Dashing into dictatorship:

While Trump and his henchmen deconstruct the administrative state, his lawyers are embracing the logic of dictatorship. The core argument emerging in their legal filings and executive orders — one without support anywhere in the Constitution or the law — is that simply by being elected, Trump has the power to do whatever he wants.

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Trump’s imperial ambitions have made for some laughably thin legal theories. As Just Security noted, the government’s argument in defense of Trump’s birthright citizenship EO does not reference any citizenship statutes nor point to any authority that would give Trump the right to undo birthright citizenship via the stroke of a pen. Instead, after quoting the relevant part of the Fourteenth Amendment — ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — the EO just goes on to state that it “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

The problem for Trump is that the Fourteenth Amendment has absolutely historically been interpreted to do just that.

But Trump doesn’t recognize it as a problem, and nobody is forcing him to do so.

It can’t be stressed enough that there is no meaningful legal support for Trump’s actions. Yes, Republicans for a few decades now have flirted with the unitary executive theory — the idea that the president’s authority over the executive branch is absolute, particularly in national security contexts and when it comes to hiring and firing. (Well, to be perfectly correct, Republicans flirt with the unitary executive theory only when Republicans hold the presidency. When Democrats do, the constant drumbeat from the GOP is that the president should have very little authority.) But even the unitary executive theory hasn’t gone so far as to say that the president can do things like unilaterally close government agencies. Even when Project 2025 called for radical changes to USAID, for example, they didn’t argue it could just be closed.

But it doesn’t matter because no one is stopping him. We’re on a steep downward slope, and it’s freezing over.