Subverting the Judiciary & Rule of Law

Where law ends, tyranny begins.

— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ch. 18, §202 (1689)

3.1 Introduction: The Final Bulwark—Why Courts Matter in Authoritarian Capture

No system of constitutional government can endure if its courts become mere instruments of factional power or if law itself is reduced to a weapon. The judiciary’s independence is a foundational guarantee against encroachment by ambitious executives and the networks of concentrated private wealth that increasingly define the present moment.

Project 2025’s blueprint for judicial capture exemplifies this threat. It aims to engineer a legal environment where elite malfeasance is shielded and public accountability is blunted, benefiting the cryptoplutocratic class at the expense of democratic constraints. Building on the post-2016 shift from institutional drift to intentional capture detailed in Chapter 1, this chapter deconstructs how the judiciary is being transformed into an armature for oligarchic dominance.

As Chapters 1 and 2 have demonstrated, P2025’s architecture extends beyond executive capture or administrative subversion; it seeks to neutralize or actively co-opt every institution capable of defiance. The judiciary, historically the last refuge for checking abuses of both governmental and private power, is thus among the first targets. This pattern holds across global cases: from Hungary’s Orbán to Venezuela’s Chávez to Russia’s Putin, autocrats move swiftly not only to “capture referees” for regime maintenance but also to guarantee impunity for favored oligarchs and shield asset flows from scrutiny.¹

P2025 makes no secret that it sees independent courts as obstacles rather than essential partners in constitutional governance:

[T]he next conservative President…must take seriously the duty to protect the powers and privileges of the President from encroachments by Congress [and] the judiciary…

P2025, p. 21

But beneath this rhetoric lies a deeper project of transforming law into an instrument that serves not merely executive ambition but also entrenched wealth, enabling what might be called rule-by-cryptoplutocracy. This means subverting judicial independence so that law protects those with access and resources while exposing adversaries (political opponents, investigative journalists, regulatory watchdogs) to selective prosecution or legal harassment.

In what follows, we dissect both stated ambitions and operational mechanisms for judicial capture embedded within P2025, and trace how these would fundamentally invert America’s tradition of rule-of-law constitutionalism into a model where legal institutions become armatures for oligarchic dominance as much as regime maintenance.

3.2 Judicial Capture as a Playbook Move

Authoritarian capture rarely begins with overt abolition of courts; it proceeds through subtler mechanisms: altering appointment processes, demanding personal loyalty over professional independence, expanding executive discretion in judicial selection or discipline, steadily eroding norms that shield judges from political reprisal. In the American context today, these tactics are deployed not only to consolidate partisan power but to insulate an emergent cryptoplutocratic oligarchy, a fusion of political actors and economic elites seeking legal impunity.

P2025’s blueprint makes this explicit: courts are reframed as adversaries whose “encroachments” must be resisted (P2025, p. 21). Assertive presidential appointments at all levels ensure judges will advance administration priorities indistinguishable from those of regime-aligned donors or corporations (P2025, chs. 1–3). Traditional vetting mechanisms are sidelined if they threaten elite networks.² Proposals to weaken tenure protections or heighten disciplinary threats target judges who might block deregulatory agendas or anti-corruption probes touching plutocratic allies.

These mechanisms have been tested incrementally for decades, especially since the late twentieth century, but until recently lacked sustained coalition-wide intent. Since 2016, however, convergence among actors hostile to judicial independence has enabled a qualitative leap: what was once scattered or symbolic becomes systematic policy embedded in blueprints like P2025.

Comparative experience demonstrates this pattern elsewhere, from Hungary’s Fidesz stacking courts to block scrutiny of party-linked tycoons,³ to Venezuela’s court-packing shielding regime cronies.⁴ In each case, judicial capture is not just about regime security, it is about providing durable legal cover for oligarchic enrichment. In each case, and now in the United States, the ultimate goal of judicial capture is to achieve legal finality for oligarchic interests. It is to ensure that once a public asset is privatized, a regulation is dismantled, or a fortune is secured, there can be no legal recourse for the public to claw it back.

As Levitsky and Ziblatt have shown in their study of modern autocracies,⁵ elected leaders rarely abolish courts outright; instead they politicize appointments, undermine judicial independence through threats or procedural changes, and use court-packing or jurisdiction-stripping to ensure favorable rulings.

