In this incisive conversation, Brookings scholar Professor William A. Galston argues that America’s decentralized system remains a crucial brake on executive overreach. While warning of real risks, he maintains, “We’re not there yet,” distinguishing the US from harder cases of institutional capture abroad. Professor Galston spotlights federalism and the courts as the decisive arena of resistance—urging institutions to defend their prerogatives through litigation, “not street protests but the law.” He assesses the influence of Project 2025, redistricting fights in Texas/California, and the politics of immigration, crime, and DEI, noting potential backlash among centrist voters. The result is a clear-eyed appraisal of democratic resilience—and the legal contests that will shape whether the US moves toward or away from competitive authoritarianism.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
Giving an in-depth interview to the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Professor William A. Galston — senior fellow and the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institution and a leading authority on American governance, populism, and institutional resilience — provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolving dynamics of US democracy under President Donald Trump’s second administration. Drawing on his deep expertise in political institutions and constitutional law, Professor Galston examines how federalism, legal contestation, and civil society remain central to safeguarding checks and balances amid mounting executive centralization.
As the title emphasizes, “US. Federalism Slows the Shift Toward Competitive Authoritarianism,” Professor Galston underscores that America’s decentralized political structure continues to serve as a buffer against executive overreach. He stresses that, despite concerns about democratic backsliding, the US is not yet on par with countries such as Hungary, Turkey, or India, where institutional capture has been far more extensive. “We’re not there yet,” Professor Galston explains, “and I am hopeful that we’ll never get there.”
A recurring theme throughout the interview is the growing role of law as the principal arena of political struggle. Professor Galston argues that the resilience of US democracy increasingly depends on institutions defending their legal prerogatives: “Pushing back, using not street protests but the law, will be the most important venue of contestation.”
This dynamic is vividly illustrated in his discussion of a recent legal battle involving Harvard University, which challenged the Trump administration’s attempt to withhold federal research funds. A federal judge sided with the university, ruling that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional. For Professor Galston, this episode demonstrates that institutions “with the will to defend their legal rights can push back — and push back effectively.”
The interview also delves into the strategic influence of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation in shaping Trump’s second-term agenda. Professor Galston notes that the initiative has successfully translated its ideas into both institutional frameworks and personnel appointments, allowing the administration to pursue expansive interpretations of executive authority while testing the limits of constitutional constraints.
Additionally, Professor Galston examines redistricting battles, such as those in Texas and California, highlighting how federalism enables both parties to counterbalance each other’s maneuvers, thereby slowing the concentration of power at the national level.
Finally, Galston reflects on the broader trajectory of US democracy, warning that the coming years will be decisive in determining whether constitutional norms can withstand mounting pressures. Yet he remains cautiously optimistic, noting that state governments, universities, professional associations, and civil society are “waking up” to the importance of defending democratic principles.
This interview offers a nuanced, scholarly perspective on the complex interplay between institutional resilience and executive ambition, providing crucial insights into America’s democratic future.
Here is the transcript of our interview with Professor William A. Galston, edited lightly for readability.
Executive Power Expands, but the Rule of Law Faces Its Test
Professor Galston, thank you very much for joining our interview series. Let me start right away with the first question: How has Trump’s second-term agenda accelerated the concentration of executive power relative to his first term? Do you see evidence of a shift from ad hoc populist mobilization toward more institutionalized mechanisms of executive aggrandizement?
Professor William A. Galston: I certainly do. There has been a dramatic shift from President Trump’s first term to his second, largely because those around him who share his general worldview used those four years to craft a highly detailed agenda — not only a policy agenda but also an institutional and legal one — aimed at expanding the perimeter of executive power. They are pursuing this through the strategic use of existing laws and mechanisms. They are not coming in and declaring the Constitution invalid or claiming that the laws do not count. Rather, they are saying, “Here’s how we interpret the law,” in order to give the president the authority to do things that previous presidents did not attempt. This has created a legal struggle, which I believe lies at the heart of the current divisions in American politics.
