Americans are, of course, deeply divided today over race, gender, immigration, religion, and other differences that define us as a people and political culture. These cleavages have existed throughout American history, but in their current iterations, they share a common element in Donald Trump. Both sides of the Trump fault line see him as the first mover in defining the country’s divisions, staking out unyielding positions—as he did last week on race and gender by ending federal anti-discrimination regulations.
Back in office, Trump opened a new division around presidential authority. It pits his ignoring of traditional boundaries and a determination of what he deems necessary to carry out what he sees as his electoral mandate versus the country’s founding beliefs that the Constitution, laws, Congress, and the judiciary establish hard limits on any president’s authority.
To his critics and opponents, Trump’s combative style and record raise fears that he will use his claims to open-ended powers to settle once and for all the country’s longstanding divisions around race, gender, immigration, and more, not in a peaceful or unifying way. For Trump’s supporters, the prospect of him wielding broad authority raises hopes that he will make them more prosperous, secure, and proud.
Both sides of this debate value democracy as they understand it. One side, like James Madison, believes that a large, diverse democracy requires compromise between branches, each with limited power. The other side’s view of democracy rests on the claim that a nationwide election confers the people’s consent on the winner, who can act decisively to serve their interests.
Trump ignores this debate because he operates in a different framework. His approach to politics has always been to cast supporters as friends and critics as enemies. This characterization of politics was first propounded by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, who has drawn considerable attention. See this New York Times piece from last year, one from the Trumpian Claremont Review, and the leftist Jacobin.
And in Schmitt’s framework, when enemies at home or abroad gain notable political sway, it creates a grave emergency that warrants executive action outside the law. It’s clear why Schmitt was the favored theorist for the Nazi party and a senior jurist in the Third Reich.
It’s safe to assume that the president has never read Carl Schmitt, yet he frequently echoes Schmitt’s thinking. He declared his “authority is total” as president and baldly stated his intention to be “a dictator on day one.” He claims that his domestic enemies weaponized the government and stole the 2020 election, initiating an emergency that justified the January 6 attack on Congress as it prepared to certify Joe Biden’s election. And on the first day of his second term, he pardoned those convicted as “friends” and “patriots.”
In Trump’s first weeks back in office, he asserted presidential authority to end birthright citizenship, announced plans to investigate his critics, suspended funds appropriated by Congress, and summarily fired the Inspector Generals without notice to Congress as required by law. He turned over control of the personal data every American provides to the government to administer Social Security and other taxes and benefits to employees of the mega-billionaire Elon Musk, an open booster of Germany’s AfD party, which is surging in the polls based on anti-immigrant nationalism that echoes the Nazi era.
All these acts are arguably unconstitutional or illegal. All are wholly consistent with a Schmittian view that Trump’s return to the presidency had not yet vanquished America’s domestic enemies, so he can do what he feels is necessary to vanquish them.
This is not muddled thinking or engineered chaos. It’s a coherent view of politics that supersedes the debates between a strong versus weak presidency. A new battle over Trump’s Schmittian approach to America has begun, and the outcome is unsettled.
Our politics are very different from Germany’s in the 1930s. While Germany had been a democracy for less than 15 years before the rise of National Socialism, the United States has been a continuous democracy since the Articles of Confederation 244 years ago. Call me an optimist, but democracy is still embedded in our political DNA.
It also feels doubtful that most Americans will accept that Trump’s opponents are domestic enemies that, in turn, demand the sweeping powers Trump is trying to wield in his first weeks back in office. What happens next depends on how Congress, the Supreme Court, and the media respond to the Trump-Schmitt executive agenda. So far, a Republican Congress has been supine, as even the president’s most controversial nominees speed to confirmation. That leaves the rest of us to decide the kind of America we want, one with a leader with the outside-the-law powers Schmitt championed, and Trump seems to be seizing, or one true to our heritage as the world’s oldest democracy.
