An Authoritarian’s Dream
The Supreme Court handed Trump the mantel he's been yearning for.
As President Trump’s political power begins to fade, his Supreme Court appointments are handing him the very authoritarian mantel he’s been yearning for.
Signs of a weakened president are everywhere. His approval ratings have been pushed to historic lows by the unpopular and unsettled Iran war, continued rising inflation, economic distress, and increasing public dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. Even the Republican-controlled Congress is refusing to go along with his notorious $1.8 billion fund to “compensate” the January 6 attackers. The Senate is resisting pressure to take up the “SAVE Act,” the president’s big voter suppression bill.
Meanwhile, the president’s Supreme Court majority seems determined to rescue him from his troubles by putting the presidency on political steroids. In a series of unprecedented decisions in the term that ended last week, the court authorized the president to ignore congressional restrictions, destroy the independence of regulatory agencies, summarily fire civil servants, and obliterate administrative law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan in Trump v. Slaughter, observed that the executive power now granted by the court is greater than the autocratic power of the English king who impelled the American colonies to issue the Declaration of Independence and initiate the American Revolution.
The court’s latest decisions vastly expanding presidential power are the culmination of a trend that began in 2024 when it granted Trump sweeping immunity from prosecution for alleged criminal conduct during his first term in office.
The immunity decision was about a specific question: whether Trump was immune from prosecution for his conduct on January 6, 2021. The court could have found, as the lower courts did, that Trump had no immunity in that particular case, leaving for another day the question of how broad the protection may be in other circumstances. Instead, during oral arguments, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch famously noted that the court was “writing a rule for the ages.” And so it did, shielding the president from legal accountability for his actions in office, far beyond what Trump was then accused of, including conduct he might be accused of in the future. For a president no longer constrained by the ballot box, this was a gift.
The coup de grace was the case last week upholding Trump’s summary firing of Rebecca Slaughter, the last Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission. The decision overruled a longstanding precedent that the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies established by Congress for the purpose of making expert determinations in a quasi-legislative or judicial manner, except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
The Slaughter decision risks destroying the professional civil service. It endangers all government experts, making them vulnerable to political interference and intimidation by the president. (Consider a national weather agency run by people with sharpies, ready to track hurricanes to match the president’s wacky views.) As Elie Mystal wrote in the Nation, “[I]t means that institutions that regulate business, banks, public health, and the environment are nothing more than puppets of the administration in charge.”
When the Slaughter case was argued, Solicitor General John Sauer could not have been clearer. Why did the president demand total control over all executive employees? The president “must have the power to control,” he said, because: “[T]he one who has the power to remove is the one who … is the person they have to fear and obey.”
The court’s insulation of the president from accountability and the expansion of executive power is an authoritarian’s dream. Vice President JD Vance made this clear in recent comments about the Watergate crisis that lead to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Vance asserted that Watergate would not be an issue when the “deep state” is controlled by the president and cannot launch “a witch hunt.” In fact, the “deep state” in the Watergate crisis was a vigilant bipartisan congressional effort that threatened Nixon with impeachment and a judicial system that enforced the rule of law against an intransigent president.
The expansion of executive power beyond previous limits may be an authoritarian’s dream. But it can turn into a nightmare. Other authoritarians who packed the courts to aggrandize their power (like Viktor Orbán in Hungary) have been unceremoniously sacked by the people. Trump in his remaining two years and those who have backed his power grab are headed in the same direction. And let us not forget that it all started when authoritarian King George III was sacked by the American people.
Nancy Gertner is a retired U.S. District Court judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. John Shattuck is a professor of practice at Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and president emeritus of Central European University.
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