“From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters
This land was made for you and me”
American democracy was, until recently, seen as benchmark, a given. Presidents weren’t all powerful, Congress and the Supreme Court were active checks and balances on their power. In some instances, such as Obama’s second term if the president doesn’t control Congress it can make it very difficult for their legislative program to progress.
One way that these checks and balances can be bypassed is by the use of Presidential executive orders (EO’s|”), a legally binding directive issued by the President to federal agencies, managing operations and setting policy without Congressional approval, though they cannot override existing law. They are used to implement policy priorities swiftly, such as immigration, energy, or economic, but are temporary and can be reversed by future administrations.
The following data was sourced at:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders
To date, in his second term, Trump has issued 239 EO’s in 1-yrs. His predecessors issued: Biden, 162 in 4-yrs; Obama, 276 in 8-yrs; Bush Jr., 291 in 8-yrs; Clinton, 364 in 8-yrs.
In his first term, Trump issued 220 over the 4-yrs, suggesting that he learnt from that, and finding it more efficient to circumvent the system, governing in a more authoritarian fashion.
A part of this authoritarianism is the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), who are weaponising intimidation and violence against the citizens of Democrat controlled cities, leaving many afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten and arrested, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working there.
In Minneapolis, after ICE shot Renne Good, an unarmed mother, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the outraged protests. This resulted in hundreds of Minnesotans registering for training to become “observers” of enforcement activity.
The actions of ICE and their endorsement by the president are being mimicked by his supporters.
Shortly, after the shooting of Good, Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman, was sprayed with an unknown substance during her town hall in Minneapolis. In response, Trump quipped that “she probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”
Trump has long targeted Omar, who arrived in the US as a refugee as a child and has been a citizen for more than 2- years. His xenophobic attacks on her have ramped up in recent weeks as he has targeted Minnesota’s Somali community. He recently called for her to be “sent back to Somalia” in a post on Truth Social.
Continuing this xenophobic behavior, last week Trump directed his aides to post on Truth Social a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The post was subsequently deleted with Trump claiming that he hadn’t seen that portion of the clip.
‘Trump directed his aides to post on Truth Social a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes’
Asked whether he would apologize, as even Republican officials have suggested he should, Trump bristled. “No, I didn’t make a mistake,.”
The attack on Omar was the second on a lawmaker of color, after the Florida representative Maxwell Frost said he was punched in the face on Friday at the Sundance film festival in Utah by a man who said Trump would deport him.
The Trump administration displays ongoing racist tendencies, not that different to those of Nazi Germany
Last August, the X account of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) posted an ICE recruitment poster featuring an Uncle Sam figure holding a “law and order” sign while standing by a crossroads post featuring arrows reading “invasion” and “cultural decline”. The DHS caption? “Which way, American man?”
The Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, recalling the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). Another tweet from the Department of Labor announced that “America is for Americans,” which sounds a lot like another Nazi slogan: “Deutschland den Deutschen (“Germany for Germans”).
In February 2025, it emerged that James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor in Texas, had been running a social media account praising Hitler and declaring that “America is a white nation”. He was pulled from his post after the story first broke, but this month it appears he returned to work.
Last year, Dalton Henry Stout, founder of the neo-Nazi Aryan Freedom Network, said: “[Trump] awakened a lot of people to the issues we’ve been raising for years. He’s the best thing that’s happened to us.”
The justification for ICE acting liking a latter day Gestapo is based on crime rates. The administration continues to paint a dystopian picture of inner-cities ravaged by crimes, with no-go areas, all caused by undocumented migrants and, those who support them.
However, statistics show that violent and property crime rates have plunged since the 1990s. despite this, the administration intends to remove 1m undocumented migrants a year. A part of their strategy is based on fear, which is being utilised to frighten people into “self‑deporting”. Whilst most Americans – and the majority of independent voters – think this deportation drive is excessive, Republican-aligned voters disagree, with C.30% thinking he has not gone far enough.
