Everyone keeps saying that it can’t happen in the United States. There are too many safeguards. There’s the U.S. Constitution, the separation of powers, the checks and balances. But if Donald Trump manages to return to the White House in 2025, Trump and his cronies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the federal government.

Trump and his Republican supporters are, right out in the open, intending to reshape the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in Trump’s hands. They are going to be centralizing more power in the Oval Office, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Per an article in the New York Times, Trump and his associates are also planning to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.

Trump intends to bring previously independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control. He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs he doesn’t like.

And he intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed to be obstacles to his agenda. He claims that he will scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

Some people think I am either exaggerating the dangerous consequences of a Trump victory in November 2024 or that I’m just another liberal doomsayer crying wolf. But none of what I’ve written here is hidden. It’s being played out in public, so that Trump can claim, if he’s elected, that his is what the people of America wanted — a grassroots mandate for a more powerful, unbridled executive in the Oval Office who can do whatever he wants to in order to “make America great again,” just like he claims he did the last time he was president.