeach. But Trump, who has already been impeached twice, is still standing. Now that Republicans control both Houses, they seem to take pleasure in ceding power to the executive. So, impeachment is even more unlikely.

The courts have two issues limiting their power. The right of ‘judicial review’ – the authority to decide whether the president has or hasn’t complied with a law – has been debated for virtually as long as the Constitution has existed; the question still hasn’t been resolved in over 200 years. And even if the Supreme Court does find the president in defiance of the law, without Congress and/or the military to back it up, the judiciary is virtually impotent.

Which leaves the People. Their most obvious weapon is the vote. This November two gubernatorial elections – New Jersey and Virginia, both potentially swing states – and some state legislative elections may give us a sense of which way the electorate is leaning. But, whichever way these votes go, the outcomes will have little to do with the power of the federal government.

In 2026 the entire House of Representatives plus a third of the Senate will stand for re-election. Will the Republicans intimidate Democratic donors and candidates the way they intimidate judges? Will Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg-owned media mute voices on the Left? Will the results of the elections be tabulated and reported honestly? Will losing Republicans refuse to step down? These are all real possibilities. No doubt there are plenty more.

Thus far, street protests against Trump have been anaemic, though a brief speaking-tour of western cities by Bernie Sanders and AOC has started to stir up the pot. Boycotts of Trump-supporting corporations haven’t been particularly successful. I’ve heard that students are training in martial arts for future conflicts with police or the National Guard, but so far these are mere rumours. The anti-war movement in the 1960s and 70s was effective in standing up against Lyndon Johnson3 – but Johnson was a lot more benign than Trump. Could street protests grow into a national movement?

In many ways, we do seem to be a hair’s breadth away from a dictatorship.

Illusion of democracy

Here is where personal emotions and nightmare scenarios re-enter the picture. Fears about the future of America and grief over institutions decimated by Trump no doubt account for the vulnerability that many of us are feeling. Virtually every age group, region and profession has something to worry about: will I lose my social security? Will my kids’ student loans be called in? Will excessive tariffs cause a recession?

And there are the more far-reaching fears. Pundits like Timothy Snyder, author of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America, and Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, alerted us to the possibilities of an imperial Trump presidency, and now many are troubled by similar visions. So, what would a Trump dictatorship look like?

To my mind – and, hopefully, this is all just febrile fantasizing – Trump’s autocracy would be rather different from those in China and Russia. While the Chinese use surveillance and Putin a combination of national passivity, religiosity and an odd acceptance of suffering, Trump, the businessman, has already indicated that his dictatorship would operate under a mixture of cronyism, public bullying and mostly the threat of withholding money and influence – in short, making use of America’s obsession with money.

The pressure is already on. Universities are being threatened to comply with Trump’s directives or lose their federal research grants. Recently, New York’s prestigious Columbia University agreed to allow, among other measures, an outside administrator to run its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, thus endangering the principles of academic freedom.4

Law firms are also caving in to Trump’s demands. Paul Weiss, one of the country’s largest firms, agreed to do US$40 million worth of pro bono work for the administration in exchange for security clearances so that its associates can enter federal buildings. There is a kind of cruel whimsy to this quid pro quo: Paul Weiss, a largely Jewish, liberal-leaning law firm, agreed to enforce decrees against antisemitism that may grate against its own principles of free speech. One can’t help thinking of Roman emperors in bad Hollywood films dreaming up decrees expressly meant to confuse and denigrate their enemies.

The comparison to Rome may not be so far-fetched. Trump has been talking about redesigning federal buildings in Neo-Classical style, thus directly referencing Rome as well as Hitler’s projected plans for Nazi Germany. His sale of ‘gold cards’ to rich foreigners – which has apparently already reached 1,000 – recalls Rome’s penchant for winning over rival leaders by offering them Roman citizenship. In this scenario, Congress will – if it hasn’t already – become as compliant as Rome’s legislative assemblies, rubberstamping the consuls’ re-elections year after year to maintain the illusion if not the substance of democracy. Indeed, prominent Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule devoted an entire 2023 essay to similarities between Roman and US law, declaring that ‘the American President is more like a Roman emperor than many would like to admit, and that fact is legitimized in American law.’ Can one even be sure that J. D. Vance will be Trump’s choice to succeed him in 2028? In true Roman style, isn’t it more likely to be one of Trump’s sons waiting off-stage?

Years ago I heard Slavoj Zizek extolling the virtues of Enlightenment Europe, maintaining that it was the only place left on the planet where one didn’t have to believe in God. Now, it seems, Europe may also become the only place left on the planet with at least some semblances of the democratic state that the US once embodied. Trump’s vindictive dismantling of that state is what keeps me awake at night. When you check the news, keep an eye peeled for Americans in the street. They look like they haven’t slept a wink either.

Written on 24 March 2025, New York.