What Have We Become, My Sweetest Friend?
The American republic is in its death throes. In Donald Trump’s tumultuous second term, a final stage of authoritarian coup is unfolding in plain sight. One by one, the guardrails of democracy have been dismantled – a radicalised Supreme Court green-lighting lawless power grabs, a pliant or vanished Congress abdicating its duties, and militarised agencies enforcing the president’s will with zeal. The past weeks have crystallised this reality. On 23 June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority delivered Trump a major victory by lifting court-ordered restrictions on deporting migrants to third countries, allowing his administration to remove people with virtually no due process. Barely days earlier, Trump unilaterally launched a bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities without congressional approval, igniting a Middle East conflagration that observers warn could spiral into a Third World War. Meanwhile, Congress – the body meant to check executive abuses – has all but disappeared or been neutered, failing to convene meaningfully as the president wages illegal war and rules by decree. All the while, Trump absurdly pursues a Nobel Peace Prize even as he fans the flames of war, and he maintains a brazen pattern of lies about ceasefires, humanitarian policy and his own constitutional authority.
This is not alarmism; it is America’s living nightmare. Trump’s autocratic instincts have now fully mutated into an embrace of fascism, enabled by allies in the judiciary and security apparatus. Constitutional norms lie in tatters. The rule of law has been subverted at every turn, replaced by the rule of one man. What was once a nation of laws has been reduced to a cult of personality buttressed by force. In the urgent, evocative tone of a country on the brink, let us examine how these recent events weave together into a portrait of a lawless regime – a de facto coup against American democracy, years in the making, now reaching its culmination.
Crowned by the Court: He Wears This Crown of Shit
On a summer day in 2024, as war coverage blared across televisions—from artillery flashes in foreign battlefields to breaking news of distant conflicts—another bombshell quietly detonated in Washington, D.C. The United States Supreme Court handed down a ruling that, in one stroke, expanded presidential immunity to unprecedented heights. Unlike the spectacle of tanks and troops abroad, this legal thunderclap received only a fraction of the public’s attention. Yet its impact on American democracy is no less explosive. In a 6–3 decision split along ideological lines, the Court declared that former presidents are immune from prosecution for “official” acts, granting what one justice decried as a “law-free zone around the president”. In effect, the Court placed the president above the law in ways the nation’s founders never intended.
This landmark ruling, coming amid public distraction and fatigue, has profound implications. It undermines the constitutional checks and balances designed to constrain executive power, erodes the rule of law, and edges the United States closer to authoritarianism. “This nation was founded on the principle that there are no kings in America … no one is above the law, not even the president,” President Joe Biden reminded the country, denouncing the decision as “a dangerous precedent”. Biden’s alarm echoed a stark warning from his own campaign: that the Court had effectively handed Donald Trump “the keys to a dictatorship”.
The urgency of these warnings contrasts sharply with the calm on the streets. There were no mass protests or congressional emergency sessions. Many Americans, it seemed, were either unaware of the ruling’s significance or too numbed by years of political turmoil to muster a response. As media outlets fixated on kinetic crises overseas, a constitutional crisis unfolded at home with disturbingly little fanfare. This is the story of how a Supreme Court decision—overshadowed and under-scrutinised—may mark a turning point in America’s democratic backslide.
A Ruling That Rewrites the Constitution
The case, Trump v. United States (2024), arose from Donald Trump’s attempt to derail the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election. Special Counsel Jack Smith had indicted the former president for allegedly conspiring to overturn the election results and inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Trump’s defence was audacious: he claimed absolute immunity from criminal prosecution because, he argued, everything he did while president—even pressuring officials to falsify votes—was within his official duties. Lower courts flatly rejected this claim, emphasising that “the presidency does not confer a lifelong ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ pass”. But on July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority proved more sympathetic. In a sweeping opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court carved out new immunities for the presidency that stunned legal experts and historians alike.
Under the ruling, any action a president takes that falls within the “exclusive sphere” of constitutional authority is absolutely immune from prosecution, even after leaving office. That covers the core powers of the office—things like issuing pardons, vetoing legislation, commanding the military, or appointing officials. For all other official acts “within the outer perimeter” of presidential duties, the Court granted a “presumptive” immunity that prosecutors can overcome only by meeting a virtually impossible standard: proving that a criminal charge “would pose no dangers of intrusion” on the executive branch’s functions. In plain English, the Court erected a high barrier around the Oval Office—a shield against the law for any deed a president can remotely frame as part of the job. There would be, Roberts wrote, “no immunity for unofficial acts” —but as critics noted, defining what is truly unofficial is now murkier than ever. Never before in U.S. history had the Supreme Court so directly insulated a president (former or current) from the reach of criminal law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent with two liberal colleagues, blasted the majority for obliterating a fundamental democratic principle. “The majority thinks [a former President] should [have immunity], and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law,” she wrote. The Constitution’s authors, Sotomayor pointed out, never wrote any such immunity into the nation’s charter. Indeed, the Founders explicitly rejected monarchic impunity: they wanted an “energetic executive,” but one accountable to laws and the people. As the Brennan Center for Justice observed, the Framers concentrated power in a single elected president precisely to ensure responsibility—so the president could not evade blame or punishment by hiding behind subordinates. They certainly did “determine that presidents would have no criminal immunity” for lawbreaking. Yet the Court’s conservative majority brushed aside this history in favour of its own theory of executive power. The result, Sotomayor warned, is a president who “in every use of official power, is now a king above the law”.
