How much damage has been done so far?

Assessing the impact of Trump 2.0

As anticipated, the second Trump Administration began with an aggressive “shock and awe” blitz of executive actions designed to undermine democratic institutions, overwhelm the public, and throw the nation off balance.

While Trump is intentionally creating chaos on numerous fronts, at the core of his actions is a dangerous undermining of America’s fundamental tradition of an executive kept in check and balanced by Congress and the courts. We see this expressed in real-time as Trump willfully ignores legislation and funding authorizations from Congress — including longstanding legal protections designed to ensure the health, safety, and security of the American people. And as he razes government agencies wholesale and purges thousands of federal workers to install unqualified, unvetted “yes” men and women in their places.

This edition of The Entrenchment Agenda assesses the degree to which Trump has advanced his six most extreme anti-democratic measures in ways that, ultimately, aim to make it difficult for voters to dislodge authoritarians from office: (1) pardons to license lawbreaking, (2) investigations against critics and rivals, (3) regulatory retaliation, (4) federal law enforcement overreach, (5) domestic deployment of the military, and (6) the potential refusal of autocrats to leave office.

Pardons to license lawbreaking

As he promised, and despite what even close supporters (including Vice President JD Vance) said should not be the case, Trump granted clemency to the nearly 1,600 rioters charged with crimes related to their actions on January 6, 2021. He did so regardless of the violence committed, including granting clemency for offenses involving violence against law enforcement officers. In doing so, Trump solidified his alliance with domestic paramilitary actors, and pardonees have since gone on to menace January 6 police officers, return to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress, and appear on stage at a Trump rally.

Beyond the mass clemency he granted to January 6 rioters and in-step with the pattern he established in his first term of handing out pardons for his political allies, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, founder of a dark web platform used for illegal drug trafficking whose cause was championed by the libertarian movement and cryptocurrency advocates. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote that he pardoned Ulbricht in honor of “the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly,” making the connection between political support and the pardon explicit.

Assessment: Trump’s January 6 pardons vindicated his allies’ use of violence to pursue political power. Without any constraints on this executive power, Trump will likely continue to use it to place himself and his supporters above the law.

Directing investigations against critics and rivals

Building on his false assertions that the 2020 election he lost to President Joe Biden was “rigged” and the January 6 rioters did “nothing wrong,” Trump is staffing the Department of Justice with high-ranking officials who adhere to those misguided beliefs and have signaled their willingness to act on them.

On Inauguration Day, Trump installed Ed Martin as acting D.C. U.S. Attorney, a former leader of the Missouri Republican Party who represented rioters and served as a “Stop the Steal” activist during the 2020 campaign. From that perch, Martin, who describes himself performing that role as one of “Trump’s lawyers,” moved to dismiss a case in which he represented one of the January 6 defendants, fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on cases related to January 6, and sent letters to Democratic lawmakers Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Robert Garcia threatening to investigate the officials over critical statements they made about Elon Musk’s DOGE activities.

Kash Patel, a close Trump ally who claimed the FBI played a role in stoking the January 6 attack and published a book in 2023 listing dozens of high-profile Trump critics by name, labeling them as “the most dangerous threat to our democracy,” was narrowly confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become FBI Director in late February.

Trump then appointed Dan Bongino as Deputy FBI Director to assist Patel, thereby breaking the longstanding norm of appointing a career agent to that role. Bongino, a former Secret Service officer-turned-commentator, has described the left as “evil,” said Biden “should be in prison” and investigated for “possible treason,” and promoted numerous conspiracy theories about Democrats, the 2020 election, and January 6.

On Monday, Patel was sworn into office by Attorney General Pam Bondi, another Trump ally who prominently boosted Trump’s 2020 election conspiracies. At her own swearing-in-ceremony, Bondi announced the creation of a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate those who handled criminal investigations related to Trump on both the state and federal levels. In an interview on Fox News on March 3, Bondi said she was getting “rid of the Jack Smith team” that had investigated Trump’s handling of January 6. She said, “They’re gone, gone” and vowed to “root out” and “find” those at the department she believed “despised Trump…everything is on the table, everything…everything is being looked into.”

Assessment: Trump made “retribution” against those who investigated him a centerpiece of his 2025 campaign. He has installed high-ranking officials who are acting accordingly. The FBI Director has identified other targets by name, and a pair of Democratic lawmakers have already been subjected to legal harassment. Weaponization of the Justice Department is underway and is likely to escalate.

