One of the frustrating things about Donald Trump’s second term is that everyone acts so surprised when events unfold exactly as the right wing said they would. For all of Trump’s denials during the campaign, Project 2025 has been the perfect guidebook for the embrace of authoritarianism that we are now seeing. That means if you are waiting for the courts to stop Trump, you are going to be disappointed.

Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have already said as much. In a social media post last Saturday, Trump wrote, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a quote that has been attributed to Napoleon and that is popular among far-right extremists. (The New York Times, which continues to downplay Trump’s radicalism, said that Trump “suggests” that no laws are broken, as if he didn’t flat out say it.)

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Meanwhile, Vance had his own above-the-law moment. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power,” Vance posted on X earlier in the month. That idea is not new for Vance, who has previously advocated for the radical right to ignore laws it doesn’t like.

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Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, has a legal theory to support this fringe idea. He calls it “radical constitutionalism.” In a 2022 essay, Vought wrote that, in order to accomplish its goals, “[t]he Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.”

In other words, throw out two centuries of law and start from scratch.

Under this framework, the executive orders are the vehicle for not just testing the doctrine, but implementing it. The idea is to overwhelm the courts with challenges, knowing that they will end up before the Supreme Court.

According to a post on the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) website, “the orders are not merely setting up test cases.” Rather, they have “the aim of provoking a confrontation over the legitimacy of the existing legal order, at least with regard to Article II [the section of the Constitution the established the Executive Branch], if not more broadly. And the administration might be planning to dare the Court to say ‘no’ with threats of noncompliance.”

AEI is not a Democratic think tank. It’s long been aligned with the conservative movement, so such a warning is very disturbing.

Meanwhile, Democrats continue to demonstrate that they are virtually useless in the face of a growing authoritarian threat. While sending out fundraising alerts that claim we are facing a “five-alarm fire,” they continue to publicly pretend that things aren’t quite all that bad. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) told CNN that we’re “not quite there yet” when it comes to a constitutional crisis but will be if Trump ignores the court. You would think lawbreaking of this magnitude would qualify as a constitutional crisis, but among the party elite, apparently not.

Meanwhile, Vought hasn’t even gotten started on the other parts of his extremist agenda, like jailing people who spread “trans ideology” or banning same-sex couples from adopting.

As bad as things are, they are going to get worse. Still, some Democrats persist in believing that the old political paradigm will still work. ”I think we’re overthinking this,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said. “The simplistic thing is what Abraham Lincoln said: ‘In this country, public sentiment is everything.’” 

As a reminder, Khanna was the one who promoted the idea of Democrats working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Of course, that was before Musk called Khanna an obscenity on X for saying Musk should be held accountable for his rampage through the federal government.

Some people never learn.

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