The paradox at the heart of the ruling is as absurd as it is alarming. The Court’s opinion pays lip service to the maxim that “the president is not above the law”—then proceeds to ensure that, in many cases, he will be. By the majority’s logic, a president cannot be prosecuted for the “use” of official powers, which in practice means he cannot be prosecuted for even the most flagrant abuse of those powers. The very acts that pose the gravest threat to the republic—those undertaken under colour of presidential authority—are now the hardest to hold accountable. The Court has, in the dissent’s words, “effectively [created] a law-free zone around the president”, upending a constitutional equilibrium that stood since the 18th century. It is a radical reinterpretation of the separation of powers, achieved not by constitutional amendment or democratic debate, but by the fiat of six unelected justices.
Checks and Balances Undermined
American democracy relies on a simple premise: no man is above the law. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling strikes at this premise, forfeiting critical checks on executive power. In the past, a president who abused authority could expect multiple layers of accountability—investigations, potential prosecution after leaving office, and the ultimate safeguard of impeachment by Congress. But today, impeachment is politically dysfunctional (as two failed impeachment trials of Trump demonstrated), and now the Court has closed the door on criminal accountability for a broad range of presidential misconduct. “By inserting this opinion into a world where impeachment is no longer a viable option,” the Brennan Center observed, “the Supreme Court is licensing future presidents to subvert our democracy at will”. In short, the traditional checks and balances are crumbling just when we need them most.
Consider what “absolute immunity” for core presidential acts truly entails. As legal analysts have noted, it effectively establishes an imperial presidency—the very outcome the Founders fought a revolution to avoid. If a president can cloak criminal actions in the mantle of official duty, the possibilities for abuse are staggering. Justice Sotomayor grimly illustrated this in her dissent: “Orders the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organises a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” Under the Court’s doctrine, even murder or treason committed under the guise of an executive command could be beyond the reach of prosecutors. As Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky explained, if a president were to “call out the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political rival,” because it’s done under commander-in-chief powers, “that would be absolute immunity”. It’s a nightmare scenario: a president could unlawfully eliminate opponents or sabotage elections, yet neither courts nor Congress could swiftly check him—short of the next election or a near-impossible impeachment conviction.
Such scenarios sound like the stuff of dark political fiction, but legal experts across the spectrum agree that the Court’s ruling “practically invites future presidents to use the levers of the federal government to commit crimes”. “That’s absurd and intolerable,” the Brennan Center’s analysis concluded bluntly. Even former Attorney General Eric Holder reacted with outrage, warning that a president can now “VIOLATE THE CRIMINAL LAW” so long as he claims to act within a broadly defined constitutional authority—a doctrine Holder called “absurd and dangerous”. The decision, in the words of one law professor, put a “huge thumb on the scale” in favour of presidential power, signalling to all future occupants of the White House that the law will bend around them.
Beyond empowering individual abuses, the ruling also weakens institutional checks that restrain executive overreach. Prosecutors must now navigate a convoluted, three-tier immunity test (absolute, presumptive, or none) that is guaranteed to delay and bog down accountability. The Supreme Court’s opinion explicitly forbids courts from examining a president’s motive when deciding if an act was “official”. This means that even if a president clearly abuses power for personal gain—say, directing the Justice Department to persecute a political rival purely out of vengeance—judges cannot easily strip the act of its “official” label. The line between official and unofficial conduct, already blurry, has been made “almost a nullity,” as Sotomayor observed. By tilting the legal playing field so heavily in favour of the presidency, the Court has made it far harder for the judicial branch (or anyone) to act as a check. Any attempt to prosecute presidential wrongdoing will now devolve into protracted litigation over jurisdiction and definitions, likely stretching beyond a president’s term and perhaps beyond the public’s attention span.
Enabling Authoritarian Tendencies
While the Court cloaked its opinion in legal formalism, its historical significance is plain: this ruling laid a foundation for authoritarianism in America. It dramatically expands the power of the presidency—not just for Trump, but for all who follow. As one analysis put it, the decision “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding”. The immediate beneficiary is Donald Trump, a man who has openly tested the limits of American democracy. The Court’s verdict shielded Trump from full accountability for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, sending prosecutors scrambling to drop or pare back charges and raising the odds that he may never face trial for subverting voters’ will. In the words of one legal scholar, “the Supreme Court has given former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more”. The impunity that Trump enjoys now sets a precedent: a defeated president who schemes to hold onto power can largely escape legal consequences, so long as he can claim he acted under “official duties.” The Court has essentially legalised a scenario of a losing president refusing to step down, as Trump attempted after 2020.
