Recently, the United States, under the guidance and control of President Trump’s administration, is at risk of a threat to democracy as he exercises abusive executive power and politicizes independent institutions such as the Department of Justice. To an extent, he has achieved his goal of amassing immense power and eroding other institutions, given the fragile nature of the United States’ presidential system. President Trump has undermined the democratic regime in the United States in several ways, including politicizing institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice, and expanding his executive powers to circumvent institutional procedures and advance his goals. 

One of President Trump’s ways of undermining democracy in the United States is his constant injection of ideological and political motives into regime-level institutions such as the Department of Justice. The Trump administration is using mechanisms to politicize the Department of Justice by replacing the DoJ prosecutors who do not align with President Trump‘s motives and desires with those who are loyal to him. Additionally, the clear sign that the Justice Department was being driven to satisfy Trump’s goals was evident when Pam Bondi, the United States Attorney General, fired about 20 Justice Department employees, which included the staff who worked on the January 6 cases for special counsel, Jack Smith, who charged President Trump with improperly retainment of hundreds of classified documents after he left office early in 2021, and for engaging in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to stay in power after his 2020 election loss. 

Through “How Democracies Die,” Political Scientists, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt highlight that “when mutual toleration are weak, democracy is hard to sustain. If we view our rivals as a dangerous threat, we have too much fear if they are elected. We may decide to employ any means necessary to defeat them-and herein lies a justification for authoritarian measures”. This argument by Levitsky and Ziblatt help shed light on the threat to democracy in this action as it can be seen that the current administration is undermining and eroding the democratic institutional norm of mutual toleration by Pam Bondi with the removal of the Justice Department’s employees, who had worked hard to build a case against President Trump, including the January 6th Capitol riot and other classified documents, and were then replaced with political appointees. This is an example of eroding an institutional norm, mutual toleration, as the Trump administration is not following the traditional norms that protect civil servants from political pressure, and it has removed several prosecutors and investigators. His administration argued that they could not be trusted to implement the president’s agenda because the administration did not view them as legitimate rivals, leading to their removal despite strong disagreements with their ideas.

Another way President Trump is abusing his executive power is by overusing his legal authority to issue executive orders to control the federal bureaucracy, thereby bypassing congressional approval swiftly. Executive orders are a legal mechanism the president can use to implement laws and regulations; the constitutional basis for these orders must originate in a statute or a provision of the Constitution. His excessive use of executive orders, although legal, allows his administration to challenge existing institutional norms, such as institutional forbearance. Institutional forbearance refers to the democratic norm of exercising self-control and restraining actions that violate the spirit of democratic rules. When President Trump returned to the office for his second term, he relied heavily on executive orders, issuing about 200, covering topics ranging from immigration to tariffs and climate change. Several of these executive orders were deemed unconstitutional and invalidated by federal courts for exceeding the executive branch’s authority. Trump’s actions can be seen as executive aggrandizement, as we have discussed in class, in which the executive, President Trump, exercises control over everything to maintain his power.

Moreover, the arguments made by Levitsky and Ziblatt can help shed light on the threat to democracy posed by undermining informal constitutional norm, institutional forbearance as they argue, “the opposite of forbearance is to exploit one’s institutional prerogatives in an unrestrained way. Legal scholar Mark Tushnet calls this “constitutional hardball”: playing by the rules but pushing against their bounds and “playing for keeps.””. In this analysis, Levitsky and Ziblatt highlight that a political leader might abuse executive power in an uncontrolled, unchecked way, since it is a legal mechanism the president can use, but also note that it is a dangerous form of political behavior that erodes democratic norms. Additionally, it can represent a shift from democratic procedures toward a zero-sum conflict that leads to the incremental decay and erosion of democratic principles and institutions. 

All in all, we can see that in the United States, under President Trump and his administration, democratic norms and procedures are being challenged as he attempts to abuse his executive power, using legal mechanisms such as executive orders to achieve his goals. Moreover, he has also gained control of several independent bureaucratic institutions, such as the Department of Justice, where he removed employees who did not align with his motives and objectives. These situations can be viewed through the lens of informal democratic norms, such as mutual toleration and institutional forbearance, as President Trump gradually erodes and undermines democratic norms in the United States, thereby contributing to democratic erosion and backsliding.