Mario Del Pero

Mario Del Pero is Professor of International History at Sciences Po, Paris, and Senior Research Fellow at ISPI, Milan. His research focuses on the history of U.S. Foreign Relations.

Pundits and experts have often urged EU policymakers to focus on US President Donald Trump’s actions rather than his rhetoric – on what he does, not on what he says. This injunction is, however, deeply problematic. The US presidential pulpit possesses a unique pedagogical power, whether constructive or corrosive. The words of the US president – the most powerful political actor in the world – help define the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable: what can be publicly imagined, articulated and ultimately legitimised. This includes scenarios once considered unthinkable, such as armed conflict with US allies over Greenland, the transformation of Venezuela into an American protectorate, or the imprisonment of domestic political opponents. Yet, during Trump’s second presidency, rhetoric has very often been matched by policy. By reshaping the normative landscape, Trump has made the previously unthinkable available for serious consideration, lowering the threshold of what institutions and citizens alike are willing to tolerate.

This convergence is particularly evident on the domestic front, where Trump’s project can be interpreted, at best, as an effort to significantly rebalance institutional power in favour of the executive branch and, at worst (and more correctly), as an explicitly authoritarian endeavour aimed at bringing the US democratic experiment to an end. During the first year of the second Trump presidency, this project has had five distinctive traits.

The first element is the intensive use of presidential power. In the span of a single year, Trump issued 229 executive orders, a figure approaching the total number promulgated by Barack Obama over two full terms (276) and significantly exceeding those issued by Joe Biden across four years (162). Despite Republican control of both the House and the Senate, Congress has been effectively sidelined. Apart from mandatory budget legislation, no major laws have been enacted, and the 119th Congress (2025-2027) is on track to become one of the least productive in the modern era. To date, the judiciary has emerged as the primary institutional counterweight to this expansive use of executive authority. Federal district and appellate courts, as well as specialised judicial bodies such as the New York-based Court of International Trade, have repeatedly intervened to block or suspend executive orders and presidential actions. In doing so, they have triggered a far-reaching constitutional confrontation that will almost certainly require resolution by the Supreme Court. In 2026, the Court will be called upon to issue decisions of exceptional consequence, beginning with the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs.

The second defining feature of Trump’s authoritarian turn lies in his full embrace of the unitary executive doctrine, which holds that the president possesses sole and exclusive authority over the executive branch. In practical terms, this interpretation dramatically expands presidential latitude in dismissing officials without congressional consent, exempting the executive from oversight and supervision, and reducing – if not eliminating – the autonomy and independence of executive institutions and federal agencies. One of Trump’s earliest actions was the mass dismissal of inspectors general across multiple departments, a move that signalled the systematic dismantling of internal mechanisms of accountability. To date, this approach has resulted in the effective erosion of the autonomy – and the overt political weaponisation – of the Department of Justice, as well as in direct and unprecedented attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve. Together, these actions reflect not merely an aggressive interpretation of executive power, but a structural effort to subordinate key institutions to presidential authority.

The third defining feature of Trump’s authoritarian turn is the deployment of both verbal and material violence against a broad category of ‘political enemies’, including universities, law firms, individual public officials and international students. This violence has served a dual function: intimidation and retribution. It has been used to repress and stifle dissent – most visibly in the targeting of students involved in protests over Gaza – and to punish past or present adversaries of Trump and his political project. This logic of retaliation is evident in the investigations and public attacks directed at figures such as former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, as well as less prominent but symbolically significant officials such as Christopher Krebs, the cybersecurity expert who publicly affirmed the integrity of the 2020 vote. 

Fourth, Trump’s authoritarian turn is reflected in the aggressive escalation of anti-immigration policies, aimed at arresting and deporting large numbers of people residing in the United States without legal authorisation. This effort has often been pursued through practices that amount, in effect, to a suspension of habeas corpus protections, alongside the expansion of discretionary powers granted to the principal federal enforcement agency, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE’s budget was dramatically increased in the federal budget – the bizarrely named ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – approved in July, and over the course of a single year, the agency more than doubled its number of agents; current plans project a further expansion that would bring its personnel to roughly 50,000 by the end of Trump’s second term. Empowered with what amounts to a near-free hand in the coercive pursuit of alleged ‘illegal’ migrants, and increasingly recruited on the basis of explicit political and ideological alignment with the administration – ‘America has been invaded by criminals and predators; we need YOU to get them out,’ proclaims the recruitment advertisement on ICE’s website  – the agency has been profoundly transformed, becoming both the symbol and the instrument of the Trump administration’s highly discretionary and punitive immigration policy: a heavily politicised security apparatus, operating with limited oversight and increasingly positioned as a direct extension of presidential authority rather than as a neutral arm of the federal state.

Finally, federal security apparatuses – including federalised National Guard units – have been systematically mobilised in cities and states governed by Democrats. These deployments have been justified as efforts to restore law and order, but their political logic is more revealing: they are intended to reassert federal – and specifically presidential – authority over state and municipal governments that have openly opposed or resisted Trump’s policies.

These authoritarian methods and policies have served multiple, interrelated political objectives. They have been used to radically dismantle the federal government by shutting down agencies and programmes and by dismissing hundreds of thousands of federal employees; to remove or weaken regulatory frameworks, particularly in the realms of finance and environmental protection; and to reverse many of the measures introduced by the Obama and Biden administrations, including their effort to expand and consolidate the social safety net. One overarching goal, however, deserves particular emphasis. Many of these policies and practices stem from MAGA’s deeply racialised and essentialist conception of what the United States is – and ought to be – as a nation. This vision amounts to a form of racial nationalism that stands in sharp contrast to the civic and constitutional nationalism often invoked in more progressive and normative interpretations of the United States as an intrinsically ‘unfinished’, and continuously evolving, national project. Trump’s central objective has been, and remains, the symbolic and material ‘purging’ of the national body from the alleged ‘impurities’ that, in his own words, ‘poison’ it – a vicious metaphor he employed during the electoral campaign.

Trump’s immigration policies cannot be fully understood without recognising the nativist and white supremacist logic that underpins them. This logic is evident in other domains as well – the proportion of minorities appointed to high-level federal positions is the lowest since the Nixon administration – but it finds its most explicit and consequential expression in the administration’s draconian anti-immigration initiatives. It is visible in the rhetoric used to justify these policies, in their legal and institutional architecture, and above all in the role, organisation, and modus operandi of ICE, which has emerged as a central instrument in the enforcement of this racialised vision of national belonging.

Photo credits: Shutterstock.com/Peter Serocki