This did not happen in a vacuum. It comes after years in which guardrails have been bending, and norms have been shattering, under the strain of Trump’s norm-defying presidency and the radicalisation of his supporters in politics and on the bench. The Supreme Court itself has been increasingly “Trumpified,” critics argue, its conservative justices seemingly willing “to sacrifice any law or principle to save the former president.” Three of the six justices in the majority were appointed by Trump, and their ruling in Trump v. United States reads at times like a reward to the man who put them on the high court. Chief Justice Roberts took pains to insist that “the President is not above the law,” even as he immunised the president’s most dangerous acts. His opinion often reads as if the Chief Justice were Trump’s defence counsel rather than a neutral arbiter. The outcome, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer acidly noted, “benefits the Court’s preferred presidential candidate” in 2024 while allowing the justices to “live with themselves for defacing beyond recognition the Constitution”. In her dissent, Sotomayor did not mince words about the stakes: she departed from the customary polite closing (“respectfully, I dissent”) to issue a chilling final line — “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”. That rare note of alarm from the bench underscores how momentous and perilous this moment is.
By empowering a would-be strongman and his successors, the Court’s ruling feeds directly into authoritarian tendencies that have been creeping into American governance. Scholars of democratic decline often warn that modern autocrats erode democracy not by dramatic coups, but by gradual, legalistic means—tweaking laws, capturing courts, normalising abuses of power under the veneer of legality. Here, we see exactly that pattern: a judicial decree, draped in constitutional verbiage, which in effect grants the president a license to lawlessness. The Center for American Progress starkly described the decision as creating “a permission structure to morph the presidency…into a dictatorship”. The American President can now commit acts that “sound like the province of a dictatorship” yet claim immunity in the name of official duty. Sell pardons for bribes? Immune. Jail political opponents on trumped-up charges? Likely immune. Even the ultimate abuse—refusing to relinquish power after losing an election—has been effectively green-lit, so long as it’s done under color of law. Trump’s failed coup of January 6 can now be seen less as an aberration and more as a harbinger. The Supreme Court has signaled that next time, a president bent on clinging to office might not need to rely on a violent mob at the Capitol; he can simply use the instruments of government to nullify the people’s verdict, with the confidence that the law will shield him from punishment.
Reactions to the ruling split along predictable lines. Trump and his allies celebrated it as an exoneration, crowing that the Court “handed Donald Trump a big win for our Constitution”. But defenders of the rule of law have been nearly apoplectic. President Biden cautioned that the “power of the presidency will no longer be constrained by the law” if this precedent stands. Law professors, retired judges, and democracy advocates have described the decision as “dangerous”, a “direct threat” to the republic. “Only dictators have immunity from criminal acts while in power,” one commentator observed bluntly, noting that America has now joined those ranks in practice (if not in statute). Around the world, authoritarian leaders and aspiring strongmen must surely be taking note: the United States—long a beacon of the rule of law—has carved out a remarkable exception for its highest office, one that autocracies often reserve for their own rulers. The moral authority of America’s constitutional system, already weakened in recent years, suffers a further blow when the law’s equal application is so starkly compromised.
A Distracted Public and the Slow Creep of Autocracy
Perhaps most haunting is the public’s muted response to this democratic unraveling. Unlike the dramatic street protests seen in other democracies when judicial independence or presidential accountability comes under attack (from Israel to Poland), the United States saw no such mass demonstrations for this court decision. On the morning the ruling was announced, only a modest crowd gathered outside the Supreme Court—an uneasy mix of protesters and tourists, many initially confused about what the complex decision meant. News cameras captured a brief cheer when someone mis-read the outcome as “No immunity!”, and then the crestfallen faces as reality set in that the Court had, in fact, granted Trump much of the immunity he claimed. Within minutes, the celebratory mood turned to one of confusion and anxiety. “Wait a minute, I’m confused… ‘No immunity for unofficial acts’… What does that even mean?” one baffled observer remarked, encapsulating the public’s struggle to grasp the ruling’s implications. A veteran protester outside the Court fumed that America was becoming “the laughingstock of the world” for allowing a would-be autocrat to run for office again with impunity. Another onlooker feared the justices were “clearing the path for a dictatorship”. But these voices of alarm were few, their platform limited to a sidewalk in Washington.
Across the country, the ruling landed with a relative thud. It was competing for attention with relentless media cycles of sensational news: a summer of wildfire smoke and heat waves, overseas wars and humanitarian crises, and the daily circus of campaign trail rhetoric. Major newspapers and networks did report on the Supreme Court’s decision, of course, and opinion pages filled with essays sounding the alarm. Yet the story struggled to penetrate the national consciousness. There were no emergency presidential addresses in prime time beyond Biden’s brief remarks; Congress did not rush to debate any corrective legislation or even censure the Court. America’s collective reaction felt eerily phlegmatic given the gravity of what had occurred. The societal apathy toward this creeping authoritarian shift may itself be a symptom of democratic erosion. After years of chaos and conflict—from the shock of January 6 to a pandemic, from impeachment dramas to economic tumult—many Americans have become desensitised to political outrage. Each new alarm bell risks blending into the background noise.