‘The Trump administration displays ongoing racist tendencies, not that different to those of Nazi Germany‘
The result of ICE’s actions left many in fear of leaving their homes, with US citizens of color increasingly affected. A September supreme court ruling seemingly interpreted by ICE as allowing detention solely on the basis of race and ethnicity. In 2024, police killed 1,379 people, with victims almost three times more likely to be black than white.
There is no law that allows this persecution; being an undocumented migrant is a civil not a criminal offense and ICE officers have limited detention powers.
This is nothing more than a campaign of terror and intimidation, with victims and protestors being smeared as “deranged leftists” and “domestic terrorists”, with “absolute immunity” for the officers involved.
In October, the president told generals: “It’s a war from within.” ICE has been transformed into a paramilitary force apparently answerable only to Trump.
At the beginning of most authoritarian regimes, government begin to use words like” security”, “order”, “deterrence”. Explaining Isreal’s behavior in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu frames it as “security”.
The use of ICE, is only one example, of how Trump’s first year of his second term, has seen him focus on consolidating his authority: dismantling federal agencies, purging the civil service, firing independent watchdogs, sidelining Congress, challenging judicial rulings, deploying federal force in blue cities, stifling dissent, persecuting political enemies, targeting immigrants, scapegoating marginalized groups, ordering the capture of a foreign leader, leveraging the presidency for profit, trampling academic freedom and escalating attacks on the news media.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard political scientists and authors of How Democracies Die, and the University of Toronto professor Lucan Way, wrote in Foreign Affairs, last month: “In 2025, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies,”. They argued that the US under Trump had “descended into competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections are held but the ruling party abuses power to stifle dissent and tilt the playing field in its favour.
True authoritarian regimes make no serious claim to moral legitimacy, whereas a competitive authoritarian might invoke actions that are technically above the law. Constitutions are invoked and obscure laws brought back to defend aggressive policies, with talk of “necessary action”. They point to courts that still function, a press that is still somewhat free, elections that still take place – even as all of these institutions disintegrate.
Ratings of US democracy by scholars – and Americans overall – dropped “significantly” after Trump took office last year, according to data from Bright Line Watch (1) . In its September survey, experts rated US democracy 54 on a 100-point scale, placing the country closer to illiberal or hybrid regimes than to the full democracies of G7 peers such as Canada or the United Kingdom.
An assessment by the Century Foundation’s new democracy indexing project found that the US had recorded a 28% “collapse” in democratic health over the past year – from 79/100 in 2024 to 57/100 in 2025, a decline more akin to a coup or other major shock.
Another area that has come under attack is the media. As Jim Morrison said: “whoever controls the media controls the mind.”
“whoever controls the media controls the mind.”
The Washington Post, now owned by Trump devotee, Jeff Bezos, was, until recently, a bastion of US democracy. It was the Post’s reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein whose reporting bought President Nixon down.
Last week, Bezos, cut more than 300 newsroom jobs, a move that has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks.
“I am crushed,” said Bob Woodward.
Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor, said: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations”. Baron castigated Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favour with President Trump”, saying it left an especially “ugly stain” on the paper’s standing.
Bezos bought the Post in 2013, and was initially seen as being good for the paper. In 2017, soon after Trump’s first inauguration, the Post introduced its new strapline: “Democracy dies in darkness.”
The return of Trump has seen a very different Bezos. The first obvious sign was in October 2024, when he pulled the Post’s planned endorsement of Trump’s Democratic rival Kamala Harris just 11- days before the presidential election, an actions that led to at least 250,000 people cancelling their subscriptions
Soon after, the billionaire unilaterally imposed new strictures on the paper’s opinion content. He introduced what he called his “two pillars”: personal liberties and free markets.
Bezos isn’t the only uber-rich tech or venture capitalist to see journalism as an asset to monetize: the Los Angeles Times was acquired in 2018 by a biotech billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong has displayed symptoms of Trump Appeasement Syndrome. He too refused to allow his paper to endorse Harris days before the 2024 election.
Elsewhere in the media, Trump has stripped public media channels NPR and PBS of more than $1bn in federal funding, launched full-frontal attacks on individual journalists and outlets exposing his corruption and lies and sustained a bullying campaign against corporate owners designed to browbeat them into subservience.