Regulatory retaliation

Eliminating the “deep state,” Trump’s shorthand for various government officials who opposed his unlawful actions during his first team, was one of Trump’s central 2025 campaign pledges that’s now creating enormous upheaval throughout the federal government.

As a first step, Trump signed an executive order known as “Schedule F” to shift government employees into an employment classification with fewer protections.

But, Trump’s alliance with tech mogul Elon Musk, which intensified during the campaign's final months with Musk’s significant financial contributions and personal zeal for Trump’s re-election, has supercharged his efforts to purge the workforce. Trump tapped Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is not an official department established by Congress and is tasked with slashing the federal workforce and cutting spending.

Without authorization from Congress or serious security vetting, Musk and his DOGE employees took over the Department of Treasury and Office of Personnel Management computer systems, gaining unfettered access to vast troves of sensitive information. DOGE staff used the access to email millions of government workers asking for their resignations and employment information, to offer retirement agreements, and later, terminate employment. These activities raise substantial concerns about privacy, Appointments Clause violations, and conflicts of interest Musk may have with his private companies that have business before the federal government.

Musk has also appeared in the Oval Office to make widespread accusations of fraud without evidence. He has repeatedly taken to his social media platform, X, to disparage Democrats and various government agencies and programs. One is USAID, which the Trump Administration quickly shuttered, even though Trump has no authority to abolish it, as Congress established it and would require its authorization. Trump had said it was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”

USAID is a test case of sorts for the administration. Trump's allies have made it known that they don’t believe in the idea of independence at federal agencies, which Congress designed to be apolitical, and that they want to use the agencies to advance their entrenchment agenda. One way Trump is stamping out independence at other agencies is by firing Inspectors General, apolitical investigators tasked with rooting out corruption, conducting audits, and making sure laws are being followed at their assigned agencies. On January 25, Trump abruptly fired Inspectors General across 17 agencies, eliminating those safeguards.

At the Federal Communications Commission, Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, has ordered a review of CBS’s editing of an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, citing concerns over possible “news distortion” — a classification previously reserved for only extreme cases of news misrepresentation and has, in rare instances, caused stations to lose their licenses. Carr is looking into PBS and NPR over its aired sponsorships and a San Francisco radio station over coverage of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid. Carr has also ordered investigations into Comcast over its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, which the Trump Administration has banned across the government and seeks to eliminate in the private sector, based on false claims that speech and policies promoting DEI are unlawful.

Institutions of higher education are being impacted, too. Georgetown Law was recently warned of an inquiry over its DEI practices, as D.C. Interim Attorney Ed Martin, mentioned above, vowed not to hire anyone from schools that “teach and utilize” DEI. The Trump Administration is canceling $400 million in funding and contracts for Columbia University as a part of efforts to stop what it considers to be “illegal” protests on campus.

The White House also punished the White House press corps for its speech. When the Associated Press refused to incorrectly call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as Trump desired, the White House retaliated by banning the outlet. Soon after, the White House determined that the independent White House Correspondents Association would no longer decide which outlets would be permitted to cover the White House and would control the press pool instead.

Trump is also targeting single individuals for retaliation. Upon taking office, Trump swiftly revoked security clearances for dozens of officials who spoke out about Russian disinformation, including top intelligence officials from the Obama and Bush administrations and also Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who published a memoir critical of Trump.

More recently, Trump moved to remove security clearances from lawyers who Trump investigated him or did work for his political opponents. In late February, he targeted those who provided legal advice to former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the Department of Justice’s previous January 6 investigations into Trump. On Thursday, he issued an executive order to suspend security clearances held by attorneys at the law firm Perkins Coie over what Trump’s executive order labeled as “dangerous and dishonest activity” linked to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign against Trump.

Lastly, Trump's tariff policies should also be considered a form of regulatory retaliation, too. He wields them inconsistently as a means of leverage, causing tumultuous effects on the global markets.

Assessment: Purging employees is the first step towards replacing them and remaking government agencies to comply with Trump’s agenda. When that happens, regulatory retaliation can be expected to accelerate in all forms, especially as the administration restricts press access, terminates government watchdogs, and eliminates other accountability measures. The administration's aggressive moves to tamp down on free speech should be vigorously countered as a first line of defense.