The contrast between the enormity of the issue and the paucity of public outrage is striking. When a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning abortion rights leaked in 2022, protests erupted nationwide; when the Court actually reversed Roe v. Wade, it dominated headlines for weeks. But the Court fundamentally altering the accountability of the presidency? That garnered nowhere near the same sustained public focus. Why? One reason may be that the concept of “presidential immunity” sounds abstract, a technical legal matter that doesn’t hit home in the way tangible issues like reproductive rights or inflation do. It unfolds in court filings and legal jargon rather than in everyday life—until one day, it may enable a crisis that will very much hit home. Another reason is the fog of partisanship: Trump’s loyal base cheered the ruling as a victory for their side, while many others simply filed it away as yet another Trump-related scandal in a very long list. The fragmentation of media means many Americans heard only filtered, partisan takes—some right-wing outlets painting the decision as a heroic check on “politicised” prosecutions, and some left-wing commentators shouting about impending fascism. The nuance and significance of the moment struggled to break through either narrative. In the meantime, wars abroad and culture wars at home provided flashier headlines to feed the 24-hour news appetite.
The net effect is a kind of democratic drift: a historic expansion of presidential power occurs, the foundations of the Republic shift, and the public response is a collective shrug, a weary acceptance, or at best a split reaction along party lines. It is the classic environment in which liberal democracy can decay—not with one dramatic bang, but with a series of quiet acquiescences. Tyranny rarely announces itself outright; it creeps in when people are too distracted or jaded to guard the ramparts.
The Supreme Court as Enabler of Tyranny
When history chronicles the downfall of American democracy, June 23, 2025 may be remembered as a key date. On that day, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority silently blessed one of the Trump regime’s most draconian policies: the mass deportation of migrants to third countries without meaningful due process. In a brief unsigned emergency order, the Court lifted a lower court’s injunction that had required the government to give migrants notice and a chance to plead for their lives before deporting them to countries where they might face torture or death. The decision split 6–3, with the three liberal justices dissenting in stark, even apocalyptic terms. “Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in far-flung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a district court exceeded its powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are entitled,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a scathing dissent, calling the majority’s action a “gross abuse” that was “incomprehensible as it is inexcusable”.
What exactly did the Supreme Court sanction? Nothing less than the power to deport “anyone anywhere” at will, as Sotomayor noted. The case arose from Trump’s effort to “streamline” removals by sending certain immigrants – even asylum-seekers – to third countries not listed on their removal orders, without the legally required checks for danger. A federal judge had blocked this practice, insisting the government at least verify that deportees wouldn’t be tortured and give them a chance to object. The Trump administration flouted that order repeatedly – at one point trying to send deportees to war-torn South Sudan on a few hours’ notice, until stopped by an outraged judge. Incredibly, when caught violating the court’s instructions, officials simply moved the migrants to a U.S. naval base in Djibouti and even to Guantánamo Bay to circumvent judicial scrutiny. Rather than punish this lawlessness, the Supreme Court rewarded it. By pausing the judge’s injunction, the conservative justices effectively told Trump: go ahead and “remove anyone anywhere”, law be damned. At this article’s writing, no less than 64 US citizens have been deported.
The triumphal response from Trump’s camp laid bare the stakes. “Fire up the deportation planes,” crowed a Department of Homeland Security official after the ruling. A White House spokesperson celebrated that the Court’s decision “reaffirms the President’s authority to remove…aliens…and Make America Safe Again”, pointedly deriding the blocked injunction as the work of a “left-wing” judge. In other words, Trump’s team viewed the Supreme Court as an ally in sweeping aside legal constraints. Indeed, this was just one of several emergency-docket wins they racked up before the Court in recent weeks – from ending humanitarian protections for refugees to dismantling checks on executive power under obscure 18th-century laws. The Court has become a reliable shield for Trumpism. As one commentator noted bitterly, the extreme-right Roberts Court is a “willing partner”, emboldened to enable Trump’s agenda of “discrimination, deportation, and domination” under a veneer of legal legitimacy.
The human cost is staggering. The migrants whose fate sparked this case were terrified of being dumped into violent nations where they have no ties – places like South Sudan, which the U.S. State Department itself warns against travel due to “ongoing armed conflict”. Their lawyers say these people – some of whom had been awaiting deportation only because their home countries refused to take them back – would face “imprisonment, torture and even death” if expelled to such countries. Sotomayor likewise warned that the Court’s green light “exposes thousands to the risk of torture or death”. By removing even the basic requirement of notice and a hearing, Trump has made his Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a terror machine: able to snatch people and ship them off to any corner of the globe on a moment’s notice. This is an outright betrayal of America’s legal principles and moral values – yet it is now the law of the land, courtesy of the Supreme Court. The president is effectively unconstrained by law, free to target whomever he pleases. As one analyst observed, no matter what the Court says, the president is not a king – but Trump now behaves as if he were.
