The Axis of Illiberalism (2026) — Part III
Trump, Trumpism, Project 2025 and How an Illiberal Regime is Forged
The first two articles in this series traced how liberal democracy is hollowed out through the removal of restraint and how illiberal actors align across borders without formal alliance. What remains is the most unsettling turn: the moment when erosion stops being improvised and becomes intentional.
Illiberalism does not need a blueprint to function. It can advance through opportunism, norm-breaking, and selective enforcement. But once those tactics prove effective, they invite something more durable. Planning replaces impulse. Design replaces drift.
In the United States, Project 2025 marks that transition. It is not a manifesto in the traditional sense. It does not articulate a vision of society or offer a coherent moral philosophy. It is a design document: a practical manual for converting electoral victory into permanent control by dismantling the internal restraints of the state. What makes it dangerous is not extremism, but competence.
At first glance, the second Trump term can look chaotic. A journalist loses access after asking the wrong question. A major law firm is banned from federal buildings for representing political opponents. Federal agents appear on city streets without legal authority. Deportations occur while courts are still reviewing cases. Universities quietly close diversity offices to protect funding. Fact-checkers are punished. International courts are sanctioned. Authoritarian leaders are praised.
Each episode, taken in isolation, feels familiar. This is just Trump being Trump: vindictive, impulsive, erratic. A personality problem, not a political system. That assumption is comforting. It is also wrong. Because when these acts are placed side by side, they stop looking random. They begin to form a method. Not a conspiracy, not a super-villain’s master plan, but a way of exercising power that keeps elections intact while hollowing out the institutions meant to restrain it. Political scientists have a name for this system: illiberal democracy.
To understand how this is built, one distinction matters more than any other. Donald Trump is not the architect of this system. He is its beneficiary.
Trump is greedy, vain, narcissistic, and vindictive. He wants power for personal reasons: to punish enemies, silence accusers, enrich himself, and demand loyalty. He is habitually impulsive rather than strategic. He is not a careful planner of institutions. Those around him are.
Trump’s first term exposed the system’s remaining guardrails. Courts blocked some actions. Civil servants slowed others. Inspectors general exposed abuse. Journalists imposed political costs. Even a conservative Supreme Court occasionally constrained executive overreach.
Trump experienced this as sabotage. Trumpists experienced it as a design flaw. Trump reacted emotionally. Trumpism reacted structurally. Project 2025 is best understood as the post-mortem of that first term. It asks a simple question: where did power encounter resistance, and how can that resistance be neutralised next time? Its answer is not to abolish democracy, but to empty it.
Career civil servants are a problem because they answer to law rather than loyalty. Independent prosecutors are dangerous because they investigate. Regulatory agencies are illegitimate because they constrain power and capital. Civil rights enforcement protects ‘the wrong’ people. Oversight exists to obstruct.
The goal of Project 2025 is not chaos. It is insulation.
At the centre of this design is the civil service. Thousands of roles currently protected by norms of independence are targeted for reclassification, rendering them politically contingent. Expertise becomes secondary. Institutional memory becomes a liability. Loyalty replaces competence as the organising principle.
This is not an attack on the administrative state as such. Illiberalism does not abolish bureaucracy. It recognises its importance and captures it.
Independent agencies follow the same logic. Bodies designed to regulate markets, protect the environment, enforce labour standards, or uphold civil rights are reframed as ideological actors rather than neutral institutions. Their insulation from political pressure is treated not as a safeguard, but as illegitimate autonomy. Authority is concentrated in the executive. Procedural friction is redefined as inefficiency. This is where the language of “efficiency” becomes decisive.
Illiberalism rarely announces itself in the vocabulary of repression. It speaks instead in the language of reform. Speed. Streamlining. Accountability. Results. Savings. Friction is cast as failure. Delay as sabotage. Expertise as elitism.
The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency illustrates this logic in practice. DOGE did not bypass the state. It operated inside it. But it reorganised administrative capacity around executive priorities, weakened procedural safeguards, and compressed decision-making timelines. Agencies were merged, defunded, frozen, or repurposed. Normal processes were discarded in favour of speed and disruption.
This is not state weakness. It is state redesign.
Once the machinery of government can be reorganised rapidly through executive action alone, resistance becomes an organisational problem rather than a legal one. Institutions may still object, but they are restructured faster than they can respond.
The judiciary is treated more cautiously, but with the same intent. Courts are not abolished. They are outpaced. Years of strategic Supreme Court appointments have produced a Court increasingly inclined to treat executive power as presumptively legitimate. Doctrines narrowing standing, limiting agency authority, expanding presidential immunity, and deferring to executive claims in areas such as national security have reshaped the legal terrain.
