WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 01: U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) speak to the media outside the Capitol on April 01, 2025 in Washington, DC. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) spoke on the Senate floor for more than 25 hours protesting President Trump’s agenda, breaking a record set by Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 24 hour, 18 minute filibuster against the Civil Rights Act in 1957.
Trump’s popularity, or lack thereof, also presents a weakness for his efforts at autocratic consolidation. Other recent autocrats had huge parliamentary majorities when they first won election, allowing them to consolidate power by passing laws, and amending or rewriting constitutions.
While 2024 was Trump’s strongest showing in three elections, he still only eked out a win through tight margins in crucial states, and his party did not obtain large legislative majorities. It puts his efforts at consolidation in a precarious state: Without the ability to easily push his agenda through the legislature, all of his biggest actions so far have been through executive orders or actions, and they are often clearly illegal.
That has left the administration at the whim of the courts. So far, this has gone extremely poorly for Trump as his orders have been repeatedly struck down in district and appellate courts. These court rulings have pushed Republicans to attack the courts and propose impeachments of judges and laws to curtail judicial power, and the Trump administration to either defy orders or threaten to do so.
But Trump and his team seem to be operating on an assumption that, unlike their foreign counterparts, they’ve already seized control of the Supreme Court. They appear to believe the Supreme Court’s decision in the presidential immunity case that saved Trump from prosecution in 2024 contains a theory of unburdened executive power that would bless all of their actions. But that’s not guaranteed.
“We will soon see if the Supreme Court is totally on board with a Trump dictatorship or whether it still thinks it has a role to play in separation of powers,” Scheppele said.
And internal contradictions within Trump’s policy regime may still crater his popularity or split his MAGA coalition.
The first of these is one unique element of Trump’s autocratic efforts: Elon Musk. There isn’t a real analogue, in any of the other countries that slid into autocracy, to the way the richest man in the world and owner of a massive media platform has gone into government to tear it apart.
“There’s a real contradiction between what Musk is doing and what MAGA purports to do,” Levitsky said. “If you’re going to build a populist coalition among the working class, breaking the state is probably not the way to do that.”
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