War by Decree: Bombs Without Congress
Simultaneous with Trump’s domestic crackdowns has been his most perilous international adventure: a unilateral descent into war. In mid-June, President Trump ordered a series of illegal airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities – without any declaration of war or authorisation from Congress. In the dead of night on June 21, U.S. B-2 stealth bombers, acting on Trump’s command alone, dropped massive 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow uranium enrichment site, while Israel simultaneously expanded its own bombing campaign against Iran. It was the largest Western military assault on Iran since the 1979 revolution, a drastic escalation that many feared could ignite a regional – even global – conflict. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, missiles flew across the Middle East: Iran retaliated with volleys of ballistic missiles at Israel (flattening buildings in Tel Aviv) and at U.S. forces in the region, while Israel struck targets deep inside Iran. Within hours, multiple nations – from Saudi Arabia to Yemen and Iraq – were being drawn in, airspaces were closed across the Gulf, and commentators around the world openly wondered if “World War III” had begun.
Yet faced with this spiralling crisis of his own making, Trump did not seek unity or counsel – he doubled down on unilateralism and deceit. First, he pointedly bypassed the United States Congress. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the power to declare war or authorise sustained military action. Trump showed utter contempt for this bedrock principle. In fact, he barely even notified Congressional leaders of the Iran strikes. According to lawmakers, the White House gave detailed advance briefings to a few Republican allies – the House Speaker and Senate GOP leader – while Democratic leaders were kept in the dark. The “Gang of Eight” bipartisan leadership, normally consulted on sensitive military operations, was bypassed entirely. One senior congressman said he learned of the bombing on social media, calling it “uncomfortable… and unconstitutional” that the people’s representatives had no opportunity to debate or even be informed of one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions in years. This was war-by-decree, launched as if Congress simply does not exist.
In many ways, Congress has ceased to exist in any meaningful sense under Trump’s reign. At the very moment when missiles began to fly, Congress was effectively AWOL – absent without leave. No emergency session was convened in the wake of the Iran strikes. No immediate votes were held to assert legislative authority or to restrain the president’s rash action. A few outraged members, mostly Democrats, scrambled to respond: Senator Tim Kaine hastily pushed a War Powers Resolution directing the removal of U.S. forces from hostilities against Iran not authorised by Congress. Progressive lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna publicly urged Congress to reconvene and reclaim its role. But the institution as a whole offered little more than a whimper. The Republican majority, intoxicated by Trump’s belligerence, actually praised the President’s moves. House Speaker Mike Johnson and his GOP leadership team quickly defended Trump’s actions, not only abroad but at home – even applauding his decision to deploy thousands of National Guard troops and active-duty Marines onto the streets of Los Angeles to crush immigration protests earlier in the month. Rather than act as a co-equal branch checking an errant executive, today’s Congress either cheers the strongman or simply fades into irrelevance.
The consequences of this abdication are dire. With no legislative oversight, Trump has been free to escalate the Iran conflict on a whim, heedless of the global fallout. After the initial bombardment, he boasted on live television that the strikes were a “spectacular success,” claiming Iran’s nuclear sites were “completely and totally obliterated”. (In reality, independent satellite imagery indicated significant damage but could not fully confirm Trump’s hyperbolic claims ). He then issued mafioso-like threats that if Iran dared respond, “future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier”. All of this without any new authorisation from Congress. Trump and his advisors have argued, absurdly, that decades-old war authorisations or inherent self-defence rights allow his Iran offensive – a position widely rejected by legal scholars and which Congress could contest if it had the spine. Instead, the legislature remains largely on the sidelines, hoping belated War Powers resolutions might rein him in after the fact.
Even more chilling is the strategic nihilism of Trump’s war. His strikes were a gambit of unprecedented risk, throwing the United States directly into an Israel-Iran hot war with no endgame. “The U.S. showed they have no respect for international law. They only understand the language of threat and force,” Iran’s foreign minister said after the bombing, and unfortunately he has a point. By violating another nation’s sovereignty and targeting its infrastructure without provocation, Trump shredded long-standing international norms. He also brought the world to the brink of economic chaos – Iran responded by moving to close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for a quarter of global oil shipments. Global oil prices spiked on cue, and the UN Secretary-General warned that Trump’s actions marked a “perilous turn” that needed to be halted immediately. Yet Trump barrels forward, musing about “regime change” in Tehran on his Truth Social feed (complete with the imperial catchphrase “Make Iran Great Again”). It is hard to imagine a more lawless and destabilising posture – America as rogue superpower, led by a man who sees diplomacy as a show of weakness and violence as first resort.
The Disappearing Congress and the One-Man Regime
The erosion of Congressional authority in both domestic and foreign affairs has reached a terminal stage. In Trump’s Washington, Congress has either been cowed, co-opted, or simply cast aside. The once-robust mechanisms of oversight – subpoenas, hearings, spending leverage – have withered. Part of this collapse is due to Trump’s allies in the legislature, who have systematically undermined any checks on their leader. We see it in the aforementioned rally-round-the-flag response of Republicans to Trump’s Iran adventure; we see it in the GOP’s acquiescence as Trump guts agencies and purges officials who might challenge him. But part of it is also the result of brute force and fear. After the January 6, 2021 insurrection (itself a dress rehearsal for this slow-motion coup), many members of Congress who once opposed Trump have retired, been defeated, or, in the case of some Republicans, made their peace with his dominance. Those who remain in opposition find themselves shouting into the void. When Representative Jim Himes – one of the few briefed after the Iran strikes – complained that it was “unconstitutional” for Trump to take such consequential action without Congress, it barely registered as a blip in the news. Trump simply does not care, and his party does not dare make him care.
