Since the new year began, the federal government has searched a journalist’s home, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a military strike, threatened to seize Greenland and violate NATO commitments, and opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H. Powell. Congress has refused to exercise its war powers authority, and President Donald Trump brandished the Insurrection Act to quell protests in Minneapolis where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a U.S. citizen.
And it’s only January; the winter is still young.
The cracks you hear are not democracy fracturing but a republic thinning — where executive power expands and constitutional restraints weaken. In previous generations, any of these events might have defined an administration. But today, they share the same front page.
Fittingly, the most visible symbol of our thinning republic is ICE, whose actions across the country have become shorthand for unaccountable federal power. Americans increasingly disapprove of Trump’s deportation policy and ICE’s tactics, according to polling from last week. But it’ll be another year before their votes can install a new Congress; that makes government feel less democratic. And the extraordinary deference the other branches give the White House makes government seem less representative. It’s a democratic republic in structure and process, but it governs with diminishing regard for the people and behaves like it’s afraid of the president — a republic in name only.
Despite it all, the government has held. There’s been no nation-halting constitutional crisis. No rupture dramatic enough to force a reset. It’s mostly business as usual for today’s branches: the executive flexing its authority, the legislature shrinking from its own and the judiciary shielding the presidency and loosening federal protections for the people. But the resulting imbalance makes it increasingly difficult to check an emboldened executive, especially when partisan loyalties trump most everything else. The greatest risk isn’t that the system will fail, it’s that its institutions — and the public — will grow accustomed to presidential excess.
The Trump administration’s hypocrisies and broken promises already go largely unchecked, suggesting the acclimation to a thinning republic is well underway. It justified the military operation in Venezuela by charging Maduro with conspiring to traffic cocaine while pardoning a former Honduran president serving time for trafficking at least 400 tons of cocaine. It calls itself a champion of states’ rights while threatening to occupy Minnesota with federal forces and targeting the state’s elected officials. It claims to be a defender of the First Amendment while using pepper spray on protesters and cowing the press. Even its professed love for meritocracy is undone by Trump’s acceptance of someone else’s medal for the Nobel Peace Prize.
These contradictions are just the tip of the iceberg: When reporters asked Trump about limits on his power, he answered, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Democratic republics are not designed to rely on the personal restraint of presidents — doing so makes government capricious and, sometimes, dangerous. History makes the point clear. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used unchecked executive authority to single out Japanese Americans, ordering their incarceration without due process in an operation upheld by the Supreme Court. Fifteen years later, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed federal troops to an Arkansas high school to enforce the Constitution, using executive power to ensure the state complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial segregation. President Abraham Lincoln advanced emancipation by executive order, and President Barack Obama used executive action to temporarily protect undocumented children from deportation. Conversely, Trump has used unilateral authority to target immigrants by ethnicity and national origin for removal.
These actions differ in purpose and consequence, but they share a common feature: People’s access to constitutional rights hinges on presidential whim. The risk is less a factor of who occupies the Oval Office and more that the system learns to accept executive overreach, whoever the president is. Each accommodation signals that limits are negotiable, each successive administration inherits the autonomy normalized by the previous ones.
For many Americans, this thinning is not new. Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, immigrants and those below the poverty line have long lived in a republic that is democratic on paper but unrepresentative in practice. Elections are held. Protests continue. Law exists. But leverage is thin and protections are uneven, contingent and fragile. Some encounter the federal government as an abstraction; others are greeted with its armed enforcement.
The expectation of a snapback — that a change in the White House will restore equilibrium — is misplaced. Thinned republics do not repair themselves without intervention. They require deliberate action: Congress reclaiming its powers, courts insisting on limits and executive authority held accountable by both, along with the people. Without that work, today’s precedents set the baseline for tomorrow, leaving the republic intact in structure but brittle in essence.
Ultimately, the danger is not that the republic will shatter overnight but that it cracks slowly, becoming habituated to an unchecked executive — a country skating along on thin ice.
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