What I fear most
Can America's authoritarian turn be stopped?
There are few stranger or worse feelings as a journalist than calling upon an expert, hoping to be told that your interpretation of events is alarmist, only to have that expert sound more alarmed than even yourself.
I am by no means a legal scholar. I have no formal training in the law. What little expertise I do arguably have has come through this tried and true journalist method: talking to smart people with more knowledge than myself.
Over the past year and a half, when it comes to the question of whether democracy and the rule of law are holding in America, Frank O. Bowman III has tended to be among the first of those smart people to whom I turn.
I first spoke to Bowman, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law, in July 2024 for The American Independent, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Trump v. United States that granted wide-ranging legal immunity to the presidency for “official acts.”
The conservative majority declined to draw a distinction in that case between what it considered official and unofficial acts, something that appeared quite concerning to me even from my unsophisticated vantage point.
Bowman provided the educated analysis that backed up my original interpretation — that the decision could insulate an autocratic president from legal accountability even for the most unthinkable acts, like ordering the military to orchestrate a coup d’état or directing federal law enforcement to arrest members of the political opposition on spurious charges.
“You notice that (Chief Justice John) Roberts doesn’t deny that his rule would apply. He just says it’s fearmongering, I guess on the implied basis that, well, golly, no president would actually do that,” Bowman told me at the time. “But he doesn’t say that if the president did do that, that his rule wouldn’t apply.”
Nineteen months after that decision came down, and more than a year after President Donald Trump’s return to power, I checked in with Bowman to see where his thoughts were.
I asked him whether the U.S. government could be credibly described as authoritarian at this point in Trump’s second term.
I didn’t realize I was subconsciously hoping to be reassured until he answered: “I think we’re there.”
It’s been hard for me not to arrive at the conclusion as well, watching the Trump administration pressure FBI investigators to stop looking into fatal shootings by federal agents or seize ballots to pursue his repeatedly disproven claim that he won the 2020 election.
However, there’s something about hearing your own alarmism validated by someone who knows what they’re talking about.
“I think the situation is rather worse than one would have anticipated,” Bowman told me. “You know, the worst case scenarios would have looked something like what we’re experiencing now. But I think even I probably didn’t think things would fall apart this fast.”
Over the course of a sobering 40-minute Zoom call, Bowman laid out all of the ways in which the U.S. Constitution has essentially ceased to function as a barrier to autocracy.
Where the independence of the Justice Department was once a sacrosanct principle within the executive branch, Trump now freely uses the prosecutorial powers of the state to help his himself and hurt his foes — as evidenced by the indictments of longtime opponents like former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James or the arrest of former CNN host Don Lemon.
“He’s using the department to prosecute his enemies,” Bowman said. “That’s not hyperbole. It’s not a hypothesis. He’s just doing it, and not only doing it, but saying he’s doing it in so many words publicly, effectively ordering the attorney general of the United States to go wield the power of the Justice Department to prosecute his personal and political enemies. All of that is happening now.”
The nature of the constitutional framework of the United States, with its investment of executive power in one individual, has meant that there was always some risk of this sort of bad behavior. But the checks that would previously have discouraged lawless actions are largely no longer there, Bowman explained.
“Up until Trump versus the United States, I think it was very clear that if he were to employ the pardon for a purpose that was itself illegal, he could be prosecuted for it,” Bowman said. “If he were to pardon somebody because they paid him a bribe, if he were to pardon somebody in order to facilitate an obstruction of justice, essentially to hide his own wrongdoing or somebody else’s wrongdoing, I don’t think there’s any question up to the day of that decision that a president was criminally liable for that kind of behavior. That appears no longer to be the case.”
And, as shown by the two unsuccessful impeachment attempts of Trump during his first term, there is effectively no way to remove him from office, possibly no matter how much he violates the law.
“The thing that we know from his first term is that a Congress controlled (by Republicans), or even one that has a significant number of Republicans in the Senate, is not going to impeach and convict the man,” Bowman said. “As a result of all that, we entered into Trump’s second term, and Trump entered into it, recognizing that he was largely immune from the checks that were built into the Constitution against autocratic, demagogic, dictatorial behavior. The current Republican Party is totally in his control. They are utterly unwilling as a body, and generally speaking, even as isolated individuals, to respond in any sort of vigorous way by criticizing him, much less voting against him in any significant matter. That means not only, of course, is impeachment dead as a serious means of getting rid of him, but it means that the basic structural limitations on presidential power are effectually neutered.”
So, in the United States of America in 2026, the president can do pretty much anything he wants without fear he will ever face consequences. In the 250th year since the war for independence from an overseas monarch, Donald Trump is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.
“He’s immune from firing Justice Department people in order to pursue criminal schemes, in order to cover up his own wrongdoing, in order to cover up the wrongdoing of other people,” Bowman said. “He’s immune from pardoning for crime, from pardoning any of his minions for committing crimes. The result of all of that is that he has control over the investigative and prosecutorial organs of the federal government to an utterly unprecedented degree.”
This is a rather undesirable position for any democracy to be in, but especially one in which the president is someone who refused to accept an election loss, and whose administration openly describes his former vice president’s refusal to accept illegal elector slates as “betrayal of the president.”
Millions of Americans carry on life as usual. They make their morning coffee, they drop their kids off at school or soccer practice, they go to work. Even those of us who are the most plugged-in speculate about midterm election expectations or who might be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028. I increasingly fear it’s not out of the realm of possibility that those may be moot points.
Bowman offers some much-needed reassurance here: “Elections are run by states. They’re run by localities. It’s awfully hard for a federal government to impose its will on that, particularly in contested areas.”
But it’s only some reassurance.
“I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, not saying that we couldn’t slide completely into a long period of real darkness. I think we could,” he said. “I think the answer to whether that’s in the cards will depend to some extent on the guys with guns. Who controls them? How far are they willing to go? Will the people, particularly in command of the regular military, really be willing to see the country slide into a genuine dictatorship? All those things are questions we do not know the answers to.”
Perhaps sensing my despair, though, Bowman ended his assertion with a declaration that he had not yet completely lost hope.
“The challenges are many, and they’re incredibly stiff. But can we do it? Yes, many countries have survived far worse than this, and I like to still maintain some faith in the resilience of this country,” he said.
On good days, I share Bowman’s faith.
A week after I spoke to him, though, multiple news outlets reported state election officials are preparing for the Trump administration to try to illegally interfere in the 2026 election for the benefit of the Republican Party. That effort, if it transpires, may very well fail. But with each passing week, my good days grow fewer and further between.