Indeed, a striking development of this de facto coup is the physical and psychological absence of Congress during national emergencies. As Trump lurches from crisis to crisis (many of his own making), the sight of lawmakers asserting their prerogatives has become vanishingly rare. The Iran conflict is instructive: rather than immediately convene to deliberate on the onset of war, Congress let Trump set the narrative and terms. By the time any legislative action is considered – such as a symbolic vote on the war’s legality – facts on the ground have already been established by the Commander-in-Chief. Trump’s message to Congress is plain: Try to stop me if you can. And Congress, for the most part, has not tried.
Worse, key Congressional figures are now effectively cheerleaders of Trump’s authoritarian measures. The new House Speaker, installed with Trump’s blessing, dutifully praises the President’s harshest policies. When Trump decided to dispatch armed forces into an American city – deploying active-duty Marines alongside National Guard to “quell” civilian protests over an immigration raid – the Speaker and GOP leaders not only failed to question this extraordinary use of military force on U.S. soil, they held a press conference to defend it. This is the behaviour of a rubber-stamp parliament in an autocracy, not a functional legislature in a democracy. It brings to mind the darkest of historical parallels: legislative bodies that clap for the Dear Leader as he declares emergency powers, rather than challenge him. Trump hasn’t even needed to formally invoke emergency authority (though he likely would if it suited him). He has simply acted – and Congress has either applauded or silently acquiesced.
Yet even when presented with a chance to reassert its authority, Congress flinched. On June 24, 2025, the House voted overwhelmingly—344 to 79—to table an impeachment resolution against Trump for his unauthorised bombing of Iran. Shockingly, 128 Democrats joined Republicans to bury the effort. The move was not born of conviction but of cowardice, rationalised by party leaders as a “distraction” from legislative priorities. Some feared electoral blowback; others dismissed the attempt as symbolic. But in shelving the resolution, Congress didn’t just avoid a fight—it ceded moral ground, signalling to the White House that war without consent, deception without consequence, and death without debate would now go unchallenged.
The resultant power vacuum on Capitol Hill means that, in effect, the United States is being governed by one man. Trump issues orders; the courts (as shown) frequently validate them; the agencies carry them out – and Congress is largely missing in action. This breakdown of checks and balances represents the consummation of Trump’s long campaign to usurp authority. As a candidate, he infamously mused about wanting to “terminate” parts of the Constitution that inconvenience him. As President, he has done everything in his power to make that fantasy a reality, from ignoring subpoenas and court orders to impounding funds contrary to Congress’s statutes. In a telling remark earlier in his reign, Trump gloated: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” That shocking declaration – effectively a claim to absolute power – was widely condemned at the time. But today, it reads like an accurate description of how Trump governs. With Article I (Congress) effectively sidelined, and Article III (the judiciary) largely co-opted, Article II’s vision of executive power has been twisted into a dictator’s charter. “For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law,” one observer presciently warned of a second Trump term. We are now living that reality: the rule of law is in shambles, and the rule of Trump is ascendant.
Nobel Dreams and Violent Delusions
Amid this democratic collapse, Donald Trump continues to spin an alternate reality in which he is not a tyrant but a saviour – even a man of peace. Perhaps nothing illustrates the delusional hypocrisy of the Trump regime better than the saga of the Nobel Peace Prize. Astonishingly, in the very same weekend that Trump plunged the Middle East into war, he and his boosters were patting themselves on the back as peacemakers. On Saturday, June 21, as bombs fell on Iran, the government of Pakistan issued an effusive public recommendation that Trump receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his “decisive diplomatic intervention” in defusing a recent India–Pakistan crisis. Trump had helped mediate a ceasefire between the two nuclear-armed rivals after a terror incident in Kashmir – a genuine diplomatic achievement, for which Islamabad gushed that Trump’s “pivotal leadership” merited the world’s highest peace honour. Never shy about trumpeting his supposed triumphs, Trump basked in the praise and, according to aides, took it as vindication that he deserves the Nobel Prize his predecessor won.
But within 24 hours, reality intervened in brutal fashion. On Sunday, after news broke of Trump’s unilateral Iran attack, Pakistan’s government angrily condemned Trump’s bombing campaign, calling it a “serious violation of international law” and of the very nuclear agreements the world was trying to uphold. The Pakistani Prime Minister phoned Iran’s leadership to express outrage that Trump had struck facilities under international safeguards, branding the move destabilising and dangerous. In other words, one day Trump was being lauded for peace; the next, he was being denounced for recklessly courting war. The irony would be darkly comic if it weren’t so deadly serious. This President’s hunger for accolades – his craving to wrap himself in the mantle of a Nobel laureate – coincides with an insatiable appetite for conflict and domination. He wants the praise without the principles, the glory without the responsibility.
