Since 2025, the United States has crossed the threshold from constitutional democracy into an electoral autocracy: elections continue and institutional forms remain, but effective power is concentrated in the presidency, with Congress and the courts reduced to limited, mostly reactive checks. Leading comparative scholars like Steven Levitsky now describe the US as a non‑functioning democracy or competitive authoritarian regime with “still some hope for reversal,” but that optimism underestimates how thoroughly the institutional guardrails have been hollowed out. The June 27, 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the judicial hinge point: without touching constitutional text, it eliminated nationwide injunctions by district courts, so that only the Supreme Court can now halt an executive order across the whole country in real time. Class actions, touted as a substitute, are far too slow and procedurally fragile to match the tempo of decree‑based governance, meaning that new executive orders and OMB “guidance” function as de facto law for everyone except the narrow set of plaintiffs who manage to secure class‑wide relief. In practice, this channels almost all meaningful review into a Supreme Court that has repeatedly avoided ruling on the merits of core Trump initiatives and instead issued procedural greenlights from a conservative supermajority sympathetic to a strong “unitary executive.”
The few headline judicial “checks” since then underscore how limited this role has become. In the National Guard cases, the Court blocked one attempted federalization of Guard units into Chicago and related cities, but did so on narrow, fact‑bound grounds, and Trump responded by pulling back the Guard while deploying CBP/ICE task forces under Greg Bovino to perform similar crowd‑control and “public safety” functions far from any border, culminating in civilian deaths, injuries, and protester detentions. In the Abrego Garcia case, the Court ordered the government to “facilitate” the return of a single wrongly deported Salvadoran, only for the administration to drag its feet and then re‑label him as gang‑linked to justify renewed detention and charges. These are real interventions, but they are narrow, case‑specific, and easily blunted by “court‑baiting” workarounds; they do not amount to a robust, system‑level constraint on presidential rule by decree.
At the same time, Congress has not been formally stripped of its powers but has effectively self‑neutralized. Most consequential policy on immigration, foreign assistance, environmental and energy regulation, and civil‑rights enforcement has been made by executive fiat—through sweeping EOs, OMB apportionment decisions, and unilateral defunding—and then retroactively accommodated in omnibus packages like the “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which was written around White House priorities and post‑facto agency cuts rather than imposing independent legislative ones. The 119th Congress has passed only a few dozen laws, overwhelmingly symbolic or minor; virtually no major legislation of consequence has been enacted over Trump’s objection or without prior executive cues. On war powers, a loyalist GOP caucus has declined to constrain unilateral interventions in Venezuela and now Iran, voting down resolutions that would have required authorization for large‑scale hostilities and thereby leaving the door open to more “Venezuelas and Irans” launched on presidential say‑so alone.
Layered on top of this is an executive increasingly willing to override state prerogatives. ICE and CBP deployments, framed as responses to “crime” and “border emergencies,” have pushed federal enforcement deep into the interior, pressuring localities through grants and data‑sharing to align with Washington’s priorities regardless of local law or crime statistics, while threats to federalize or deploy the National Guard for domestic “security” purposes blur the line between state and federal police powers. The combined effect is a regime in which, despite media rhetoric about “guardrails,” “co‑equal branches,” and a “robust” judiciary, the only institution that can reliably set and change binding rules for the whole country at scale and at speed is the executive, with Congress, the lower courts, and the states relegated to sporadic, slow, and usually partial corrections. By comparative standards, that is what an electoral autocracy looks like: formal democratic procedures and constitutional text remain in place, but the center of effective power has migrated almost entirely into the presidency.
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