Democracy, Undone With a Sharpie
How a few hundred strokes of a pen have redrawn the balance of power in Washington, and pushed American democracy toward the edge of irrelevance.
It turns out the end of democracy as we know it won’t come with a bang. If things keep moving the way they have over the last 507 days, it will come with a Sharpie.
Donald Trump has used executive orders, signed with a black marker and his barely legible signature, not just to control what happens inside government buildings, but to bend our national culture to his will. Our dynamic, evolving and increasingly diverse society is being recast into something rigid, exclusionary, and backward-facing, one swipe of a black marker at a time.
We used to have three branches of government. Now we have one vengeful, narcissistic individual armed with a pen pretty much in total control, backed by a small group of far-right ideologues with a blueprint designed to purge the system, leaving no agency, no safeguard, no shred of neutrality untouched.
Their plan: Use presidential orders — sprinkled with half-truths, far-right dogma and outright lies — to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and consolidate power in the executive branch within 180 days of taking office. Why such a rush? Because the 2026 midterms are just around the corner, and MAGA Republicans know their razor-thin majorities in Congress could vanish overnight, potentially slamming the brakes on their radical, top-down agenda.
For much of American history, executive orders were tools of necessity. They were ways for presidents to manage wars, implement laws passed by Congress, or respond to major national emergencies.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued roughly 3,700 executive orders during his 12 years in office, the most ever. But, of course, they came in response to the Great Depression and World War II. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps to restore public lands and give young men purpose, the Works Progress Administration to rebuild infrastructure, the Social Security Board to protect the vulnerable, and the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring power and modernization to rural communities.
FDR’s orders were sweeping and, for the most part, positive. But even FDR had his failures. For instance, he ordered the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, a stain on his record and on the country’s conscience.
But for the most part, his use of executive power was rooted in true national crisis and aimed at lifting up the vulnerable, not targeting them. It was about rescuing a country paralyzed by economic collapse, and later rallying it to confront global fascism. The result was a nation transformed and, maybe for the first time, made whole.
He didn’t turn the government into a weapon. He made it into a lifeline for millions of Americans, and a democratic bulwark for the world.
Meanwhile, Trump is using his executive orders to purge political enemies, commandeer federal agencies for personal and partisan aims, and freeze or reroute Congressionally-approved funding. And he’s invoked a veritable stream of emergency declarations to give them legal cover, basically using them as blank checks to bypass oversight.
These include emergency declarations that sidestep environmental laws to expand oil and gas drilling, that allow the detention and removal of undocumented immigrants without due process and, most recently, one that allows the deployment of military force in response to immigration protests. In his view, anything that doesn’t serve his personal agenda, or advance the ideological goals of his Project 2025 partners, is a national emergency worth overriding democracy for.
The numbers of executive actions signed so far by Trump are truly staggering. As of yesterday, just 506 days into his administration, Trump has signed 161 executive orders, according to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In comparison Biden signed 162 over four years.
House of Cards
But in depending so much on executive orders, rather than congressional action, he’s essentially building “a house of cards,” according to Adam Warber, a professor of political science at Clemson University and the author of the influential 2006 book Executive Orders and the Modern Presidency: Legislating from the Oval Office, which is considered a definitive study of how modern presidents use executive power.
“He’s not creating a lasting legacy,” Warber said in an interview on Thursday. “He’s building a house of cards, in essence, because the next administration could easily revoke them if they want to.”
Trump, he added, “reminds me of folks in the business world who take on a Wizard of Oz role in which they’re constantly trying to persuade someone that they can change anything, do anything. I assume he’s simply playing to his base, that’s what important to him. But I think he’s also trying to make up for the failures of his first term.”
What’s been happening in America, Warber said, is a form of “ping-pong politics” that’s unhinged any chance at continuity in government.
He’s got a point. Recently, we’ve bounced back and forth politically between parties, with Clinton followed by Bush, Bush followed by Obama, Obama followed by Trump, and Trump followed by Biden, before we landed here again with Trump. In the process, executive orders have become a quick and effortless way to serve each party’s political interests, and they’ve too often bypassed honest debate and real deliberation.
But in our latest political turnabout, we’re seeing something both historically unique and pretty alarming. The weaponization of executive authority not just to shape policy based on a political party’s platform, but to punish enemies, reward loyalists, and consolidate personal power.
And perhaps most frightening, we’re seeing the use of executive orders explicitly designed to change the culture of an increasingly diverse America into something narrower, something meaner, and something easier to control.
Ideological Warfare
Trump and the cabal of far-right groups enabling him didn’t invent the executive order, and he’s not the first president to use them to steer the direction of government. But what this group of scurrilous malcontents have done is transform a simple management tool into a weapon of ideological warfare, leaving deep and lasting scars on American democracy.
It’s not a military coup or a violent uprising. It’s page after page of policy turned into law without a single vote in Congress, and often kept in place despite the lack of legal support. If Trump somehow manages to keep his job past 1988, or if he’s replaced by Don Jr. (heaven help us), or JD Vance (even worse), we’ll be living in a far different country culturally moving forward.
And yet, as Warber points out, these orders are fragile. What one president does, can be undone with a similar stroke of the pen, or by independent Congress taking back its rightful authority. Trump’s no fool, despite what many online may write, and his far-right backers have been planning this move for years.
With a compliant Congress in hand and a right-wing Supreme Court behind them, they know their time is now.
But Democracy’s not dead yet, so long as the rest of us still believe our ballots matter more than one vengeful man’s signature. The U.S. Constitution was built to hold back a king, and to keep those who would be king in check. Project 2025 hasn’t replaced it yet. What do you think?