Trump himself seems unable to perceive the contradiction. In fact, he has redoubled his bizarre Nobel obsession even as the wars rage. On social media and at rallies, Trump rails that “Obama got a Nobel Prize for doing nothing!” and that “if I get peace, I deserve it twice over.” According to White House insiders, Trump saw Pakistan’s nomination as proof that his strategy of maximal aggression was working – in his mind, bombing Iran hastened a peace deal, so why shouldn’t he get a Prize for making the “12 Day War” (as he grandiosely dubbed the Iran-Israel conflict) stop at 12 days? The President even announced (prematurely) that Iran and Israel had agreed to a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE,” presenting it as the fruits of his bold gambit. This claim turned out to be shaky – Iran’s foreign ministry said no formal agreement was in place and indeed Iran launched more missiles later that night. But Trump never lets facts get in the way of self-congratulation. He promptly took credit for ending a war that, in truth, he helped ignite. At a NATO summit the next day, Trump preened that his mix of “aggression and diplomacy” had succeeded, boasting that Israel and Iran had supposedly both come to him saying “PEACE!”. To underscore the theatrics, the White House posted a photo of Trump brandishing a hat emblazoned with the words “Trump was right about everything”.
It is difficult to overstate the cynicism and insanity of this spectacle. A President who is actively inciting war – violating international law, killing hundreds (if not thousands) through airstrikes, and pushing the region to the brink – simultaneously casts himself as a heroic peacemaker deserving the Nobel Prize. This is beyond gaslighting; it is a kind of upside-down Orwellian propaganda. Trump’s supporters echo it fervently: state media and sycophantic lawmakers hail him as the strong leader who brought Iran to its knees and “achieved peace.” In reality, any ceasefire (if it truly takes hold) will be fragile and born out of exhaustion and global pressure – despite Trump’s actions, not solely because of them. But truth matters little in this regime. What matters is the narrative of Trump’s infallibility. He must be victorious in all things: the winner of wars and the winner of peace prizes. The end result is a grotesque moral inversion. America is now led by a man who bombs and talks of medals in the same breath, who destroys and calls it salvation. This disconnect from reality is a hallmark of authoritarianism, where the “dear leader” claims every virtue even as he perpetrates every vice. The first president to utter “fuck” in an interview.
Upon the Liar’s Chair
Central to the solidification of Trump’s one-man rule is an ecosystem of lies so pervasive that it shrouds the nation in a fog of unreality. This President lies habitually, pathologically, and with impunity. But these are not the petty lies of a politician exaggerating crowd sizes; they are foundational lies that warp policy and endanger lives. In recent weeks we have seen a torrent of falsehoods on the most grave matters of state – ceasefires, refugee protections, constitutional authority – all aimed at furthering Trump’s power and deflecting accountability.
Start with the ceasefire lie. As noted, Trump proudly declared that Iran and Israel had agreed to stop fighting, touting this as a personal achievement. But within hours of his pronouncement, it became clear this was, at best, an exaggeration and at worst, a fabrication. Iran conditioned its halt on Israel stopping airstrikes by a certain hour – and when that hour passed, Iran fired more missiles, killing Israelis even after Trump’s supposed “deal”. The Israeli government, for its part, never confirmed any ceasefire on the terms Trump described. By all indications, Trump’s announcement was premature, based on wishful thinking or miscommunication. Yet he persisted in selling it as a grand success, even reprimanding media who questioned the details. This is a familiar Trumpian pattern: claim victory where there is none, and rely on loyal propagandists to reinforce the claim. It is the same strategy he used domestically – for instance, insisting the 2020 election was stolen, or that COVID was “totally under control” – now applied to matters of war and peace. The danger is obvious: when the Commander-in-Chief lies about whether a war is ongoing or not, it sows confusion among allies and citizens alike, and erodes any remaining trust in American leadership. But from Trump’s perspective, truth is expendable if the lie serves his image. By positioning himself as the author of a (illusory) ceasefire, he sought to blunt criticism of his war gamble and cast himself as the indispensable dealmaker.
Then there are the lies about refugees and human rights that buttress Trump’s harsh policies. As he accelerates mass deportations and virtually eliminates asylum, Trump insists that he is actually protecting refugees – just “not here.” His administration cynically argues that sending migrants to third countries is somehow for their own good, or at least legally compliant. After the Supreme Court cleared the way for third-country removals, officials claimed their process “already complied with due process” and that only “criminal aliens” with “heinous crimes” would be affected. This is profoundly misleading. In truth, the policy would have swept up a broad class of immigrants (including torture survivors and vulnerable families) and dumped them into danger without proper screenings. It was blocked precisely because it violated due process and U.S. law, until Trump’s allies on the high court intervened. The claim that all deportees are violent criminals is likewise a gross exaggeration; many had simply overstayed visas or were trapped in immigration limbo. By lying about the nature of those being deported, Trump seeks to forestall public sympathy and paint his cruelty as security. We have seen this tactic repeatedly: refugees demonised as threats, even as America betrays its tradition of shelter. Now, with the Court’s blessing, Trump has free rein. Planes are already departing, filled with people who had no chance to plead their case. To call this “swift justice” as the administration does is an Orwellian perversion. It is swift injustice – and it relies on the American people accepting a lie that those sent away deserve their fate.
