Protesters at the Hands Around the Kennedy Center protest in Washington, DC, 18 September 2026. Reuters/Ethan Johnson/SIPA USA

US President Donald Trump’s authoritarian approach – and his brazen profiteering in office – have provoked a significant backlash. Global Insight reports on this mounting resistance and the prospect of future accountability.

In 2025, US President Donald Trump ordered the historic East Wing of the White House demolished and began building a massive new ballroom, without consulting architectural authorities or Congress. In August 2026, a US District judge ordered construction of the ballroom – which Trump calls a ‘gift’ to the American people – be stopped.

On appeal, the Supreme Court allowed building work to proceed. President Trump is now racing to finish the project before the justices can rule on the merits. Notably, Chief Justice Roberts dissented, joining the three liberal judges on the Court in finding that Trump’s project is likely to be unlawful.

Many Americans disapprove of President Trump’s actions, but they can only watch as he bulldozes a Washington landmark. It is, in miniature, a metaphor for Trump’s entire presidency. Unilateral action is followed by partial judicial restraint that nevertheless leaves President Trump free to act with impunity. The President’s actions are met with resistance, not only from some members of Congress but from state governors, city mayors and an increasingly activist citizenry. But the lasting damage is already done.

Now, midway through his second term, that pattern may be about to change. The US President is facing a rising backlash against his authoritarian governing style.

Behind the backlash

President Trump returned to office in January 2025 and issued an array of executive orders and decisions that shunted Congress aside and tested the limits of his constitutional authority. As courts have ruled against him, he has repeatedly attacked judges, ignored judicial orders and moved to find workarounds.

In President Trump’s second term, he and his family have used the office of the presidency for self-enrichment in ways that are qualitatively new and blatant. Trump Media & Technology Group has offered to sell Wall Street traders and investment companies privileged access to the President’s pronouncements on its social media platform, Truth Social. Truth API, which launched in August, is an attempt to create a new source of income, according to Trump Media, with its first customers paying up to $100,000 a month for access.

However, two press organisations have filed a complaint against the service. They argue that it’s unconstitutional, including because it denies equal access to presidential pronouncements. Trump Media says the service’s critics haven’t grasped ‘the distinction between public and nonpublic information’.

President Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr have assembled several crypto businesses with revenue models intertwined with their father’s political power and regulatory authorities. In July, it was reported that President Trump himself made over $1.4bn in 2025 from business dealings in cryptocurrency. ‘My concern is that the President of the United States has such an enormous financial interest in cryptocurrency while he will be heading up the executive branch and the agencies that are regulating crypto,’ said Richard Painter, Associate Counsel to the President and chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W Bush, who was speaking to Global Insight in summer 2025. ‘To have such an enormous conflict of interest for the president who is hiring and firing people at the regulatory agencies, could be a very bad situation,’ he said, adding that ‘it’s absolutely critical that the regulators themselves don’t have a financial interest in the industry they are regulating. That’s true for the entire executive branch’.

The family business, the Trump Organization, is involved in overseas real estate deals, particularly in Gulf Arab states. In 2025, Trump accepted a $400m luxury aircraft from Qatar – an ‘unconditional’ gift, the administration says – for his official use.

President Trump has used litigation to leverage multi-million dollar payments by media companies for his presidential library fund. The President created a $1.8bn ‘anti-weaponisation’ fund to pay compensation to supporters, potentially including those caught up in federal prosecutions related to the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol − although this was later shut down by the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely dismantled the oversight mechanisms inside government that provide guardrails against public corruption. The President, his administration and family members have denied any conflicts of interest or wrongdoing in terms of ethics.

The East Wing/Ballroom pattern has replayed across trade, immigration, military force and the machinery of government itself. The President has even extended his authoritarian approach to remodelling Washington and threatened to demolish the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a celebrated monument to an assassinated US president, after a legal dispute over whether Trump’s name can be added to the building. President Trump told reporters that the Center could ultimately be ‘ripped down’ unless there’s recognition of his name on the building. In September, hundreds of people formed a human chain around the building to protest the Center’s closure.

