Marty Levine
September 11, 2025
We have a President who wishes to be King, supported by a cadre of true believers and others who see him as their tool for obtaining greater wealth and the power to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Together, they are operating from the premise that a President, particularly this President, has total power. They believe that he (and it will never be a she for them) has the authority to dictate and control every aspect of government and our lives. They have euphemized this authoritarian belief as constitutional because, they say, the Constitution creates a “Unitary Executive” (described in more detail below).
To me, this looks more and more like a desire to crown a King or put a Dictator into office.
Here’s how the American Constitution Society described this vision shortly after Trump began his second term:
Proponents of the unitary executive theory argue that “[t]he executive is headed by a single person, not a collegial body, and that single person is the ultimate policy maker, with all others subordinate to him.” This version of the unitary executive assumes that the president may directly control the activities of all departments and agencies within the executive branch.
A more muscular version of the unitary executive asserts that the president may even depart from the law in some circumstances, usually related to national security. This version of the unitary executive was most famously summarized by former President Richard Nixon during his interview with David Frost, saying, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. By definition.” While not a wholehearted endorsement of that view, the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. U.S. certainly gives it more credence or at least gives presidents more cover to disregard the law.
In 2024, the Supreme Court set the table for them when it ruled that the President was above the law. Here’s how the American Civil Liberties Union described the impact of the Court’s granting of absolute power to the President.
In Trump v. United States, the court’s Republican-appointed justices — including the three Trump appointees — announced a brand new constitutional immunity from criminal liability for presidents’ “official acts,” or anything a president may do using the powers of the office. The court’s decision ensures that future presidents — including Trump himself should he win reelection in November — will know that they can escape criminal accountability for blatantly criminal acts, no matter how corrupt. Even acts that strike at the heart of our democracy, like resisting the peaceful transition of power, could not be prosecuted.
Donald Trump has, since January 20, 2025, acted, with frightening speed, to make their vision come true. One step after another; one drop more tipping the balance away from democracy.
Our Democracy requires us to balance individual interests with our commitment to a common good. It requires us to always protect that balance from tipping over. Because, if it does, we will have become a nation that can no longer protect itself from the cruelty and gluttony of those who then control the levers of power.
Human history has seen such tipping moments before, and for most people, the pictures of those times are not pretty.
What brings me to paint such a dark picture on a lovely late summer day?
I was set off when the news flashed that the Supreme Court had lifted a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that had been issued by US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong that had prevented ICE agents and other Federal law enforcement personnel from detaining individuals only the basis of
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- Apparent race or ethnicity;
- Speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent;
- Presence in a particular location (e.g. bus stop, car wash, tow yard, day laborer pick up site, agricultural site, etc.);
- The type of work one does.
Is there anything in that list that seems outside the common understanding of what people should expect from their government, from their democratic government?
Our President and his minions did, and they asked the Supreme Court to throw these protections out. And just days ago, without offering any rationale or reason, the Supreme Court did. In an unsigned order, the US Supreme Court lifted the TRO and allowed people to be stopped, questioned, and detained just based on their perceived ethnicity.
Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent joined by Justices Kagen and Jackson, said what I was feeling when I heard this news
We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job… The government…has all but declared that all Latinos, U. S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.
The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” {Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 878}. After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little. Because this is unconscionably irreconcilable with our Nation’s constitutional guarantees.
One more drop on the wrong side of the scale as Justice Sotomayor emphasized when she signed her opinion “Respectfully, but regretfully, I dissent.”
Drip…Drip…Drip.
Over the weekend, the President who would be King posted this message on his Truth Social account
This, after telling us he was going to send National Guard troops into Chicago’s streets.
Drip…Drip…Drip… Another Drop on the wrong side of the scale.
Days before this President Trump had authorized the bombing of a boat in international waters, destroying the boat and killing its passengers. Here’s how he told the world, via his Truth Social channel, about what he had done:
Earlier this morning, on my Orders, US Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility….The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No US Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!
All without any proof that the boat was an active threat to our nation or that, even if it were, there was not another way to intercept it and arrest those for whom he had proof that they had committed a crime. On his word, it was enough to kill.
Drip…Drip…Drip… Another Drop on the wrong side of the scale.
If you are thinking this is bad, but it will pass because we can elect a Congress in 2026 that can take back the power that Donald Trump has seized, and then elect a new President two years later who can reverse our slide. Donald Trump is telling us we may not get to do that.
Step by step he is threatening to make elections meaningless. With the Supreme Court’s blessing that politically motivated gerrymandering is okay, the President has gotten MAGA-controlled states to redistrict so that it becomes harder for their opposition to elect representatives and thus, they control the House.
The President has also begun to take control, because he can as the “unitary Executive” of our national election process. With an executive order he issued in March, he is trying to seize control of every state’s voter rolls and dictate the method for determining who is allowed to vote. If he can, he will shape the electorate to his designs. He has also told us that he will move to end the use of mail-in ballots and voting machines. If he does, the elections will be easier to manipulate to achieve the outcome he desires.
And he has floated the idea that he will run again for another term even though he is constitutionally barred from doing so or even cancel the 2028 election.
While many knowledgeable voices are telling us all of his blustering about elections is just bluster, that the law makes impossible, will the laws that Democracy depends on hold?
That is what worries me most, as each day brings another assault on our democracy.
With a President who cares not for anyone else’s rules but his own, a Congress controlled by his acolytes, and a Supreme Court which has been unwilling to say no it is harder and harder to see what the forces are that will turn the tide back from our national slide into authoritarianism.
And yet I keep turning out to march and protest. I keep asking my community to join with me. I keep asking elected officials to stand up and do their job. I keep working to get the right people elected.
Will that be enough?
I hope so. I pray so.
PS: After I finished this piece, I learned the tragic news that MAGA powerhouse Charlie Kirk had been murdered. And before we knew who had pulled the trigger or what the motivation might be, the President told us how he was going to use this tragedy as another step toward his dictatorship.
Here’s how NBC News summarized Trump’s comments right after learning of Kirk’s death
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said in a video message Wednesday night. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump called for “all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree” — but he then called out “radical left political violence,” without paying tribute to any Democratic politicians who have been targeted.
“From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year — which killed a husband and father — to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others, radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said.
Ignored were the memories of any political violence that was not directed at his minions.
And one day later, when we were beginning to learn that the assassin may have been a conservative and not a liberal, he went further, excusing his followers’ violence and blaming progressives for everything wrong in this country
I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.
Rigged elections, loss of a working federal government with real checks and balances, permission to use race and ethnicity as reasons to throw people in jail, ordering assassinations of civilians, troops in the streets, and now blaming his foes for heinous crimes.
If this is not what dictatorship looks like, I’d like you to share with me where I have it wrong.
And then I came across this comment from Frederick Douglass about an earlier time in our history, and I thought we had seen this moment before. I hope we can make it turn out differently.
