After Trump: Proposals for a Post-Authoritarian America

(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

A YEAR INTO HIS SECOND TERM, Donald Trump has proved transformative: He has transformed America’s proud liberal democracy into virtual one-man rule, tearing down checks and balances constructed over more than two centuries to block exactly this.

Trump will not be president forever. And when he goes, Democrats will face a defining choice: exploit the executive machinery he has exposed, or dismantle it. The temptation to exploit it will be enormous, and yielding to that temptation would be a historic mistake. If post-Trump America is to be a post-authoritarian one, it will have to embark on a Second Reconstruction, and Democrats will need to lead it.

In the first Reconstruction, the Union faced the challenge of reintegrating the South under a rule of law guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens. Republicans led the task then, with some support from loyal Democrats. They undertook not minor technocratic tinkering but major structural interventions, constitutional amendments and new institutions, that remade our governing framework and ensured democratic inclusion. Something similar is needed now.

And enacting such a Second Reconstruction will require not only sustained commitment from Democrats at a moment when they will face powerful incentives to look away, but also the support of principled, non-MAGA Republicans who still care about constitutional governance.

Perennial Presidential Overreach

America has weathered upheavals before. But never, since the Civil War, has its political operating system faced such a fundamental assault. This system consists of three interlocking elements: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s structural framework, and the amendments that protect individual rights.

Many presidents have taken liberties with the system. Woodrow Wilson restored segregation in the federal government and used wartime powers for an aggressive federal crackdown on speech, criminalizing criticism of the war and the draft. Franklin Roosevelt, confronted with a Depression and another world war, browbeat Congress to pass the sweeping National Industrial Recovery Act, effectively legislating by proxy. But Wilson acted largely with congressional support, and when the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA and other New Deal measures, Democrats themselves rose to thwart FDR’s court-packing scheme.

Neither attempted to quash every check, blow past every limit, like the current White House occupant. The closest analogue in presidential history was Richard Nixon, who authorized secret wars, withheld appropriated funds, ordered warrantless surveillance of political opponents, and directed White House staff to burgle the Democratic National Committee headquarters before obstructing the investigation.

But even this seems like petty crime compared to Trump, whose abuses have fundamentally inverted the president’s relationship with American citizens, executive agencies, the other branches of government, and the states. He swore to defend the Constitution, but he is in fact its enemy.

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All-Out Assault on the Constitutional Order

The Declaration of Independence lays out America’s design philosophy: The people are free and equal, and government derives its legitimacy from protecting their rights and rests on their consent. The Constitution is the operating system’s core architecture, structuring relations among the branches to prevent anyone, especially the executive, from monopolizing power. The Bill of Rights and later amendments hardwire limits on state power over individuals.

Trump has attacked every layer of this system.

The Declaration’s premise, that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, was breached by his efforts to steal the 2020 election and his ongoing attempts to corrupt free and fair elections. His retaliation against critics, media organizations, and political opponents undermines the basic principle that legitimate government exists to secure rights, not punish dissent. His rhetoric casting certain groups, not just social outgroups but also political opponents, as less authentically “the people” collides with the Declaration’s universal claim that all are created equal.

At the constitutional level, Trump has converted a presidential system into a personalist and patrimonial one, pardoning those who attacked Congress at his behest and handing them settlements for being investigated in the first place, before floating an obscene $1.8 billion slush fund to shovel taxpayer dollars to insurrectionists. He has presided over his and his family’s enrichment by over $3 billion in just the first year in office.

Inside the executive branch, he has treated agencies not as neutral administrators of law but as extensions of personal will. He removed at least seventeen inspectors general, congressionally created watchdogs against public corruption, and replaced many with loyalists. Through more than two hundred executive orders, he has stripped career officials of tenure protections, centralized enforcement in the White House, bypassed Senate confirmation, and sidelined senior military officials including judge advocates general who advise on the legality of operations.

He has also usurped Congress’s powers. He empowered Elon Musk to head a “Department of Government Efficiency”, never authorized by Congress and led by an unconfirmed private citizen, enabling cancelation of contracts and redirection of appropriated funds in violation of Congress’s power of the purse, the bedrock of the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. By invoking emergency statutes to justify sweeping tariffs and harsh interior enforcement, he stretched broad statutory delegations into instruments of unilateral rule.

Finally, the judiciary, the system’s error-correction mechanism, has faced escalating defiance. A Washington Post analysis found the administration frequently resisted or narrowly complied with adverse rulings, while a Minnesota judge documented nearly a hundred court orders that ICE had ignored.

This is not merely aggressive governance. It is a rejection of the operating system itself, the premise that executive power is bound by law. When, back in his first term, Trump declared, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he articulated a theory incompatible with constitutional architecture and has governed accordingly. The last rupture of comparable magnitude came when Southern states attempted to dissolve the Union itself.

A Constrained and Accountable Presidency

The Declaration not only affirms the right of a self-governing people to “alter or abolish” an abusive government; it affirms their duty to “institute new Government.” And our constitutional system established mechanisms by which Americans could restructure our government when necessary. After FDR broke the two-term norm, the Twenty-second Amendment imposed presidential term limits. Following Nixon’s abuses, Congress enacted a suite of guardrails, the National Emergencies Act, the War Powers Resolution, the Impoundment Control Act, to constrain an overweening presidency.

Trump knocked down each of these, and they will need to be not just rebuilt, but strengthened. Internal guardrails such as inspectors general, expert commissions, and the nonpartisan civil service must be insulated from at-will removal by the president. But Trump has created a blueprint for future authoritarians, so restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t be enough. Two deeper structural reforms are essential.