Seven months on, and ‘Operation Epic Fury’ has led to the deaths of 14 US military personnel, while 418 have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. By September, Congressional Budget Office statistics showed that the military cost had reached $38bn.

The House of Representatives has voted three times on resolutions demanding a withdrawal of US forces. The President has ignored them, while US fuel prices have risen sharply amid a global energy crunch. President Trump’s war in Iran is ‘a war of choice’ and ‘of aggression’ that was not justified by ‘an actual threat’, says Leila Sadat, a former Member of the IBA War Crimes Committee Advisory Board. Sadat, the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law at Washington University, highlights that ‘Congress has voted against the war, which means at this point it is being conducted in violation of US and International law’.

The legal ‘stress test’

Trump’s presidency ‘is really stress-testing the legal system,’ says Mark Stephens CBE, Co-Chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute. ‘The international concern is not based on one executive order or one intemperate speech. It comes from the accumulation. Democratic backsliding usually arrives not with a brass band or a revolution, but through a succession of supposedly exceptional measures until essentially the exception becomes the system. It eats itself.’

Congress, which should be the first constitutional defence against an over-assertive executive, has failed to constrain President Trump. Courts have been only partly successful in constraining him. And Trump has rampaged through the niceties of American democratic norms, appearing to care little for the consequences.

With the midterm elections approaching in November, the President has attempted to regulate mail-in voting through his control of the US Postal Service. However, he has been blocked by a federal judge and the Supreme Court until after the elections. Critics feared that hundreds of thousands of ballots, already being distributed by some states, would be lost, impossibly delayed or disqualified.

Stephens, a consultant at law firm Howard Kennedy in London, explains that US District Courts provide ‘immediate scrutiny and fact finding’ while appeals courts decide ‘whether the restraint survives’. Only a small fraction of cases involving President Trump reach the Supreme Court, which is increasingly being forced to draw ‘authoritative constitutional boundaries,’ he says.

When the high court struck down his administration’s sweeping tariffs in February, President Trump attacked the majority who ruled against him, including justices he had appointed. The President pursued the same tariffs ‘in another form,’ says Stephens. That episode, he says, showed genuine judicial independence, but also ‘a problem of policy substitution after legal defeat’.

A courtroom victory, in his view, ‘isn’t necessarily an institutional victory’. The administration routinely appeals, seeks a stay, repackages the policy, invokes a different statute or ‘makes compliance itself the next legal controversy,’ exploiting a system built to be slow and deliberative – one that was ‘never intended’ for an opponent who keeps moving the goalposts, Stephens says. President Trump’s normalisation of attacks on judges and lawyers is ‘part of the tools of authoritarianism,’ he says. ‘The guardrails only work when you’re prepared to stand behind them.’

Usurping authority

President Trump’s tariff regime, imposed unilaterally against allies such as Canada and the EU, has drawn increasing scrutiny from lawyers regarding whether the White House has bypassed the constitutional allocation of power on trade altogether. ‘The circumstantial evidence of the way in which this administration has behaved on trade points to authoritarianism,’ says Raj Bhala, Special Projects Officer of the IBA International Trade and Customs Law Committee.

Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution – known as the ‘Foreign Commerce Clause’ – the power to regulate international trade is vested with Congress, not the president. Historically, presidents have exercised jurisdiction on trade only through congressionally-delegated ‘fast track’ negotiating authority. That authority lapsed in 2021 and hasn’t been renewed.

President Trump has singled out Canada for action under six separate trade authorities since taking office in 2025. The Trump administration says the tariffs imposed are intended to offset ‘the burden and disadvantage […] from Canada’s discriminatory treatment of US commerce,’ while Ottawa says Washington is engaging in unfair trading practices.

‘The way the Trump administration has treated the Constitution and the Foreign Commerce Clause. The way it’s taken no interest in getting trade negotiating authority or working with the committees of Congress. And the way in which it has imposed trade remedies on almost all nations of the earth, and then particularly Canada […] the authoritarian behaviour is evident,’ says Bhala, who is a University Distinguished Professor at Kansas University School of Law.