In your statement to the NYT, you argue that Trump has pushed the role of the president far beyond what his predecessors would have ever tried. There are already respected scholars who call Trump ‘a dictator.’ Would you agree with this characterization?
Professor William A. Galston: No, I would not — at least not yet. The president has said that if the Supreme Court rules against him in a particular matter, he will respect that ruling and will no longer do what he is forbidden to do. That promise has not yet been tested. But the moment of truth will come sometime in the next 12 months. The Supreme Court, I believe, is very likely — and I can’t tell you which rulings it’s going to be — to rule against the president in some areas of his assertion of presidential authority. And if that happens, and I think the odds are very high that it will come sometime in the next 12 months, we will see whether President Trump intends to keep his word and respect the holding of the court. If he does keep his word, then I would have to say that, like some presidents before him, he has used every device to try to expand his power, but in the end, he recognizes that he is constrained by the rule of law. If he says, “The Supreme Court has made its decision, but I disagree with it, and I’m not going to obey it,” at that point, he will be asserting non-constitutional powers. And if he gets away with it, at that point, I would be willing to call him — if not a dictator — an authoritarian ruler who is ruling outside the law. That hasn’t happened yet.
Trump Moves to Institutionalize Power and Reshape Electoral Rules
To what extent does Trump’s governance illustrate a transition from charismatic populism to incipient authoritarianism, and which institutional indicators best capture this trajectory?
Professor William A. Galston: Well, this, in a way, extends the first question you posed to me, namely the difference between the first Trump term and the second. There is certainly an effort to institutionalize not only a more powerful presidency but also a stronger Republican Party that has been reshaped in the president’s image. The efforts to change the electoral rules of the game between now and the midterm elections through state-based redistricting represent an attempt to institutionalize an advantage for his party.
Similarly, the president is seeking to reshape the laws that govern elections — who can vote, how they can vote, and what the requirements are for voting — all with the aim of securing an edge over the Democratic Party. These are clear attempts to institutionalize not only his authority as chief executive but also the power of his party. Some of these efforts may succeed, while others will fail. It’s hard to predict.
Certainly, the president has the right to ask a particular state to engage in redistricting, and many, though not all, states will be able to respond to that in one way or another. So that’s certainly within existing political bounds. President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, tried to use an election to purge members of his party with whom he disagreed. His party fought back, and he was rebuffed. So this is not the first time a president has tried to institutionalize greater power and authority for himself and his party. Previous efforts have not succeeded, at least not entirely. For example, Roosevelt attempted in 1935 to do what President Trump is trying to do in 2025 — eliminate independent agencies whose leaders are exempt from firing simply because the president dislikes them or disagrees with some of their decisions. The Supreme Court said no to Roosevelt in 1935, and he respected that. He wasn’t happy about it, he grumbled, but he respected the decision. We’ll see what happens this time. Those of us with some knowledge of American political history recognize aspects of what’s going on now — not all of it, but some of it.
Culture Wars and Power Plays Redefine US Political Fault Lines
Trump has repeatedly sought to limit congressional oversight and weaken checks and balances. Do these efforts signal a temporary partisan strategy or a structural erosion of US democratic institutions?
Professor William A. Galston: The erosion of congressional oversight has occurred through political processes rather than institutional changes and, therefore, could be reversed by a president with a different attitude. Just this week, for example, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, was scheduled to conduct oversight at one of the intelligence facilities under the aegis of the Department of Defense, and reportedly, the Secretary of Defense intervened and canceled the site visit that Senator Warner was going to make. That was a clear effort to reduce congressional oversight. However, there was nothing institutional about it.
By the way, I misstated earlier: Senator Warner used to be the chairman of the Intelligence Committee and is now the leading Democrat on a committee chaired by a Republican colleague, with whom he has worked very well. So, I don’t think that the reduction of Congress’s oversight capacity has been institutionalized. I do think it reflects the will of the current president and the unwillingness of members of his own party in Congress to challenge his will. For a very simple reason: they’re afraid of him. They’re afraid of what he can do to them—to damage their political careers—and perhaps for other reasons as well. That’s not an institution; that’s an individual set of relationships.
