This Is Not Normal

A look at how Trump's early moves closely follow the strategy of an anti-democratic, authoritarian strongman as he seeks to establish an autocratic government

By Ben Raderstorf/Project Democracy

In 2017, Trump signed four executive orders in his first five days in office.

This time around he’s signed more than 40.

This is designed to be a deluge, a quite-literally made-for-TV event showcasing the purported power and decisiveness of an autocratic leader. Trump wants you — and every other American who thinks democracy is preferable to strongman rule — to feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Following the authoritarian playbook to a T. More than anything, last week revealed how Donald Trump’s goal is power: Power for its own sake, not as some means-to-an-end. He doesn’t see being in power as simply a tool to deliver change or material benefits to his supporters.

Consider: What’s the number one issue voters want Trump to address?

It’s prices. In our poll with YouGov last week, the top single issue voters wanted the president to focus on was “curbing inflation.” And what did Trump do on prices?

Here is, in full, the substantive part of his executive action on prices and cost of living:¹

I hereby order the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker. This shall include pursuing appropriate actions to: lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply; eliminate unnecessary administrative expenses and rent-seeking practices that increase healthcare costs; eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the costs of home appliances; create employment opportunities for American workers, including drawing discouraged workers into the labor force; and eliminate harmful, coercive “climate” policies that increase the costs of food and fuel. Within 30 days of the date of this memorandum, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy shall report to me and every 30 days thereafter, on the status of the implementation of this memorandum.

Seriously, that’s it. A single paragraph with no specifics, details, or footnotes. It’s hard to imagine an emptier, more vapid order than asking for an aide to deliver him a monthly report.

Contrast that with the bevy of executive actions taken to consolidate power. A year ago, my Protect Democracy colleagues published a report on how authoritarianism could take over in the United States: The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025.

If you look, almost every single threat they described is in the first week’s actions, in numerous, complex, detailed ways. (The only one we haven’t seen in the executive orders yet is a refusal to leave office.)

• Pardons to license lawbreaking: There’s no other way to read Trump’s decision to pardon his most violent, criminal supporters than as an encouragement of future violence.

• Directing investigations against critics and rivals: So far, the investigations focus on members of the Biden Administration, former intelligence officials who signed a letter on the Hunter Biden laptop story, and members of the January 6th Select Committee.

• Regulatory retaliation: An executive order attempting to halt the disbursement of funds from Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws is an early test case for one of Trump’s main retaliatory weapons — impoundment of funds.

• Federal law enforcement overreach: In particular, some of his orders on immigration enforcement are designed to dramatically expand law enforcement presence and power in blue states and cities. (For instance, immigration raids can now target schools and churches.)

• Domestic deployment of the military: 1,500 active duty troops have been deployed to the southern border. Watch for whether they get deployed anywhere else.

The power is the point.

Trump feels totally unchecked. There’s another key throughline of the first week. It’s disturbing, but it’s critical. Trump is acting like he’s already all-powerful, like there are zero checks.

Four examples:

On pardons for January 6th insurrectionists. Before last Monday, three quarters of Americans (and majorities of Republicans) opposed pardons for those convicted of using a deadly weapon or assaulting Capitol Police officers. A huge list of his most prominent supporters, including police unions and his own vice president, were publicly, loudly, pleading with him not to do it.

He pardoned them anyway (and many in the GOP coalition have continued to criticize the move).

On birthright citizenship. Trump could have targeted only the children of undocumented immigrants, a still-obviously-unconstitutional but at least narrow attack along lines that have been floating around conservative intelligentsia for years. But he didn’t do that. He extended the order to the children of documented visa-holders, a much more extreme position that flouts even the manufactured constitutional arguments against some forms of birthright citizenship.

He doesn’t just want to chip away at the Constitution. He wants the ability to strike out provisions entirely by executive fiat.

(A Reagan-appointee judge promptly blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”)

On the power of Congress. In our constitutional framework, Congress passes laws and the president enforces them. The president doesn’t get to decide to just ignore a law passed by Congress, and as the Wall Street Journal editorial board points out, that’s what Trump’s TikTok executive order seeks to do. As a prominent senator warned a decade ago:

“In the more than two centuries of our nation's history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same.”

(Surely Senator Cruz will take the same view now.)

Trump is also doing something similar on impoundments — an unconstitutional tool to try to override Congress’ power of the purse. Per William Ford:

Trump’s energy and foreign aid executive orders purport immediately to pause the expenditure of funds Congress appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as well as for foreign assistance programs. These orders flout federal law and attempt to substitute the president’s judgment for Congress’s bipartisan enactments.

Trump is functionally claiming the authority to unilaterally hold up major legislative packages passed into law with the stroke of a pen. No legislator should be ok with that.

On emergency powers.There is a place for invocation of presidential emergency powers: “sudden, unexpected crises that can’t be handled by Congress through ordinary legislation,” as Liza Goitein explains.

But Trump’s first day orders included multiple emergency declarations on longstanding issues (energy and the border) where majorities in Congress may be quite sympathetic to Trump’s views. Needless to say, Trump left no opportunity for Congress to pursue that ordinary legislation.

The point of these national emergency declarations is not the policies; it’s demonstrating his ability to make change without Congress (or even a solid legal pretext).

Maybe this is all just calculated power projection. He wants to debase Congress into defending the indefensible. Maybe he thinks the Supreme Court is more likely to accept the mere shredding of the Constitution if he asks their permission to set it on fire first.

But there’s another possibility: Trump may genuinely believe that he has already become an emperor without constraints.

Scary, right?

Here’s the silver lining though. Those constraints are still there. They’re dangerously frayed, but they still exist. And overconfidence can be a self-defeating trait for any leader, even an aspiring autocrat.

It’s true Trump has more pull with Congress, the courts, and the electorate than he’s ever had, but his power and standing are still fairly tenuous. We don’t know where this will go, but one possibility is: Things could quickly start to unravel.

*If* the maximalism of the first week is the product of hubris, that means it’s much more likely that Trump will overreach, and probably sooner rather than later. It’s hard to know exactly what that looks like, but you can imagine a series of litigation and legislative defeats — or a genuine crisis created by his focus on retaliation and power grabs at the expense of governance — spiraling out of Trump’s control.

Trump is playing with fire in about a dozen different ways. Something’s going to burn down. We don’t know yet if it’s his presidency or our democracy.

1) Trump’s supporters will argue that his executive orders on fossil fuels are about lowering energy prices, but it’s kind of hard to believe that considering how they were paired with other orders to restrict wind energy production and stop clean energy investments, both of which are likely to increase electricity prices.

Worth saying: There probably are material and urgent things the federal government could be doing, especially on the price of eggs, which is spiking to historic highs as the bird flu epidemic continues to spread.

Ben Raderstorf is a policy advocate at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group working to prevent authoritarianism.