First, strip the executive of the massive powers that have accumulated over the last century. Congress must claw back discretion over war, economic policy, and emergency powers it has ceded to the president. Many statutes will have to be completely rewritten. Most urgently, Congress should enact an automatic thirty-day sunset on presidential emergency powers unless it approves an extension, reversing the current perverse arrangement wherein Congress must pass a veto-proof resolution to stop powers already invoked. Had such a rule restricting the exploitation of emergency powers been in place, Trump could not have used them to impose his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Second, make the powers retained by the executive subject to greater oversight with real consequences for abuse. No president should fill the cabinet with loyalists and rogues whose chief qualification is personal allegiance, or fire experienced officials for refusing to do his illegal bidding. Congress should sharply limit acting appointments and ensure major executive roles cannot be filled indefinitely without Senate approval. White House staff, advisory by design, should be statutorily barred from issuing directives to Senate-confirmed agency heads, as Stephen Miller has done, creating a shadow chain of command beyond constitutional accountability.

Congress must also adopt “for cause” standards for oversight officials, require written findings before removals take effect, and, most crucially, tie department funding to compliance with these safeguards. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent might have thought twice before stonewalling the Senate Finance Committee this month on whether Trump and his family retain IRS audit immunity if he feared having Treasury’s funding halted.

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Constitutional Fixes

The pardon power cries out for accountability. Trump has used it as a tool of patronage and self-protection. Congress can check abuses through transparency: requiring disclosure by those who seek to influence clemency, and strengthening FOIA for clemency-related communications. The most direct fix, narrowing the pardon power itself to bar presidents from pardoning themselves, relatives, and members of their own administration, would require a constitutional amendment.

But if we’re amending the Constitution, the more important target is impeachment, the ultimate backstop for executive accountability. The two-thirds threshold for conviction has proved more prohibitive than the Framers anticipated, the two-party system makes it nearly impossible for a president to lack one-third of Senate support. Lowering it to 60 percent would still demand substantial bipartisan agreement while restoring real accountability.

Easier still, but deeply meaningful: allow a secret ballot in the Senate for impeachment votes, a change the body can adopt by rule. South Korea’s use of a secret ballot in its recent presidential impeachment illustrates how institutional design can reduce partisan intimidation. Had this option been available, Trump almost certainly would have been convicted after January 6th.

Electoral Reforms

Beyond punishing rogue presidents, we should take steps to prevent them from reaching office in the first place. America’s rigid two-party, winner-take-all structure creates incentives for polarization and minority rule. Congress and states could move toward multi-member districts with proportional representation, no constitutional amendment required. More voters would have a representative they actually voted for, and genuine multiparty competition would replace a system where the only real choice is Republican versus Democrat. Restoring fusion voting, still used in New York, would allow third parties to influence elections constructively rather than act as spoilers.

Our political system, like our constitutional system, has become dangerously presidentialized. A more pluralistic party system would lower the stakes of any single presidential election, reduce the appeal of strongman politics, and redirect political energy toward the legislature, where democratic bargaining, not personal dominance, is supposed to occur.

Democrats’ Democratic Duty

The first Reconstruction collapsed not only because President Andrew Johnson undermined it, but because a war-weary country lacked the will to see it through. Democrats cannot let exhaustion produce the same failure this time.

The temptations will be real and powerful. A future Democratic president, especially with unified control of Congress, will face enormous pressure to wield the executive tools Trump has expanded rather than dismantle them. The logic will be seductive: If Republicans used these powers destructively, why not use them constructively? But that path leads nowhere good. Institutional erosion normalized is institutional erosion institutionalized. A Democratic president who governs through executive orders and agency directives, who stretches emergency statutes to advance progressive priorities, would ratify Trump’s constitutional theory even while repudiating his politics. The operating system would remain broken, just running different programs.

Democrats will also face the temptation to counter MAGA’s cultural populism solely with kitchen-table issues, betting voters care more about economic bread-and-butter than restoring constitutional order. That bet is wrong twice over. Polities that lack stable rule of law rarely deliver long-term equitable prosperity, corruption, retribution, and oligarchic patronage ultimately shortchange ordinary voters. And Democrats have a powerful contrast available: a Republican party that capitulated to the systematic decimation of our governing institutions. That contrast is only credible if Democrats arrive with a genuine mandate to rebuild, not to exploit the rubble.

Any politician willing to put the long-term governing health of the country ahead of personal and partisan gain, making the curbing of their own future powers a central plank, will go a long way toward overcoming public cynicism. Americans have shown themselves capable of comprehending the urgency of structural reform when the messenger is credible. Think of the post-Watergate wave of 1974, which swept in a reform Congress that passed the very guardrails Trump later dismantled.

Building that mandate is the urgent work. It means running explicitly on a Reconstruction agenda: making the case, in language accessible beyond law school seminars, that what Trump has done is not aggressive-but-normal politics but a fundamental break with the constitutional order. It means developing a concrete reform agenda, and finding the right message for it: “Rebuilding a government of laws, not one man.” Or how about: Make Uncle Sam Accountable Again? It means building coalitions now, within the Democratic party and with the principled Republicans and independents who know what has been lost.

Republicans led the way in the first Reconstruction. It’s now on the Democrats.

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Shikha Dalmia is the president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and the editor in chief of The UnPopulist.

Andy Craig is senior editor at The UnPopulist and heads its Reconstruction Agenda project, dedicated to developing a comprehensive and concrete list of reforms.