How do you assess the strategic deployment of culture wars in Trump’s political agenda? Are they primarily an ideological project, or do they function as a power-consolidation tool to reshape voter alignments and institutional priorities?
Professor William A. Galston: Both. And certainly, President Trump, as a candidate and as a president, has been very good at discerning the fundamental fault lines or cleavages in American political culture and defining those fault lines in a way that maximizes the number of people who will be on his side of the line. Part of effective leadership is to define controversies that work to your advantage. In the cultural arena, President Trump has an instinct for those conflicts. I don’t think all of them that he’s picked have worked to his advantage, but certainly, the three that he emphasized in the 2024 presidential election, and again in the early months of his administration—namely immigration, crime, and so-called DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives—have all worked to his advantage so far.
Having said that, there are signs that voters in the middle of our political spectrum—and yes, there are still many of them—are beginning to conclude that the president may be going too far in the tactics he’s using. That’s demonstrably the case in immigration, where there is widespread disapproval not of the president’s objectives but of the means he’s using to achieve those objectives, which many citizens in the middle of the political spectrum view as unnecessarily cruel and as failing to provide potential candidates for deportation with sufficient legal rights to challenge the grounds of their deportations. And while Americans, generally speaking, align with the president’s goals on crime and some of the measures he’s used to reduce it, there isn’t the kind of mass support for the use of federal troops in American cities that the president imagines. At this point, I would say that probably a narrow majority of Americans believe that’s not the right long-term approach to fighting crime.
Project 2025 Drives Trump’s Institutional Power Agenda
How do you evaluate the role of Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s allied networks in shaping Trump’s second-term policy framework? Are these actors contributing to the institutionalization of authoritarian governance through ideologically driven restructuring of federal institutions?
Professor William A. Galston: I believe the Heritage Foundation, through Project 2025, has been enormously successful in shaping the second Trump administration. If you listen to current Heritage leaders — as well as former leaders who now hold senior positions in the administration — their argument isn’t that they’re overturning the Constitution, but rather that they’re correcting what they see as improper interpretations of it.
For example, more than half a century ago, Congress passed a law preventing the president from withholding funds appropriated for specific purposes. In my view, the president has acted in ways inconsistent with that law. Yet his leading budget advisor — the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — has stated flatly that this law is unconstitutional. They are determined to use this controversy to take the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing that the statute improperly restricts presidential authority.
All of this was carefully planned in advance by senior members of the Heritage Foundation. In fact, the current head of OMB was one of the architects of Project 2025. There has been a direct translation of Project 2025’s core ideas into both the institutions and the personnel of Trump’s second term. The Heritage effort has effectively served as a recruitment mechanism: identifying individuals aligned with the president’s agenda, testing their loyalty, and placing them in key policymaking and policy-executing roles.
It has been a tremendous success — we’ve rarely seen anything like this. And speaking as a member of a rival think tank, the Brookings Institution, I must admit: although I disagree with much of what the Heritage Foundation proposed in Project 2025, I have to tip my hat to them. They’ve been enormously effective and have played their cards extremely well.
Comparing Trump with Orbán, Erdoğan, and Modi: Similar Rhetoric, Weaker Grip
In comparative perspective, how does Trump’s reliance on identity-based polarization and his governing style align with global populist-authoritarian trajectories — such as those of Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, and Modi in India — particularly regarding institutional capture, media control, and judicial weakening?
Professor William A. Galston: I would say that, in his use of identitarian and nationalist policy themes, he is very similar to them. He has not yet, however, achieved the degree of control over the institutions that you just listed that we see in places like Hungary and Turkey, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, but still considerable, in India.
The press right now is not under Trump’s control to the extent that it is in Hungary. You do not have the state owning, either directly or indirectly, the share of the media landscape that Mr. Orbán has been able to create through docile intermediaries.
Nor has Mr. Trump been able to achieve the mastery of the judiciary that, certainly, Orbán and Erdoğan have achieved. The judiciary remains independent, and you can see that that’s the case because of the number of court decisions that have gone against President Trump just in the past few weeks.
