Almost a month into Trump 2.0, with Trump's "muzzle velocity" of Executive Orders (EOs) spreading more disquiet than even the worst-case scenarios had envisaged, the question increasingly looming among US watchers is whether the US is in a constitutional crisis.
The US Constitution has stood out for its clear separation of powers among the three arms of the government: The executive (the elected President), the legislature (House and Senate), and the courts. But the trampling that the legislature has been subjected to by the Trump executive threatens to upend the constitutional system of checks and balances.
Trump's flurry of EOs has targeted several offices and agencies established by Congress-USAID being the most prominent and well-known and have terminated spending mandated by Congress, in executive overreach. Predictably, the many afflicted by the EOs have gone to court, and predictably again, the courts have stayed the execution of many of the EOs.
Until now, the Trump administration has either abided by the court's restraints or submitted that it would like the court to review its order in short, enter the process of thrashing the issue out in court. But Vice President JD Vance threw a "curve ball" by tweeting that just as no court would try to tell a General how to run a war, courts do not have the right to curb the "legitimate" powers of the executive.
The Constitution's founders had not foreseen a situation where the polity would be so polarized that the Congress and Senate would lose sight of their constitutional salience. Rare is the legislator who has voted across party lines in recent years; under the vengeful Trump, rarer still. Hence the refrain: with Trump rampant, and the prospect very real that court orders could be disregarded or defied, how far is the US from a constitutional crisis?
The Trump administration's mission is to restore the executive's powers which, it argues, were curbed post-Watergate by the weakened Nixon presidency. His two chief point men to effect this mission are Elon Musk as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE) and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought.
The OMB is the White House's gatekeeper, overseeing the actual spending of the programs passed by Congress. Vought is a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Conservative who believes it is his Christian duty to re-establish the primacy of the executive. The congressional outlays, Vought argues, were meant to be a ceiling; instead, they have become a floor.
Federal Bureaucracy In Line Of Fire
Worse, the Federal bureaucracy, he charges, has become a "fourth branch," an unelected mass of 2.4 million Federal employees, who are out of control. They are unaccountable and they can't be fired. They have to be brought to heel. Vought was quoted as saying at a conference in 2023: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work... We want to put them in trauma."
Understandably then, a recent article in The Atlantic on "How Hitler Dismantled Democracy in 53 Days in Germany" by Timothy Ryback, a historian who has written several books on Hitler's Germany, stayed in the magazine's "Most Read" list for weeks on end. And a reading of "Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run The World" by the vastly experienced and knowledgeable Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum, was almost delicious in the many moments of irony it evoked.
The playbook followed by MAGA devotees to demonize USAID followed exactly the playbook used by propagandists of Russia and China, as spelled out by Applebaum, in their repeated attacks on US democracy.
In the USAID case, it all began at 9 am on February 5 when an independent journalist posted an unsubstantiated claim online that USAID had paid $8 million to Politico, a Washington-based online newspaper. Politico immediately clarified that USAID had paid it only $24,000 for subscriptions, which the journalist acknowledged 10 hours later was indeed the truth. However, by then the post had gone viral. In the next 36 hours, it accumulated 15,000 posts, including from a Republican Representative from the House and from Viktor Orban, Hungary's autocratic Prime Minister whom Trump admires.
Conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, had seized upon the online storm to allege that Democrats had used USAID to fund a "fake news empire." Orban followed this up with an allegation on X that Politico had financed the "entire left-wing media in Hungary," notching 27 million views.
Then President Trump jumped in on his Truth Social account to criticise government news subscriptions to the likes of Politico as "pay-offs" for talking up Democrats. "This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history," he wrote in all caps. The White House press office hurriedly announced the cancellation of its Politico subscription.
Ms Applebaum is a Senior Fellow at Johns Hopkins, a long-term observer of Russia, and an acknowledged historian of authoritarianism. Her book is a primer on how the growing tribe of autocrats in the post-Cold War world are banding together to expand their sphere of influence. In it, she details how autocrats use the media to sow doubt and confusion about democracy itself. One example she elaborates is eerily similar to the USAID slur campaign.
In February 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, it alleged that secret US-funded bio labs in Ukraine were conducting experiments with bat viruses. The charge was immediately rubbished but not before conspiracy networks had spread the hashtag #biolab on Twitter, notching up nine million views. MAGA's favourite TV host, Tucker Carlson, played clips on Fox News of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesman discussing the allegation and demanded that the Biden administration should "stop lying and tell us what's going on here."
The Chinese foreign ministry, Ms Applebaum recounts, took the story further by declaring that the US controlled 26 bio-labs in Ukraine. Even as Xinhua ran headlines like "US-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond," media outlets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with content-sharing agreements with Xinhua and other Chinese media entities amplified the charge.
China's motive, Ms Applebaum details, was clear: It wanted attention to be diverted from the charge that COVID-19 had spread from its labs in Wuhan. But the story also appealed to conspiracy sites in the US like the Q Anon network, who are virulently anti-vaccination.
In an eerie chorus, even as Ukraine joined battle with Russia, the Russian, Chinese, and "extremist American" interests all repeated the Russian accusations justifying the invasion and parroted that Ukrainians are "Nazis" and that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA. So successful was the echo chamber effect that, according to one poll, Ms. Applebaum recounts, one out of four Americans believed that the biolab story was true!
Conspiracy Theories Abound
The story does not end there. In March 2022, Ms Applebaum writes, the Russian state media ran a story that Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery weapon for bioweapons, first infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread diseases. Russia's ambassador to the UN followed up with a statement about the "biobird scandal," warning about "the real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bio agents from Ukraine."
What is the larger game plan of autocrats? Ms Applebaum argues that "autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics (in democracies). They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself."
Propagandists also leverage one established social truth: Smear campaigns work. No matter how quick, effective, credible, and resounding the denial, some odium still sticks to the individual or entity smeared. A week ago, President Trump had notched up the highest approval ratings ever for him: 53%. How many would bet that the bulk of his followers will not believe the smear campaign against USAID?
President Trump had repeatedly vowed in the election campaign to seek "retribution" from his enemies. What will happen if the US Federal government uses all the instruments of the state-legal, judicial, and financial-to target one of President Trump's personal enemies? Trump's critics charge this has already begun in the Justice Department, which controls the FBI, with line personnel who had investigated the January 6 Capitol Hill insurrection being targeted.
Ms Applebaum's book came out on the eve of the November election with Trump's return very much on the cards. In it, she had forewarned: "If he (Trump) succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete." Her book's descriptions of the autocrat's playbook hold the promise of being a useful mirror to track the trajectory of Trump 2.0.
(Ajay Kumar is a senior journalist. He is the former Managing Editor, Business Standard, and former Executive Editor, Economic Times)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
