U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he hosts a dinner with Republican members of the U.S. Congress in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 22, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos sees President Donald Trump's bombshell indictment of former president Barack Obama as more than a president deflecting from his connection to convicted sex traffickers. Instead, he also sees an authoritarian testing the waters of his authoritarianism.
“[President Donald Trump] is testing the legal limits of the presidency,” said Enos on Greg Sargent’s Wednesday edition of the ‘Daily Blast’ podcast. “ … which is a nice way of saying ‘he’s doing things that should be illegal, or at least things that should be condemned by all the democratic norms of this country that have operated for more than 200 years.’ And yet he does them.”
Sargent said President Trump “ratchet[ed] up the authoritarianism” this week by angrily hinting at arresting Barack Obama and accusing Obama of sedition. He’s also raging that Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is guilty of crimes, explicitly calling for him to be put in “prison.” Sargent said Trump has followed up his bluster with a dangerous type of bureaucratic manipulation “designed to manufacture pretexts for the prosecutions.” This consists of using underlings like National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard to seed the press with accusations that Obama "manufactured" Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
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Trump posted documents on Truth Social that Sargent said had plainly been given to him by administration agencies “as part of his quest to show Schiff merits prosecution.”
“This is an open flaunting of the use of agencies to gin up pretexts for prosecuting enemies,” Sargent recently posted on BlueSky.
Enos said what Trump is doing is obvious, but it’s the reaction of institutions and people around Trump that will determine if the United States’ experiment with democracy is finished.
“If he does something that is so brazen and his party and the people that he has appointed to the bureaucracy go along with it rather than saying, ‘You can’t do this, or I condemn you breaking these democratic norms,’ then that’s a signal that he can do it again,” Enos argued. “So every time somebody does something that pushes the limits of what is acceptable, does something that seems brazen … if it is not pushed back on, that becomes a new power they have.”
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“If we don’t condemn it, if it’s not something that is shut down, all of a sudden that new power is something that is adopted by that would-be authoritarian,” Enos said.
Trump is claiming Schiff committed mortgage fraud because he owns two different homes, which is common among U.S. lawmakers. However, one of Trump’s government entities, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, mined evidence to support the president’s agenda before the Schiff issue got referred to DOJ for prosecution.
“What we see here is an attack on a sitting member of the opposition — a sitting politician, a prominent one that is a member of the opposition to Trump,” said Enos, which amounts to the “weaponization of bureaucracy,” which is “directly out of the authoritarian playbook.”
What’s worse, however, is Trump has stocked the Department of Justice with “loyalist” people who may be more likely to carry out his authoritarian whims.
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“When he puts out these orders that a person that believes in democracy would say, ‘I will not carry out,’ he is testing to see if people will carry them out. … He’s putting these things out there to see if people will oppose them,” said Enos.
Laugh at his perceived flailing all you want, said Enos, but “Democratic leaders don’t recognize this moment we’re in,” and that’s a problem.
“So, I do worry about the fact that they are not strong enough in [their] statements,” Enos told Sargent, even at a time when Trump “is in a remarkable moment of political weakness right now” with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Hear the full podcast at this link.