Have Americans actually gotten over their dictator phobia?

Over the last few days, a few major media outlets have explained how the Trump administration is busy implementing the plans put forward in Project 25 - which the president pretended to disavow during the campaign. 

But it is also important to note that Trump is actually going beyond what Project 25 promoted. With his freezing of both foreign aid and domestic spending, the president is implementing "impoundment," which is the term used to describe a president refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated. 

In some ways, the president and his campaign went farther than Project 2025 in asserting presidential power over federal purse strings. In his Agenda 47, Trump endorsed “impoundment.” That legal theory holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations to fulfill their duties laid out in Article I of the Constitution, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor.

The president, the logic goes, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary, because Article II of the Constitution gives the president the role of executing the laws that Congress passes.

Congress acted during Richard Nixon's presidency to reject "impoundment" theory. But Trump's circle wants to challenge that – potentially setting up a constitutional fight that would require the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote that the president "should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.”

As Will Stancil explained, "by freezing all federal grants, trump is fundamentally transforming the relationship between the executive and congress. he is asserting dictatorial authority over federal spending, transforming congress's lawmaking powers into advisory authority. it is a constitutional crisis."

In order to understand where this is going, we need to pay attention to what Rachel Maddow reported about Vice-President J.D. Vance and his affection for a man named Curtis Yarvin. My hope would be that every American would watch this clip and understand why Trump recently attacked Maddow specifically.

J.D. Vance says that "Step one in the process is to totally rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion."

When asked by the host what that would look like, since elections are ineffectual, Vance brings up his buddy Curtis Yarvin.

Maddow then shows a clip of Yarvin saying that our government has gotten stale and needs to be deleted. That would include deleting NGO's and universities. The end game is pretty clear.

In the place of a deleted government, Yarvin says that we should install a "national CEO," otherwise known as a dictator. He then says that "if Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia."

When Stancil says that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis, it is because Trump is setting himself up as the dictator in charge of everything, totally ignoring the Constitution's clarity about the role of Congress. 

Between illegally firing Inspectors General and illegally impounding Congressionally appropriated spending and setting his militia free and purging the Justice Department and unleashing the ethnic cleansing police, I’m starting to think that “just for one day” might not have been on the level.

— Jacob T. Levy (@jacobtlevy.bsky.social) January 28, 2025 at 7:54 AM

But it might not simply be Congress they are prepared to ignore. In one of the clips from Vance's interview with Jack Murphy that Maddow didn't expose, the vice president said this:

“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”...

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

It is unclear whether a Supreme Court that has been stacked with Trump loyalists would stand in the way of the administration's assumption of these dictatorial powers. But even if they do, the Vice President of the United States has indicated that they would defy the court.  

We've already gone pretty far down the rabbit hole of tyranny in just eight days. The only question remaining is whether enough Americans have actually gotten over their dictator phobia?