The US is living through an administrative coup

Donald Trump is asserting powers with no foundation in law & attempting to erase Congressional authority under Article I. Such an unlawful expansion of executive power is an administrative coup.

Feb 03, 2025

Presidents cannot make new law through executive orders, and they cannot use them to exert authorities not granted to the President by the Constitution or by laws compliant with the Constitution. And yet:

Trump has attempted to void the Constitutionally guaranteed citizenship of some Americans, despite that action being strictly prohibited by the 14th Amendment.
Trump is attempting to seize control of all appropriated funds, despite Article I of the Constitution granting sole power of the purse to Congress and those appropriated funds being allocated as a matter of law.
This attempt to seize all appropriated funds is tied to the crisis surrounding Elon Musk taking over federal personnel records, the Treasury payments system, and USAID.
Trump is further usurping Congressional authority by imposing tariffs on Canada, without any of the emergency conditions the narrowly delegated tariff authority would require.

In each case, the President is asserting powers that do not exist. Many of Trump's orders are—to use the words of one federal judge—"blatantly unconstitutional". Others might appear to fall within the authority granted to the President by law, but violate specific statutes.

States, nonprofit organizations, and individuals, are suing to block, reverse, or remedy these abuses. Just Security is tracking these lawsuits. It is expected many more will follow, given the millions of individuals and hundreds of agencies and departments affected.

About Checks & Balances

Any American child learning about the history of American government learns that there are three branches of government—the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judiciary—which are set up to check and balance each other's exercise of power. A major concern of the framers of the Constitution was that an autocrat, a criminal cabal, or a traitor in league with foreign adversaries, might seek to accumulate unaccountable, unreviewable power.

To avoid a return to monarchy or foreign rule, the framers created a system of checks and balances, built around the principle that rights are paramount and powers are limited.

When an elected official, a political party, or those empowered by elected leaders, use the powers of office, or grant themselves new powers, to remove checks and balances or alter the way a written Constitution is translated into practice, that is an administrative coup. The government leadership might look the same, because the same elected leaders are at the top, but the actual structure of administrative governance is altered.

Even the Financial Times newspaper describes what is taking place as an administrative coup. Whatever the motive, whatever the results, that is what is happening. The President is operating outside the law in order to take power away from the Congress, the Constitution, and the People.

The new US administration is attempting to coerce agency directors and staff into complying with orders that contravene written law and grant undue power to the President. Photo: Paulius Dragunas.

In the aftermath of an administrative coup, government begins to operate outside the scope of law, allowing corrupt and arbitrary motives to influence policy, empowering individuals at the expense of the nation, and putting vital services at risk. Among the immediate signs that the rule of law has broken down is the seizure or reallocation of public funds by allies of the would-be autocrat, without proper public scrutiny.

Illegal Firings & Intimidation

Mr. Trump appears determined to remove all prosecutors, FBI agents, and other government workers, at all levels, across all agencies, whom he does not believe will be loyal to him, even if he violates the law. He has unlawfully ordered agency directors to send vaguely menacing threats to staff, warning them of "adverse consequences" if they do not immediately report the names of any people they believe to harbor views and values that do not perfectly mirror his own.

Those menacing threats are unlawful for a number of reasons:

Mr. Trump cannot subject federal workers to an ideological litmus test; no law provides for such authority. Being elected does not mean every person in the federal government must embody and enact your personal worldview.
The orders to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion, have also demanded all reports—including those mandated by law—be unpublished or revoked if they include the words “fairness” or “justice”. (Note: The Preamble to the Constitution states that the republic was established “to establish Justice”, and the Constitution also provides numerous guarantees of fairness, equal protection, and justice.)
The First Amendment makes it illegal for Congress to pass any law abridging the right to seek redress for grievances; since Presidential authority exists only as established by law, the President cannot act without deference to this right.

If it were not an administrative coup, we would not see these efforts at intimidation, thought control, retaliation, and removal of watchdogs.

Abuses of Power

Just a few of the headlines from the January 31 edition of the Trump Tyranny Tracker paint a clear picture of the ongoing administrative coup:

Pay to Play

Mr. Trump has actively sought to profit from the Presidency in at least four ways, each of which raises numerous concerns beyond the fact that the President appears to be selling the office.

Crypto: He has launched a "meme coin", using cryptocurrency technology, allowing "investors" to vastly increase his wealth in a kind of ideological gold rush. Nothing like this has ever happened before in American history. By some estimates, Mr. Trump's wealth has increased by tens of billions of dollars, due to this arrangement, which has been described as holding "unprecedented potential for corruption".
Properties: His family’s businesses have made deals to take in vast sums in foreign investment through several new hotel properties, including one in Serbia and another in Saudi Arabia.
Stocks: He is using his Trump Media company to bring profit to his family, pay political allies, and control what his supporters know, think, and feel about American politics, while having the power to select and (by his reasoning) give orders to the head of the agency that will regulate his company.
Coercion: He has filed lawsuits against the press, citing absurd and untenable causes, which could not hold up under the First Amendment, and negotiating "settlements" in which those companies pay him personally to end the lawsuits. There is reporting suggesting Meta agreed to pay Trump in hopes of favorable treatment and that Paramount may be aiming to win approval of a merger by making such a payment.

Even discussing the possibility of a payment for official acts was enough to land former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich in federal prison for 14 years. (He was released early after being pardoned by Donald Trump.)

The word corruption means a degradation, weakening, or breaking. Corruption weakens not only the affected institutions; it weakens the country itself, in all of its dealings at home and abroad. The Constitution recognizes this in the clauses prohibiting “emoluments”.

What’s next?

The American system of checks and balances means Congress has authority to act to constrain unlawful behavior by the President. So do the Courts. With Republicans likely unwilling to impeach Trump, Congress will need to be more creative in crafting bipartisan legislation that Trump could be politically compelled to sign, or in using wider legislative authorities, to restore the rule of law and end this assault on the Constitution.

The American people will continue to push back—through investigative journalism, through litigation and political organizing, through protest, and by building a body of evidence that demonstrates that acts of “overreach” were actually deliberate crimes. Some of those efforts will see early success; others will take time to play out. There may eventually be thousands or even tens of thousands of individual legal cases—including civil lawsuits, whistleblower complaints, internal investigations, and criminal cases.

Democracy requires eternal vigilance. This is why.