Now, it is quite possible that the Supreme Court will end up ratifying the President’s position in some of those cases. Still, it has not been a complete takeover.
If you look at the direction in which the United States is heading, certainly down a very long road yet to be traveled lies the kind of political systems that we now see in the three countries that you listed. But there are many miles to go before this president enjoys that kind of authority, and, frankly, I personally believe that he is unlikely to get to the end of the road. I don’t think the American people or the American legal system will permit him to do so.
Having said that, I think, at the end of his second term — and I’m making the optimistic assumption that he will not violate the Constitution and try to run for a third term — he will leave behind him an enlarged presidency with much more robust executive powers.
Then his successor will have to decide whether to use that expanded authority for purposes of his own or recommend reforms that would create new legal limits on executive authority. So, that issue will be determined by the outcome of the 2028 election, and I expect it to be one of the major debates in that election.
Federalism Acts as a Guardrail Against Competitive Authoritarianism
Given your analysis of the 2026 midterms, how pivotal is the Texas redistricting battle in shaping Republican prospects, and what does it reveal about the role of electoral engineering in sustaining partisan dominance? To what extent might such aggressive gerrymandering strategies erode democratic legitimacy and push the US toward a ‘competitive authoritarian’ model?
Professor William A. Galston: Once again, and I feel I’m giving you versions of the same answer to all of your questions, I am distinguishing between the direction of change that we can discern, on the one hand, and its proximity to full competitive authoritarianism on the other. I don’t think we’re there. One reason we’re not there yet, and I expect won’t get there, is, as you know, the United States has a very strong federal system — unlike, say, countries at the other extreme, like France, where almost all power flows from the center. In the United States, the 50 states have robust powers of their own, and there are constitutional and legal limits on the ability of the national government to direct the states to do things that they don’t want to do. If I had an hour, I could explain all of the details, but the headline is that federalism serves as a check on presidential authority and on the power of the president’s party. So, to take a simple example, Texas, responding to President Trump’s suggestion, has undertaken and has just enacted a redrawing of legislative boundaries that will probably, but not necessarily, lead to a gain of up to five Republican seats in the House of Representatives.
That would make it harder for Democrats to regain the majority because the Republican majority would expand from three seats to eight seats. On the other hand, and in response, the governor of California, a state that’s heavily dominated by Democrats, has said, “Well, if you’re gonna do that, then we’re going to counter with our own redistricting plan that will increase the number of Democratic seats in the state of California going to the House of Representatives by five.”
Okay, so if that effort to counterbalance Texas succeeds in November in California — and the new maps are being submitted directly to the voters for their approval or disapproval — if they’re approved, then California will have nullified what Texas did, and there would be no net gain. Now, the Republicans are trying to expand this redistricting effort to other states, but there the potential gains are smaller. Perhaps one seat or two seats.
But here again, Democrats are countering with outreach to states where they control the governorship and the legislature, such as my home state of Maryland. Right now, Maryland has eight seats in the US House of Representatives, seven of them occupied by Democrats, and one lonely seat occupied by a Republican. Now, it is probably the case that Maryland could redraw its boundaries to eliminate that eighth seat and bring it under Democratic control.
For all sorts of reasons, I’m not sure that the governor of Maryland or the state Democratic Party really wants to go down that road, but they may feel, in a month or two, or three, that they have no choice. So, I think it’s important to see how, at the very least, our system of federalism slows the movement towards competitive authoritarianism.
And let me add one other thing. If you look at the language of the Constitution, who gets to control the time, the place, and the manner of elections, it’s the Congress of the United States and the state governments. The President of the United States has no role whatsoever to play in that.
And so, if President Trump says, “I’m going to issue an executive order forbidding the use of voting machines, forbidding the use of mail-in ballots, or requiring every citizen to show certain kinds of identification before voting,” well, that’s fine — he’s issued that order — but he has no legal authority to enforce it because the Constitution doesn’t give him that power.
