The fatal flaw in Trump’s authoritarian playbook

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at the McDonald's Impact Summit at the Westin Hotel in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 17, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Speaking for the Tuesday podcast "Right Now" with Perry Bacon, Don Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, discussed President Donald Trump's efforts to control government institutions, noting there's a major flaw in the president's authoritarian agenda.

"You wrote this piece called 'The Authoritarian Checklist,' and you were arguing that we had now entered a competitive authoritarian period — that we lost democracy, and we were entering competitive authoritarianism — and you were describing the ideas that make an authoritarian administration," said Bacon. "And let me start by saying, this checklist you had is not some kind of — it’s not the political science authoritarian checklist. It was something you came up with yourself, right?"

The Moynihan list is slightly different than others that have been proposed by historian Tim Snyder, for example.

Moynihan argued that Trump and his allies have systematically weakened the civil service, politicized the legal system and used federal power to intimidate universities, media and businesses, while elections remain the area where structural limits still constrain him. His argument isn't that the a switch is flipped where you have democracy to dictatorship, but the sudden tilting of the playing field.

He told Bacon that it's clear Trump’s team, like Stephen Miller, learned from its failures of the first term and came back into office with "Project 2025," an effort to take control of the bureaucracy, install Trump-friendly lawyers and use executive authority to flip the federal government into a weapon against political foes.

The one theme throughout all of Trump's actions includes the capture or coercion of civil society.

The two agreed that the court system has worked extremely well at putting a check on Trump. Where it has failed is at the Supreme Court level.

"I think if you want to hold some actor other than Trump responsible for the moment that we’re in, it is the Supreme Court," said Moynihan. "They are the group that has the standing, they have the role, they have the authority to say, This administration is violating the Constitution, it’s violating the law. And again, they haven’t done that. And in fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve bought into Trump’s legal theories."

The good pieces, however, he said, are that states are still largely in control over Trump. Those "structural barriers remain.” Among them are the voters themselves.

"And so maybe Trump will do more — maybe he will send the National Guard to election sites, maybe he will ramp up more intimidation — but up to now, he does not control how people vote. And this does make the midterms all the more important," said Moynihan. "But other than the power of the electorate, he said, Trump "does not have a button he can press that fundamentally changes the nature of our election experience in America."

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