The pattern has not gone completely unchecked, but US courts have only partially restrained the President’s effort to usurp the authority of Congress over trade. In spring 2025, President Trump unilaterally imposed sweeping and punitive tariffs on US trading partners worldwide, claiming emergency powers. The Supreme Court later ruled that the emergency tariffs exceeded presidential authority.

The Trump administration responded by imposing new, similar tariffs through other statutes, repackaging the same policy under a different legal authority rather than respecting the high court’s constitutional boundary. ‘The Foreign Commerce Clause in the Constitution clearly gives the power to regulate foreign trade to Congress, not the president,’ Bhala says. ‘President Trump hasn’t worked in a way that’s respectful, or mindful of these legal guardrails.’

President Trump’s myopic approach to trade will backfire for the US, he argues. It’s forcing a permanent shift in how Canada handles its trade relations with the rest of the world, for example, with Prime Minister Mark Carney now forging partnerships with numerous Asian and European countries.

The immigration system survives

In seeking to enforce its mass deportation agenda, the Trump administration has sustained real administrative wins, but legal losses are mounting and public opinion is turning against the President’s hardline policies toward immigrants.

The Supreme Court allowed President Trump to end temporary protected status programmes by executive fiat. Legal authorisation to stay in the US is being dismantled or withdrawn for ‘hundreds of thousands of people’, exposing them ‘to arrest, detention and deportation,’ says Greg Siskind, Co-Chair of the IBA Immigration and Nationality Law Committee.

A $45bn funding boost for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has ‘allowed them to detain many more people than in the past,’ says Siskind, co-founder of Siskind Susser in Memphis. As many as 50 people have died while in ICE custody, which critics say indicates a systemic problem. The Department of Homeland Security says that relative to the higher number of persons in detention, there has been ‘no spike’ in the ratio of deaths.

The impact has been particularly hard on Latino and Hispanic communities. As immigrants with jobs who are the breadwinners in their families are arrested and deported, those left behind are facing hunger and evictions. Most Americans now say enforcement has gone too far. In early August, just 39 per cent of Americans approved of President Trump’s handling of immigration, according to an Associated Press poll.

At the same time, the administration hasn’t managed to shut the immigration system down. A Rhode Island judge forced the US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency to resume processing applications from nationals of 39 countries that President Trump had tried to blacklist. Another court struck down Trump’s proposed $100,000 H-1B visa fee as an unlawful tax. Birthright citizenship, upheld by the Supreme Court, remains the law of the land even as President Trump continues to try to undo it through other means.

Under the radar

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Law and Normative Thinking at the University Center for Human Values. Scheppele, who has spent years tracking autocratic legalism in Hungary and Russia, says that what makes the Trump administration different from other cases of autocratic takeover is that no single person is directing it. Rather, it’s a movement. ‘Trump is not doing this stuff, really,’ she says. He’s occupied with ‘ballrooms and reflecting pools’ and social media posts. The actual work has been outsourced to idealogues who understand how to use the internal power structures of US bureaucracy.

The most consequential section of the Project 2025 document, which has influenced the Trump administration through the appointment of some of its authors to US government roles, wasn’t its policy agenda, but the dry, procedural material, Scheppele says. The document was built on a granular understanding of how government actually runs, day to day. ‘That’s scary because it means that what they did could be effective,’ she says.

This is now showing up in actual regulatory changes – what Scheppele calls ‘hardwiring’ – often going unremarked outside publication in the Federal Register, the daily compendium of government rules and procedures.

Roughly 50,000 civil service positions have been reclassified as political appointments, giving loyalists the final say over federal grants. A new Trump administration rule requires that grants ‘be aligned with presidential preferences,’ meaning approval increasingly turns on whether a university or researcher is ‘willing to throw diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives under the bus,’ Scheppele says. The Trump administration says the move will improve accountability, strengthen oversight and reduce waste in federal grantmaking.