Lower courts may still issue injunctions. Judges may still object. But the knowledge that the apex court is structurally sympathetic to executive authority changes behaviour throughout the system. Risk-taking becomes rational. Delay becomes strategy. Illegality becomes provisional.
Sometimes this philosophy is stated plainly. In a recent interview, Trump described his own morality as the ultimate restraint on his power, particularly in matters of international force. Constraint, in this telling, is not legal or institutional, but personal. Vice President J.D. Vance has expressed the same view in constitutional language, arguing that judges are not permitted to “control the executive’s legitimate power,” reframing judicial review itself as interference rather than safeguard. Instead, he argued the White House believes Trump "has extraordinary plenary power."
In illiberal democracies, courts are not destroyed. They are captured at the top and exhausted below. Project 2025 reflects this reality. It distinguishes carefully between what can be done immediately through executive action and what requires time, attrition, and judicial alignment. Partial implementation is not failure. It is sufficient.
Illiberal democracy does not require completion to function. You do not need to fire every civil servant. You only need to make independence risky. You do not need to silence the press. You only need to make scrutiny costly. You do not need to overrule courts. You only need to act faster than they can respond. Anticipation does the rest.
Immigration policy provides the clearest illustration of how this system works in practice. Under Trumpism, enforcement shifts from adjudication to classification. Punitive outcomes follow labels rather than trials: “illegal,” “security threat,” “gang-affiliated.” Decisions are administrative, opaque, and difficult to challenge. Speed replaces review.
In Minneapolis in early January 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman during an enforcement operation. Within hours, senior administration figures framed the killing as justified, portraying the victim as the aggressor and insinuating political motivation. The official narrative raced ahead of investigation. It did not matter that the video evidence demonstrated that this was not the case. Accountability was already framed as partisan hostility rather than civic obligation.
The point is not the specific facts of the case. It is the tempo and the function. Coercive power first. Moral story immediately. Evidentiary scrutiny later, if at all. This is governance by exception in miniature.
Deportations follow the same logic. People are removed while courts are still reviewing jurisdiction. Even when rulings later find violations, the harm has already occurred and cannot be undone. In some cases, deportees have been sent beyond the reach of U.S. law entirely, detained in foreign prison systems under conditions American courts cannot meaningfully review. The United States does not abolish due process. It outruns it.
The press survives under the same conditions. Journalists are not censored outright. They are disciplined. Access is revoked. Lawsuits are filed. Individuals are singled out. Fact-checkers are delegitimised. Platforms amplify falsehoods at scale. The state does not need to ban journalism. It can make adversarial reporting expensive for the capitalist press and defund state-funded organs.
Regulatory discretion over media mergers and ownership creates a quiet but powerful lever. When executives know that approvals can be slowed or complicated, editorial risk becomes financial risk. Meanwhile, ownership decisions narrow the range of permissible elite opinion without any formal instruction. The Washington Post’s retrenchment of its opinion section after ownership intervention was widely read by journalists as a concession to political reality rather than an exercise of editorial independence. Reporting continues. Exposure occurs. But exposure no longer reliably produces accountability. Truth is not suppressed. It is drowned.
Similarly, universities are not closed. They are conditioned. Funding, accreditation, and regulatory scrutiny induce compliance without legislation. Institutions close offices, rewrite policies, and discipline protest pre-emptively to avoid becoming targets. Student demonstrations, particularly around Gaza, are reframed as security threats or extremism rather than political expression. Protest is not banned. It is reclassified as something universities are already obliged to supress.
Centres of critique are not destroyed. They are induced to police themselves.
This is the illiberal bargain. You keep elections. You keep national pride. You keep the language of freedom and order. In exchange, you accept that rights will apply unevenly, that some people will be excluded or punished, and that law will protect people like you first. This bargain is rarely stated aloud. It does not need to be.
Trump’s role in this system is not incidental. His chaos distracts. His grievances mobilise. His excess normalises. Behind him, a disciplined movement builds the architecture that converts impulse into permanence. Trump is the battering ram.
Trumpism constructs the building.
America under Trumpism does not cease to be a democracy. That is precisely the danger. It becomes an illiberal democracy: elections without effective restraint, law without reliable protection, rights without universality, truth without impact.
Project 2025 explains how this is done. Supreme Court capture makes it durable. Administrative restructuring makes it fast. Loyalist placement makes it reliable. Partial implementation makes it sufficient.
This is not chaos. It is not incompetence. It is not accidental. It is design.
And the question it leaves is whether Americans will accept it, or resist it.