President Donald Trump, in his second term, is rapidly moving the United States away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism capped by unrestricted one-man rule.

He has repeatedly and flagrantly disregarded the law. The disregard has included the gutting and disestablishment of agencies whose existence and budgets are based on acts of Congress. It has included mass firings and targeted dismissals of officials while ignoring legal requirements to show cause and ensure due process. 

The law enforcement powers of the government have been blatantly weaponized, politicized, and deployed against anyone Trump considers a political or personal adversary, even in the absence of a prosecutable crime. Despite the president’s duty under Article II of the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Trump has refused to enforce regulatory laws that he does not happen to like.

He has abridged basic freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment. Legal non-citizen residents have been seized on the street and jailed for weeks merely for expressing an opinion. The administration is actively considering a broader policy of revoking visas and deporting foreign students who express their opinions in campus protests. 

With some undocumented immigrants being thrown into a notorious prison in El Salvador, Trump has talked openly about extending similar treatment to US citizens. US citizens have already been swept up, whether inadvertently or otherwise, in the administration’s mass deportations.

In a further affront to freedom of speech, Trump has ordered criminal investigations of former officials because they said something publicly that disagreed with Trump’s assertions, such as his lie about the 2020 election. He has attacked freedom of the press, such as by punishing a wire service over a mere choice of words.

He has eliminated most checks within the executive branch against arbitrary and illegal behavior. This has included the wholesale firing of inspectors general and sidelining the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice.

He has extended his power grab to institutions that are not even part of the executive branch. He has gutted federally chartered research institutions and subjected them to crippling takeovers. An assault on private universities is intended to bend them into submission regarding their curricula, hiring, and admissions policies.

Trump is increasingly brazen about the illegality. He even declines to say that he would uphold the US Constitution despite having twice sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend it.

The nation is already far enough down the road to dictatorship that it is not too soon to think about worst-case scenarios of the sort Americans have seldom needed to think about happening in their own country. Such thinking is required to understand what may or may not be effective in stopping the drive away from liberal democracy. Anticipating the limitations of guardrails that may be looked at in the future may help illuminate what is needed in the present.

Ordinarily, the courts would be looked to as the principal check on illegal executive actions, and amid Trump’s torrent of illegality, courts frequently have ordered him to stop. But Trump has made his disrespect for judicial decisions clear. The administration’s response to court orders often has taken the form of “legalistic noncompliance,” which involves the use of specious arguments to conceal widespread defiance of court judgments. 

In some cases, judges have found outright violations of court orders. Trump’s underlings have explicitly expressed defiance. Vice President JD Vance has declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” ignoring the courts’ role under the Constitution in deciding what is legitimate and what is not. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has said, “I don’t care what the judges think.”

The US Marshals Service has the primary responsibility for enforcing court orders, but it is part of the Department of Justice, reporting to the attorney general and ultimately to the president. And Attorney General Pam Bondi is unhesitatingly weaponizing the Department of Justice on behalf of Trump’s political objectives.

Judges can issue contempt citations for failure to obey court orders. However, enforcement of these citations is problematic due to an uncooperative Justice Department. A court could issue a civil contempt citation and possibly appoint an executor to enforce it if the marshals refuse. Moreover, Trump can use a pardon to negate any criminal penalty imposed by a federal court.

But even if a court could make a citation stick against an administration official, Trump would lose no sleep over any such official paying a penalty. At the same time, Trump himself does nothing to change his own actions. Peter Navarro was given a four-month prison sentence—which he served—for contempt of Congress when he refused to cooperate with an investigation of the attack on the Capitol in January 2021. Today, he is a highly influential White House adviser and an architect of Trump’s tariff policy.

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives inserted a provision in its recently passed budget bill that would make it even harder for federal judges to enforce contempt citations by barring enforcement unless the judge had first ordered a bond. The provision would apply retroactively to cases in which judges are already considering whether to hold administration officials in contempt regarding the deportation of migrants. 

Trump has commented, in reference to one of the deportation cases, that he would comply with a decision of the Supreme Court. Still, there is no guarantee that he would have more respect for the judiciary at this level than at lower levels. The administration already appears to have defied the Supreme Court in the very case—involving a Maryland man mistakenly shipped to a prison in El Salvador—that occasioned Trump’s comment by failing to do all it could to “facilitate” the man’s return, per the court’s order. The administration demonstrated how much it had defied the court’s order when it later brought the man back to the United States with no trouble at all after deciding that it would suit its political purposes to prosecute a criminal case against him.

Another administration strategy to avoid having the Supreme Court stop its illegal behavior is illustrated by Trump’s disregard of the Fourteenth Amendment by denying birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants. The strategy involves opposing the universal jurisdiction of district courts while not appealing to the Supreme Court the substance of the cases on this subject that the administration keeps losing at the district level.

Although Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public statement criticizing calls to impeach judges—after Trump made such a call regarding a judge who had disallowed one of the administration’s deportation actions—recent cases have shown the Supreme Court majority to be averse to asserting the authority of the judiciary if this means a confrontation with Trump. 

This is the same court majority—including three justices Trump appointed—that gave Trump a stay-out-of-jail-free card by creating immunity from future prosecution for any action, no matter how egregious, that can be deemed part of the president’s “official” functioning. Moreover, this is also the court majority that has aggressively overturned laws in an ideological direction compatible with Trump and that most recently has effectively overturned a nearly century-old precedent in facilitating Trump’s removal of members of regulatory boards.

Given the Republican majorities in both houses of the current Congress, political checks on Trump from the legislative branch have been almost nonexistent so far. This is in stark contrast to the situation half a century ago when Richard Nixon’s resignation was precipitated by his

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