Dictator on Day 100
Donald Trump's quest to concentrate unprecedented levels of power began on Day One and hasn't stopped
More than a year before he took office, Donald Trump vowed, not once, but twice, that if he were to be elected to a second term as president, he would be a dictator “on day one.” He insisted he would be a dictator only on day one—but what dictator has ever seized power only for one day and then immediately relinquished it? As Trump concludes his first 100 days in office today, the record makes clear what he really intended: Centralize all power in his person, overturning the checks and balances of the American system of government and replacing them with a dictatorship.
What he has sought to install is, in fact, a “dictatorship”—not in some emotional or hyperbolic sense of the term, not as a category merely suggesting the potential for future assaults on our freedom. He is establishing a dictatorship in an exact and literal sense. The president has in fact asserted the ability to exercise power on his personal whim, unchecked by any other branch or organ of government.
No, this is not final. The dictatorship has been asserted, but not yet consolidated and entrenched. The fact that someone can write and publish an article like this is a demonstration of that fact. But if we are going to salvage and rebuild the American system, we have to honestly confront the extent to which it has already been subverted.
There are three main ways Trump has seized power, which together constitute a transformation of our system of government.
The Power of the Purse
The first prong of Trump’s assault was carried out on Trump’s behalf by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is not a department and is not making government efficient. The point of DOGE was never actually to cut government spending. Everyone familiar with how the federal budget works predicted it would fail at this task, and it has. That was just cover for the real goal: for the executive to control spending by its own dictate, in defiance of Congress. It’s not about the size of government, it’s about who controls it.
The actual purpose of DOGE was to reach into the mechanisms of every executive agency, grab hold of its two most basic functions—hiring, and the processing of payments—and transfer them to a group of young volunteers who answered only to Elon Musk. Though the Trump administration now seems to be putting the skids under Musk, the mechanism he created remains, to be used directly by Trump and his inner circle.
A Washington Post report describes how this worked in the DOGE takeover of USAID. Two “DOGE bros” fired all the top managers and demanded sole access to the USAID payment system. This gave the ability to veto specific payments authorized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “a process that required them to manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.” In this case, DOGE was seizing power within the executive, taking it away from Rubio. And through the theatrical firing of government employees, they want us to believe they are taking power from the bureaucracy. The wider goal, however, is to seize the “power of the purse” from Congress.
In our Constitution—inspired by the system painstakingly built up in England over centuries of conflict between king and Parliament—Congress is supposed to exercise control over the budget, creating or dissolving executive agencies, determining how or whether they spend money, and thereby controlling the actions and power of the president.
This is the power Trump has seized, by way of DOGE, and he has been using it to dissolve agencies and institutions created through laws passed by Congress, such as USAID and the Institute of Peace. This is not a coup against the bureaucracy. That’s the window-dressing. It’s a coup against Congress.
The results are pretty clear. When Musk visited with members of Congress, they complained about DOGE cutting funding to programs in their districts. It has since been reported that congressmen who maintain friendly relations with the administration can get “Elon relief” for the districts. As I wrote in an entry for The UnPopulist’s Executive Watch project: The executive branch is supposed to have to beg Congress for money—but now it’s the other way around.
The power of the purse is how Congress governs, and without it, our representatives no longer decide what the government is empowered to do. They have lost their most effective and commonly used tool for restraining or compelling the executive.
This is the first step in establishing dictatorship. The next step is the unchecked power to arrest and imprison.
Dismissing Due Process
When Trump promised to be a dictator on day one, it was specifically for the purpose of “closing the border.” That’s precisely the day he began using that as an excuse to assert a dictatorial power that has only expanded since. As David J. Bier and Ilya Somin point out, “In an executive proclamation issued within hours of being inaugurated, Trump asserted that he has total power to shut down virtually all legal immigration and ignore laws that protect immigrants from wrongful detention and deportation.”
This campaign of persecution against immigrants is where Trump has asserted his most direct and terrifying dictatorial power, which has inevitably targeted U.S. citizens as well, just as many of us had warned. Trump has claimed the power to seize anyone off the streets without due process and not just expel them from the country but send them to be jailed indefinitely in a brutal foreign prison. At the start, the administration applied this to immigrants, including legitimate asylum-seekers and those with judicial orders protecting them from deportation. They have since ramped up to expelling citizens—including children who are citizens. After all, without due process, how are they even to know that the people they seize are immigrants and not citizens?
Trump has also suggested sending “home-grown” criminals—that is, U.S. citizens—to El Salvador’s prison, where they would not be protected by the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Without due process, how is any such abuse of power to be prevented?
David Woodruff, a professor of Soviet history, sum it up in an old Russian joke:
Foxes are fleeing the USSR in droves.
Q: Why are you running away?
Fox: The Soviets passed a new law that they’re going to arrest all camels.
Q: But you’re foxes!
Fox: Yeah, why don’t you try proving to the NKVD that you’re not a camel.
If immigrants can be deported without due process, then citizens will be expelled. If people can be sent to foreign gulags because the administration arbitrarily asserts they might be criminals, then critics can be sent there because the administration asserts they might be aiding criminals. In fact, this is already happening. A Wisconsin judge was just arrested after she was accused of refusing to cooperate with an attempt by ICE to detain someone in her courtroom.
Any of us might be next. Try proving to the NKVD that you’re not a camel.
Both the attempt to seize the power of the purse and the attempt to seize actual people have been challenged in the courts, so the final step is for Trump to neuter the courts.
