Can American Democracy Stop a Lawless President Who Commands the Instruments of Brute Force?

America is in a crisis as profound as it gets, with having Donald Trump as President.

As soon as Trump got re-elected to the presidency in 2024, Raw Power was put into the hands of someone who is happy to wield it in the spirit of what the Athenians declared as they prepared to exterminate those to whom they spoke: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

That, they said, is how things operate in the human world: Raw Power is the ultimate ruler of the world, and whoever wields the most of it gets to declare how things will be.

That became an inevitable affliction of the human world with the rise of civilization. Civilized societies emerged outside the biologically evolved order, with no higher structure in place to dictate how they would interact. In that vacuum, whoever could wield the most raw power could impose their will on those who had less. The result was the rise of tyrants who conquered, slaughtered, and enslaved—because there was nothing to prevent the strong from doing what they could while the weak were compelled to endure what they must.

But people have striven to keep Raw Power from being the arbiter of everything, seeking to force power to obey something else—like the Magna Carta, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law.

By domesticating Raw Power in those ways, although the state is defined as having “a monopoly on the use of force,” the strong are harnessed to the purposes of the weak—at least to a significant degree.

Which is why the election of 2024 was such a catastrophe.

The President of the United States commands immense RAW POWER, as commander-in-chief. And this President is not content even with that much power, as he ignores the law and the constitution to subdue corporations, cities that oppose him, universities, and as he wields even more power than the presidency is defined as possessing in eliminating due process, in siccing the Law on his opponents, in usurping the power to impose tariffs to bully other countries to do his bidding, etc.

So all that Raw Power is in the hands of such a man, and the question is: can he be stopped, when he has so much Raw Power?

There are several ways such a thing is supposed to be stopped, but none of them possess the Raw Power to defeat a President who wields Raw Power enough to overwhelm the remnants of democracy if they assert themselves against him. The realities of Raw Power in America are Trump will have to be defeated by forces whose influence is not backed by sufficient brute force.

Trump can be defeated in court, but unfortunately courts — famously– don’t command armies to make sure their judgments are obeyed. Trump must either willingly submit to a court, or he would have to be effectively defeated by other means if he refused to accept a court ruling that would re-domesticate the powers of the Presidency.

(Besides, the Supreme Court gets the last word, and the majority of the current Court has repeatedly shown itself more eager to check the enforcement of the law against Trump than to be a bulwark against this President’s lawlessness.)

We do have the weight of public opinion poised to act as a check. But, like the courts — and militia fantasies notwithstanding — also do not constitute an army.

Those who want democracy to prevail can take some encouragement from polls showing that many who put Trump back in the presidency have turned against him, and from special elections demonstrating a public appetite for electing a Congress that would oppose his power grabs.

But here, too, the safeguard depends on conditions that may not apply in Trump’s America. Elections can take considerable power away from a President only if the will of the people is able to express itself freely and fairly — and there is now abundant evidence that this President is working hard to prevent that from happening in the upcoming midterms. The question is no longer simply what the electorate wills, but whether their votes will be allowed to decide who prevails.

And even if such a Congress were elected, Congress does not command forces that could subdue a defiant and usurpatious President if the conflict were decided by Raw Power. Should a President be willing to flex the military muscle he commands—including the thugs of ICE—to impose his will over that of the Article I branch of government, Congress has no independent means of enforcement.

A President who has shown contempt for the system of checks and balances cannot be assumed to respect the will of Congress to reel him in.

On the other hand, the President’s role as COMMANDER translates into his ability to wield Raw Power only if the military obeys his orders.

The United States has attempted to domesticate the Raw Power of the American military by obliging every member of the armed forces to disobey any orders that violate the law or the Constitution.

But that safeguard, too, is contingent. It depends on whether members of the military, faced with orders from a
lawless commander-in-chief, will in fact honor their oath to defend the Constitution rather than obey the commands of that President.

The American military has not been put to such a test before. How it would play out now, with this would-be dictator as President, is uncertain.

So the battle to determine whether American democracy survives seems to boil down to this: Is there enough force left in the democratic system—the rule of law, the will of the people deciding who gets power, and the oaths taken by the leaders of America’s armed forces—to counter a President who appears willing to do everything in his power to make his will dominate the American scene?