The National Science Foundation’s social science funding was eliminated in 2025, Scheppele says. Congress restored it in 2026, but the directorate that would distribute it has since been disbanded. The money exists but there’s no one to give it out.

Higher education faces a version of the same pressure, albeit slower and more structural. A new Department of Education rule makes it easier for new, MAGA-aligned accreditation bodies to get approval. The administration’s reasoning behind the rule includes that it’ll simplify the process of recognising emerging and existing accreditors, while promoting academic freedom, intellectual diversity and research integrity.

Scheppele fears they could eventually replace the regional accreditors that universities depend on for access to federal funds. Rather than adopting a ‘retail’ approach of targeting individual universities such as Columbia or Harvard, the administration is taking what Scheppele calls a ‘wholesale’ approach.

Similar patterns are emerging in defence and environmental policy and contracting. Trump officials have diminished the influence of judge advocate generals, the military lawyers inside the Pentagon who ensure that soldiers adhere to the laws of war. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has removed an office at the Pentagon that was designed to help the US military avoid unnecessary civilian deaths.

Sweeping staff cuts and a massive deregulatory push have left the Environmental Protection Agency unable to fulfil its statutory mandates. The Department of Education has been hollowed out. The US Agency for International Development was shuttered, again without authority from Congress. The Trump administration has methodically dismantled agencies throughout the federal government.

Civil society and non-governmental groups are pushing back, Scheppele says, but resistance is fragmented. Higher education groups, defence lawyers and environmental advocates, for example, each address their own sector, with little coordination between them.

So far, the anti-authoritarian backlash is too widely dispersed to add up to a national movement, she says. That could change after November’s midterm elections if Democrats win back control of the House of Representatives, giving them the ability to investigate and challenge President Trump’s policies and actions.

The pendulum has ‘swung sharply’

President Trump produced a two-day television event in September that was billed as a midterm ‘national convention’. He asked voters to ‘pretend’ he was on the ballot in November and proposed sending every American a $5,000 ‘dividend’ if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. President Trump claimed falsely that he could send out the money without approval from Congress because the US has taken in ‘trillions of dollars in tariffs and other things’.

Critics highlighted that the plan would cost about $1.3tn and further inflame inflation. Representative David Schweikert, an Arizona Republican who is leaving Congress, said he would put ‘everything of my heart and soul’ into stopping the plan, ‘because it would actually do more damage to working people than would ever help them’.

‘Poll after poll finds Trump’s approval rating underwater in states and districts he carried by double digits,’ wrote Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report, an election analysis newsletter based in Washington, DC, on 8 September. The midterm election is shaping up as a test of whether Republicans can limit the damage caused by a ‘polarizing and unpopular’ president, she says. ‘Americans in general really don’t want to live in a dictatorship, and they also see that we’re in a really serious threat of living in a dictatorship,’ says Scheppele. Trump will have another two years as president following the midterm elections. It’s unclear what, if any, legal exposure he and his family may have once he leaves office. The 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Trump v United States means he enjoys substantial immunity from investigation and prosecution for any official acts. Private acts, such as paying hush money to an adult film star for which Trump was prosecuted in New York after his first term, would not be immune under the Supreme Court’s ruling and could be pursued by a future Department of Justice.

That means any post-presidency legal reckoning for President Trump will probably turn on whether investigators can separate private conduct from official acts. It’s more likely that Congress and the next president will be empowered to pursue government reforms as happened in the post-Watergate years after President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. America must first reject Trump’s attempt at an autocratic takeover.

Stephens draws a careful distinction about the anti-Trump sentiment building ahead of the midterms. ‘Backlash should not be confused with a democratic recovery,’ he says. ‘The pendulum has swung sharply one way.’ He highlights that while resistance is visible, ‘its success is not yet assured. The real test is whether objection converts into institutional power, electoral accountability and enforceable law’.

William Roberts is a US-based freelance journalist and can be contacted at wroberts3@me.com