So, you know, I read all of the same journals that I suspect you do, and the issue of competitive authoritarianism is very much in the air, and it’s a very real issue. And there are real and important examples of it around the world. But I want the people who will listen to (or read) this interview to understand that, although there are real constitutional risks in the United States today, and many things are drifting in the wrong direction, I don’t think we are as far away from constitutional government or as close to competitive authoritarianism as many people think we are, and as the other nations, like Hungary, Turkey, India, and others, already are.
Economic Pressures Overshadow Trump’s Cultural Appeals
With rising opposition to Trump’s tariffs, even among his base, do you foresee economic discontent weakening his political legitimacy, or will identity cleavages continue to override economic self-interest in voting behavior?
Professor William A. Galston: The single most important issue in the 2024 presidential election was inflation and high prices. I monitor public opinion surveys on a daily basis, and that has not changed. If President Trump thinks that he can use identitarian issues or cultural issues to neutralize public concern about high and rising prices, he’s fooling himself. That won’t happen. He’ll try to make it happen unless prices come down over the next year, in which case he’ll brag about bringing prices down, and the American people will, if those price reductions are real, give him a lot of credit, and they’ll give him their vote. But the economy — the affordability of basic things like housing, transportation, energy, and food — still looms over the entire political landscape.
Defending Democracy Requires Law, Not Street Protests
And lastly, Professor Galston, what strategies should democratic institutions, civil society actors, and the media adopt to safeguard checks and balances and reinforce democratic resilience in the face of rising executive centralization?
Professor William A. Galston: All of those institutions should use their cultural power and their legal power to defend their integrity and their independence, which goes all the way back to my answer to your first question. I think that the principal venue of contestation in America today is the law. It is the law, ultimately, and the willingness of institutions to use their legal power to contest expansions of executive power that they don’t like. That will make the difference between the preservation of constitutional checks and balances and their erosion.
I’ll give you a very recent example from Wednesday’s newspaper. I think most people in Europe are aware of Harvard University, which is probably America’s most famous and prestigious university, and Harvard, a few months ago, decided that the Trump administration was making some demands that they could not yield to without forfeiting their institutional independence and their raison d’être as an academic institution. So they drew a line and said, "This far and no farther," and they went to court to try to get legal reinforcement for where they’d drawn the line, and on Wednesday, a federal judge gave it to them and said that most of what President Trump was doing to Harvard was unconstitutional.
The administration was ordered to restore the $2.2 billion in research money that the judge said was arbitrarily and unconstitutionally withheld from them. Now, is that the last word? Absolutely not. Donald Trump believes in litigating everything as high as he can go in the hopes of achieving a more favorable verdict someplace. But that’s an example of how an institution that has the will to defend its legal prerogatives can push back — and push back effectively.
And I think that pushing back, using not street protests but the law, will be the most important venue of contestation. The extent to which the law is used to reinforce constitutional norms will determine the extent to which the United States goes down the road towards competitive authoritarianism. But, to repeat, we’re not there yet. We’re not even close to a decline into competitive authoritarianism. And I am hopeful that we’ll never get there. I can’t promise anybody that we won’t, but I do know that institutions in America outside the federal government — the states, universities, professional associations, civil society — are waking up.
And they are beginning to understand that unless they are willing to assert their legal rights, nobody else is going to protect them. They must act firmly, but legally, for themselves, and if they do, I think the outcome will be a very challenging situation for the adherents of liberal democracy in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t say it’s an emergency. It’s not quite an emergency, but it is a moment that challenges citizens who’ve taken liberal democracy for granted to realize that it’s not been handed down like the tablets to Moses on Mount Sinai. It’s a human creation, and all human creations are subject to human erosion and human destruction.
We know one of the few lessons from history that I think is impossible to deny and very clear to all who care to read it. And so, the quote that everybody is using, when Benjamin Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention, "What form of government have you created, Mr. Franklin?" — and his answer was, "A republic, if you can keep it."
Well, those words now are a challenge to citizens of the United States today. Can we keep what we inherited? Sometime in the next decade, we’ll find out the answer to that question.