CBS News is an example; Trump leaned on Paramount, which owned the news network, with a $10bn lawsuit over a 60 Minutes pre-election interview with Harris. Paramount settled for $16m, even though the suit was widely ridiculed as spurious.
Paramount subsequently merged with Skydance Media, a transaction that required federal, meaning Trump’s approval.
‘Within controlling the media is censorship’
Post the merger, David Ellison became CEO of Paramount Skydance. He is son of the billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is a close friend and adviser of Trump’s.
The younger Ellison went ahead and appointed the anti-woke commentator Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News, despite the fact that she had no TV industry experience.
Within controlling the media is censorship.
During the opening ceremony of the winter Olympics, as the cameras cut to US V-P Vance and his wife, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck clearly heard them, but, American viewers watching NBC did not.
NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers.
Turning to education, both students and universities are under attack.
There are stories of students being warned they will never find work on Wall Street, at the best law firms, or in government offices. Other student activists are removed from their homes, illegally detained, and threatened with deportation.
Academic deans face threats of punitive funding cuts unless they impose requirements that constrain academic freedom. At Northwestern University in Chicago, students were forced to complete antisemitism training that they said was inaccurate and biased in favour of Israel before they could enrol in classes.
Turning to artistic expression, both the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian, are viewed as “organs of an ancien regime to be repurposed.”
In December 2025, the Kennedy Center board, packed with Trump-appointed members, voted to rename the venue the “Trump-Kennedy Center” to honour his role in securing $257 million in federal funding for renovations and for his overall involvement in the center. Unfortunately, the move has prompted artists and performers to flee in such numbers that the venue will now shut down for “approximately” two years.
‘In Trumpism, rules and restraint are portrayed as a corruption of the people’s will instead of being the basis of American democracy’
In March 2025, Trump initiated actions to review and reform the Smithsonian Institution, driven by claims that its museums promoted a “divisive, race-centred ideology” and portrayed American history negatively. The administration sought to eliminate what it deemed “woke” narratives—specifically targeting exhibits on slavery, immigration, and LGBTQ history—to refocus on a more celebratory, “unifying” portrayal of American history.
The economy and inflation played a key role in Trump winning a second term, and from outset he has been at war with the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, who, he claimed, was not reducing interest rates fast enough.
Many economists and bank CEO’s have jumped to Powell’s defense, including the CEO of JP Morgan Chase (JPMC”), Jamie Dimon.
Now both the JPMC and Powell are facing trumped-up charges and law suits.
Dimon said he has an “enormous respect for Jay Powell, the man”. He went to say that “anything that chips away at [the Fed’s independence] is not a good idea”, warning that it risked driving up inflation and interest rates.
In summary, what we are seeing is the beginning of governing through fear; CEOs, academics, journalists and government officials allow fear to override decency and moral authority. As one commentator wrote, there is a common pattern; it begins with claims that certain people are dangerous, and that ordinary legal safeguards should not apply to them. It ends with a society diminished, with people so in-fear that they obey in advance. After a while, this fear becomes normalised, seeping into the machinery of government.
Alongside Trump are his courtiers, uber rich, they pay homage in return for lower taxes, and a smalls state that allows them to do as they wish.
Jeff Bezos is happy to do Trump’s biding, ensuring that the Washington Post, his media outlet is kept at heel and writes only “approved” articles
The example of the Post is paradoxical. Many of the democratic norms that Trump is obliterating, such as his destruction of the norm of Department of Justice independence in his persecution of his political opponents, were laid down in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a story that the Post broke.
In Trumpism, rules and restraint are portrayed as a corruption of the people’s will instead of being the basis of American democracy. A man who pardoned supporters for an actual insurrection seeking to keep him in power now threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests.
“She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera””
Notes:
- A non-partisan democracy-monitoring initiative that surveys political scientists and the public on potential threats and erosions
@coldwarsteve
Philip Gilbert is a city-based corporate financier, and former investment banker.
Philip is a great believer in meritocracy, and in the belief that if you want something enough you can make it happen. These beliefs were formed in his formative years, of the late 1970s and 80s
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