Most insidiously, Trump lies about the Constitution itself and his own powers under it. His entire coup has been predicated on convincing enough of the public (and enough officials) that the President can do virtually anything. He has openly claimed a mandate to, for example, ignore parts of the Constitution that obstruct him – tweeting that perhaps we should “terminate” constitutional provisions to redo an election he lost. While such brazen statements still shock, what’s more dangerous are the subtle institutional lies. Consider how Trump justified freezing congressionally appropriated funds or defying subpoenas: he asserted an “unitary executive” theory that as head of the executive branch, he can control or disregard all its functions at will. Early this year, his lawyers floated arguments that even if Congress makes a law, Trump can choose not to enforce it if he believes his electoral mandate allows otherwise. These arguments, once fringe, have found sympathetic ears in the courts and right-wing media. Trump endlessly repeats that “the people chose me to do whatever I have to do”. It’s a lie – the Constitution explicitly limits presidential power – but with enough repetition, and with a cowed Congress failing to push back, the lie starts to solidify into practice. We now effectively have a president who acts as though he is above the law. As one legal expert observed, Trump behaves as if winning an election (even without the popular vote) gives him a personal mandate to break laws and ignore institutions at whim. And distressingly, a segment of the population, primed by propaganda, agrees. This is how democracies die: not just through force, but through the slow poison of unchallenged lies that corrode the very idea of truth and law.
The One-Man State Can Not Repair
America as we knew it is gone. In its place stands an autocratic regime masquerading as a constitutional government. The facade grows thinner by the day. Donald Trump has effectively completed a coup against the Constitution, not by a single dramatic stroke but by a steady accumulation of power and demolition of norms. The events of these past weeks are the capstone of that process. A Supreme Court captured by ideologues now rubber-stamps the executive’s most extreme whims, whether banning books or banishing refugees. A Congress weakened by partisanship and fear now scarcely lifts a finger as the President commits acts of war and tyranny. Federal agencies, from the Justice Department to Homeland Security, have been weaponised and militarised – transformed into instruments of Trump’s personal will rather than impartial arms of the law. The result is a one-man state: all authority flowing from the man at the top, virtually no accountability beneath.
This is fascism in practice, even if it avoids some of the old symbols. It is a fascism draped in the American flag, carried forward by men in suits and robes as much as by men in uniforms. But the pattern is unmistakable. We have a leader who claims to be the sole voice of the nation – “I alone can fix it,” Trump declared years ago, and now he governs by that mantra. We have a regime that openly seeks to crush opposition, whether it’s refugees at the border, protesters in the streets, or political opponents in Congress. We have state propaganda in the form of obedient media amplifying the leader’s lies and punishing his critics. We have minority rule entrenching itself – through court decisions, voter suppression, and demagogic appeals – while the majority of Americans who oppose this descent are rendered increasingly powerless. And underpinning it all, we have the erosion of law: as Sotomayor warned, each time the Court rewards Trump’s defiance of court orders, it “further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.” That erosion is now at an advanced stage. The law is not dead – but it is on its knees, and the regime is poised to deliver the finishing blow.
If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the voices of those who have been sounding the alarm. Constitutional scholars and democracy experts have for years cautioned that Trump’s return to power would precipitate a “collapse of American democracy”, unless the system rallied to constrain him. That rally did not happen. Instead, America shrugged – and now America bleeds. Even some who once defended Trump as an acceptable norm-breaker have fallen silent as his “subversive legal maneuvers” proliferate. The guardrails that remained (a few brave judges, a few principled Republicans) have proved too feeble to stop the onslaught. The January 6 insurrection failed to overturn an election, but the mindset behind it – the will to power at all costs – never went away. It simply migrated into the highest levels of government.
What we are left with is a fateful choice: accept the new authoritarian reality, or resist it with every tool we have left. The picture painted here is bleak, but it is not yet irredeemable. History tells us that would-be dictators can be confronted, that courts can regain their courage, that legislatures can awaken from slumber – but only if citizens demand it relentlessly. American democracy will not resurrect itself; the people must revive it, if they still can. At this late hour, complacency is complicity. To pretend that everything is normal, that we are merely seeing “strong politics” as usual, is to collaborate in the lie. The truth is stark: the Republic has been replaced by the beginnings of a lawless, fascist regime. Call it by its name. And then, perhaps, find within ourselves the courage to oppose it, before the coup truly calcifies into permanent tyranny.
In the final analysis, the Constitution has not failed the US; the US have failed it. As one commentator noted, there is no constitutional mandate for fascism – “no matter what the Supreme Court says, the president is not a king”. Yet today, America is effectively ruled by a king in all but name, his edicts rubber-stamped by robed courtiers and enforced by armed loyalists. The urgency of our moment cannot be overstated. If the American experiment is to have any future, this one-man state must be confronted and dismantled, by any means necessary. The hour is late, the stakes existential. Trump’s coup is for all intents and purposes, complete. The question now is whether freedom-loving Americans – and their representatives, if any still remember their oaths – will fight to overturn this unjust order, or this grand experiment of government of the people, by the people, for the people have perished from the earth, replaced by the long shadow of one man’s rule.
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