A Law Unto Himself
It is no surprise that the courts have ruled repeatedly and unequivocally against him. They have demanded that he stop flights taking detained immigrants to El Salvador’s prisons. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that he must “facilitate” the return of at least one of these hapless victims. The courts have also demanded that Trump not carry out further deportations without giving reasonable notice to allow his victims to challenge these actions in court.
He has obstructed, delayed, or flat-out refused to comply with these orders.
One hundred days into his second term and Donald Trump is in open defiance of the federal courts. He is acting as a law unto himself, unanswerable not only to the legislative branch of government, but to the judiciary. If he does not back down, it is only a matter of time until the courts will be forced to declare that he is acting outside of the American legal system, at which point he can no longer claim either its legitimacy or its protection.
This is not a point we are in danger of reaching in the future. We are there now, and only a retreat by Trump can bring us back from the brink. A retreat on the part of the judiciary, at this point, would not end Trump’s lawlessness—it would merely acquiesce to it.
Add to this the fact that Trump has been attempting to end the independence of the legal profession and dragoon targeted law firms into offering him a massive partisan slush fund of free legal services. Under this system, the administration’s friends will enjoy all the protections of the law, its enemies none.
Our National Trade Commissar
There is one final element of this system of one-man rule, one that has been a feature, to some extent, of every dictatorship: central economic planning. For all the right’s posturing against the bogeyman of “socialism,” this is one aspect of dictatorship that Trump has taken to with gusto, in the form of a one-man trade war.
Legally, Trump is not supposed to be able to set all tariffs on his personal whim, doubling and tripling them, removing them and slapping them back on, day by day. His power over tariffs is supposed to depend on emergency conditions that he has not even attempted to demonstrate. But in practice, Congress has long neglected its constitutional power over tariffs and allowed the president wide leeway to change them.
The result is that Trump holds the absolute and arbitrary power to manage American trade, which effectively means the ability to manage a large portion of our economy. He has boasted about foreign leaders calling up and “kissing my ass,” and he is now subjecting other countries to an Apprentice-like reality show round of trade negotiations. More ominously, he now has American businessmen trooping to the White House or to Mar-a-Lago to ask for special carve-outs and exemptions for their own businesses or industries.
Trump is now the single point around which America’s entire economic universe revolves. The ability to kidnap people off the street and stash them away in a Central American gulag may be the most shocking application of Trump’s dictatorship, but the way that the daily up-and-down of the stock market depends on his whims is the most publicly visible sign that we now live in a system of one-man rule.
“Every Act Which May Define a Tyrant”
In the Declaration of Independence, after the opening passage in which the American Founders declare the individual rights which government must recognize and serve, they provided a list of the British king’s violations of that trust. The central items in that list are these four:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
Donald Trump has treated this as a to-do list. He has imposed tariffs on us at his whim and cut off our trade, while he denies us the benefits of due process and jury trials and is already transporting his victims overseas for imprisonment. These are, as the Declaration observes, “every act which may define a tyrant.”
Trump’s first 100 days are not merely an aggressive political agenda. They are a political revolution against our constitutional order. At the end of this brief time, he has imposed on us a fundamentally different system of government than we lived under before Inauguration Day.
The American system is not gone forever—but it will be, unless we demand to change it back, and take whatever steps are required to do so.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Excellent analysis, Rob! You essentialize and tie it all together very well. You create cognitive order out of the Trumpian event chaos. Everything Trump is doing has an underlying modus operandi, and that is power, power for him to exercise over our lives.
It is very disturbing to think that it has happened here. But it has. And we must be realistic and knowledgeable about it so that we can fight back.
I feel better armed for that fight!
Incidentally, it seems that the next signpost of dictatorship will be for a complete defiance of the courts. It seems that we are there already. Trump just recently acknowledged that he can bring back Kilmar Garcia from El Salvador with a simple phone call, but he won’t.
It seems that the Supreme Court is choosing to evade/bury their head in the sand. They hope that if they are quiet the problem will just go away. But it seems very unlikely now that Trump will comply with their 9-0 decision to bring him back.
That means that increasingly Trump is just going to ignore the courts. If a lesser court holds him in contempt, he will just laugh and ignore it. Meanwhile, by choosing to stay silent and not denounce Trump for ignoring their orders, Supreme Court is sending a clear message to Trump: He can do what he wants, the judiciary be damned.
He will have become that “unitary executive” - i.e., dictator - across the entirety of government.
On a slightly different note, I think he has revoked some green cards. Next, he will revoke citizenship - first for naturalized citizens and maybe even for birth citizens. And he will throw American citizens into Bukele’s hell hole, and other to-be-announced hell holes around the world.
And eventually, it will be critics of Trump who will be sent to these hell-holes.
He already has co-opted huge financial and legal resources through his tariff and regulatory attacks on business, and his extortion of law firms and the media.
The path really seems clear. Only my inability to envision such things in America makes me feel this won’t happen. But logically and rationally, I know it will. It is where we are headed.
It is time to fight with all we have.
Excellent analysis, but there's one more area of Trump's activity you should mention: At the same time he's concentrating so much power in himself and his office, political, legal and economic, he has also established mechanisms by which people can give him unlimited amounts of money, more or less untraceably. I don't think we've yet gotten any credibly-sourced reports about how industrialists, foreign governments, indicted criminals, etc., have arranged his intercession and protection by buying a few million in $Trump coins, or DJT stock... but we certainly will.