Federal law enforcement overreach

Trump announced in his inaugural address that he would declare a national emergency to send troops to the southern border and use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to “repel the dangerous invasion of our country” by mustering “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement” to carry out mass deportations.

Although Trump demands that most federal agencies reduce their operations, immigration enforcement resources are growing. This is in keeping with his campaign promise to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement, including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI, and Homeland Security investigators,” which already had substantial law enforcement operations. The Migration Policy Institute described the current state of play as:

“Reaching beyond the federal ambit, the administration is also doubling down on its pressure on state and local authorities to conduct immigration enforcement actions traditionally reserved for federal agents, and is seeking or threatening to penalize those that offer resistance….The whole-of-government machinery displayed by this administration in its first month—accompanied by a muscular, carefully crafted messaging campaign—has the closest parallels with the actions that occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when broad swaths of the federal government were repurposed to serve the national security mission.”

Trump’s pick to run the DHS, Kristi Noem, and the “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, have echoed Trump’s war-like rhetoric about an “invasion” and other extreme ideas as they have pledged to execute Trump’s vision. Homan has said he expects “collateral arrests” in the process.

Assessment: Although Trump has vowed to increase immigration enforcement to conduct the “largest deportations operations in American history,” the data has not yet reached that level. That said, as Trump continues consolidating law enforcement resources and his officials increase demands for assistance from local and state law enforcement, that could rapidly change.

Domestic deployment of the military

During the first Trump Administration, Trump faced off with officials from the Defense Department about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to crack down on Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. This time around, Trump has selected a Defense Department head, Secretary Pete Hegseth, who described the act of calling up troops to put down protests on American soil as a “mainstream idea” and is enthusiastic about sending the military to the border to defend the country “in your own country.”

Setting the stage for potential future action, Trump, in his January 20 declaration of a national emergency at the border, ordered the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security to issue a joint report within 90 days on whether invoking the Insurrection Act to “obtain operational control” of the border would be necessary.

Assessment: Trump could position the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to conduct joint operations for immigration enforcement. The forthcoming April 20, 2025, report from both departments about invoking the Insurrection Act may provide a framework for this and other purposes, such as quelling protests.

Autocratic refusal to leave office

While the Constitution clearly states that a U.S. president may serve no more than two terms, Trump and his allies suggest that this prohibition is open to interpretation. For example, one member of Congress has proposed amending the 22nd Amendment to allow Trump to run again, some activists are plotting a “Trump third term” project, and one poll has indicated that more than half of Americans believe he will run again in 2028. Regardless of whether Trump formally runs as a candidate, he continues to raise political funds at an impressive pace, assuring his ability to wield considerable political influence in future elections.

Assessment: The Trump Administration’s moves to transform the federal workforce into enablers and enforcers of his autocratic agenda is the strongest indication that, whether he runs as a 2028 candidate or not, that authoritarian faction is intent on entrenching generational power. “Autocratic refusal to leave office” extends beyond Trump, and it will become harder to dislodge authoritarians from office as their entrenchment degrades democratic institutions and political opposition over time. Additionally, autocrats often name and install successors and then exercise power behind the scenes, which is a realistic option for Trump in the future.

Key takeaways

Trump has swiftly advanced his authoritarian playbook to entrench power, but the degree of implementation varies across different elements. As it stands today, Trump’s maximalist and unprecedented deployment of the pardon power remains a major vector of abuse and corruption. So, too, does his approach of ignoring the laws of Congress that establish federal agencies and fund the government. And, the administration's relentless scapegoating of vulnerable communities and aims to clamp down on speech, whether that’s in the form of DEI bans or investigations into critical press coverage, is grave.

On a more hopeful note, there are early signs that the federal courts may rein in Trump’s authoritarian takeovers of government programs in some meaningful ways. Similarly, the alarming steps members of the Trump Administration have taken to make government services and funding (as well as employment) contingent on fidelity to Trump is generating a healthy degree of outcry that, if channeled properly, could translate into widespread political opposition that may guard against authoritarian excesses.

Other aspects of the playbook are still in the early days of implementation, particularly regarding the administration’s potential organization of large-scale operations through the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, whether that comes to immigration enforcement or cracking down on future political protests.