Whatever hope there was that 2026 might be less jarring than the previous year is gone. This month, something snapped in the country.
On their own, this month’s headline events would be shocking enough: The killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the Trump administration’s subsequent coverup; yet more of President Trump’s corrupt pardons; and the Justice Department’s criminal investigations of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, and a group of senators and House members who simply reminded members of our armed forces to follow the law when they are issued illegal orders.
All this was before Mr. Trump announced last weekend that he would impose tariffs by presidential fiat on some of our closest allies if they didn’t surrender to his hunger for Greenland. He eventually retreated from both tariff and invasion threats after his beloved stock market fell sharply. But unilaterally undermining the alliance that has kept our country safe for more than three-quarters of a century was strategic lunacy and showed how much wreckage one man can leave behind when he’s allowed to cast aside all constraints on his appetites.
Lest anyone miss the strongman theme, Mr. Trump chose Thursday to say on social media that he hoped Attorney General Pam Bondi was “looking at” the former special prosecutor Jack Smith. That happened to be the day Mr. Smith appeared before a House committee and methodically explained why he had indicted Mr. Trump for causing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Then on Saturday, federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse whom local police identified as American citizen with no criminal record, prompting Mr. Frey to declare that “a great American city is being invaded by its own federal government.”
Collectively, those actions have brought into the open what has been lurking just beneath the surface of our politics and can no longer be brushed aside: Mr. Trump is actively seeking regime change — not in Venezuela, where a dictatorship remains in power despite the apprehension of Nicolás Maduro, but in the United States.
It’s tempting to look at the administration primarily as a psychodrama rooted in the president’s delicate ego and his obsession with doing whatever it takes to distract attention from topics he finds uncongenial (see: the Epstein files, about which the administration is also skirting the law). But what is happening to the country is about more than Mr. Trump’s extreme neediness. His neediness is transforming our institutions.
From the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have been systematic in undermining laws, rules and understandings that undergird a free, democratic and constitutional republic. Theorists of the new MAGA right made their goals clear with books such as “Regime Change,” calls for a new American “Caesar” and their embrace of a “radical constitutionalism.”
That last phrase is from a 2022 essay by Russell Vought, now the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, in which he urged Mr. Trump’s sympathizers “to cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then do it.”
They’re doing it.
One of Mr. Trump’s first acts in office received far less scrutiny than it deserved: his executive order effectively overturning a law banning TikTok. As Charlie Savage of The Times later reported, Ms. Bondi told tech companies they were free to violate the statute because — well, because Mr. Trump said so. As Mr. Savage noted, this could be seen as Mr. Trump’s “starkest power grab.” On Thursday, TikTok announced a deal with a group that included several investors with ties to Mr. Trump.
Another Day 1 move, Mr. Trump’s blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, did arouse substantial outrage. But the sharpest criticism came from Democrats and other Trump critics, with Republicans in large numbers hiding behind the fact that a president has unlimited constitutional power to issue pardons, or ducking the question entirely.
The signal Mr. Trump sent from the start — that he could set aside laws he didn’t like and that those who engaged in criminality on his behalf would receive clemency — spoke to the seriousness of his embrace of “radical constitutionalism,” which, as he has made obvious, is no constitutionalism at all.
Letting these early abuses of power slip by opened the way for the routinization of step-by-step regime change. The country got accustomed to the mass firings of government workers; the administration’s ignoring, obstructing or getting around court orders, often with the backing of a Supreme Court that had already granted him broad immunity; its shopping for prosecutors willing to file baseless charges against political enemies, the gutting the Department of Justice, and the use of the F.B.I. to find dirt on political opponents; its use of executive power to target universities and law firms; Mr. Trump’s appointment of election deniers to high-level positions, raising fears of federal interference in the fair administration of this year’s elections; and the blatant use of presidential power for personal enrichment or to help friends and donors.
Since many of our liberties are still in place and our institutions continue to function in familiar ways, fear of regime change might once have seemed extreme, unduly academic or abstract. The events of the past three weeks have brought home that, on the contrary, these worries are chillingly realistic and concrete.
The killing of Ms. Good by an ICE agent — operating as part of a de facto personal police force for the president — has shocked and dismayed a significant American majority, and Mr. Pretti’s shooting death prompted new outrage. Even Republicans who have been loath to criticize Mr. Trump questioned the obviously phony investigation into Mr. Powell for fear of its impact on the economy. The prosecutorial threats against Mr. Walz, Mr. Ellison, Mr. Frey and the members of Congress who warned service members against obeying illegal orders can be seen only as ploys to use government power to chill dissent.
It may, however, be the Greenland madness that finally forces a reckoning with what happens when Congress — yes, that means its Republican majority — sits by and allows a chief executive to run roughshod over any legal limits to his desires, any sense of stewardship toward institutions built over decades to keep the nation secure, and any responsibility to other nations that long stood with us in defense of democracy itself. Mr. Trump’s practice of radical constitutionalism is radically dangerous. He eventually backed down, but not before causing enormous damage. The observation by Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, about the world order in his remarkable address at Davos last week is also true of our constitutional order: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Recognizing that the nature of our regime is the central question in our politics will not make other issues go away. But failing to confront what’s at stake would be a generational failure. The danger now is not alarmism but complacency.
E.J. Dionne Jr. is the author of “Why Americans Hate Politics,” “Our Divided Political Heart,” “Why the Right Went Wrong” and, most recently, “100% Democracy,” with Miles Rapoport.
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