P2025 adopts this playbook openly by reframing courts not as independent guardians but as potential adversaries whose “encroachments” must be resisted (P2025, pp. 21, 27). It demands presidential assertiveness over judicial appointments and calls for an expanded number of political appointees at all levels, including lower federal courts, who will reliably advance administration priorities (P2025, chs. 1–3). The blueprint signals impatience with traditional vetting mechanisms such as ABA review or even with movement conservative institutions like the Federalist Society if they produce judges deemed insufficiently loyal (P2025, p. 359). Finally, it encourages consideration of structural reforms that would limit tenure protections or increase disciplinary threats against judges perceived as obstacles to regime interests (P2025, pp. 104, 551).

The intent is unambiguous. Rather than seeking impartiality or legal excellence in judicial selection, P2025 prioritizes ideological reliability and executive control. As recent reporting makes clear,⁶ second-term Trump allies have explicitly called for judges who will “do what needs doing,” even if this means disregarding precedent or tradition when presidential power is at stake.

The confirmation of Bove signals that demonstrated willingness to subvert law, not mere ideological affinity, is now treated as a qualification for lifetime judicial appointment under P2025’s architecture.

Recent public statements by President Trump make this shift plain, denouncing even traditional conservative gatekeepers like the Federalist Society when they advocate for any degree of independence.⁸ This model departs sharply from American constitutional tradition which treats judicial independence as foundational, and instead echoes what Levitsky & Ziblatt describe as the authoritarian move to “capture referees.” Once independent arbiters are replaced by partisans, or cowed into compliance, legal constraint becomes illusory.⁹

Under P2025’s vision, courts are transformed from partners in constitutional government into obstacles standing between regime consolidation, and oligarchic security, and must therefore be neutralized.

3.3 Undermining Independence: Packing, Intimidation & Bypassing Rulings

It is critical to recognize that while attacks on judicial independence have recurred episodically throughout U.S. history, only in recent years have they become so integrated, linked not just to executive ambition or partisan interest but to an emerging pattern of cryptoplutocratic entrenchment made possible by weakened guardrails and coalition opportunism after 2016. P2025’s capture architecture does not rely on a single tactic but orchestrates a suite of strategies to undermine judicial independence at every level and neutralize any institution capable of constraining executive, and by extension, oligarchic power.

The blueprint orchestrates multiple strategies in concert: court-packing, intimidation, and procedural circumvention, and now, through recent Supreme Court doctrine, the deliberate disabling of judicial remedies themselves. Each serves to erode the judiciary’s capacity to check abuses not just by government actors, but also by regime-aligned economic elites whose fortunes depend on regulatory impunity and legal insulation. P2025 moreover advocates for the expansion of political appointments throughout the federal judiciary, not merely at the Supreme Court or appellate level but deep into the trial courts and administrative tribunals where most Americans encounter justice (P2025, ch. 17). The aim is not to ensure legal excellence or impartiality but to guarantee that judges will reliably advance administration, and plutocratic, priorities.

3.3.1 Packing the Courts

Court-packing in the P2025 playbook extends beyond increasing headcount; it encompasses redefining qualifications for appointment, bypassing traditional vetting mechanisms, and flooding the judiciary with ideologically aligned loyalists increasingly aligned with those of major donors and corporate networks. P2025 urges that “[t]he next conservative Administration should embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches” (P2025, p. 560), euphemistic code for prioritizing loyalty over independent judgment; a litmus test ensuring new appointees do not threaten deregulatory agendas nor enforce oversight that might imperil plutocratic interests. The plan further contemplates expanding lower courts or redistributing jurisdiction in ways that dilute dissenting voices while consolidating favorable majorities (P2025, chs. 1-4).

This approach echoes strategies seen in contemporary autocracies. In Hungary, Fidesz expanded constitutional courts and filled them with party loyalists willing to shield regime-linked tycoons from scrutiny.¹⁰ Venezuela under Chávez created new judicial posts specifically to circumvent independent judges who threatened clientelist business arrangements.¹¹ In each case, and now in P2025, the structural aim remains constant: eliminate significant legal obstacles between concentrated wealth/power and its objectives.

3.3.2 Intimidation and Threats

Where packing alone does not suffice, or moves too slowly, intimidation follows close behind. P2025 proposes mechanisms for greater “discipline“ against judges who obstruct administration goals, ranging from term limits functioning as implicit removal threats to budgetary punishments against so-called “rogue” courts or individual judges who issue unfavorable rulings. This rhetoric about “accountability,” while cloaked in rule-of-law language and deliberately vague on specifics, functions unmistakably as a warning: judges who challenge administration priorities, or regulatory rollbacks benefiting elite interests, risk professional sanction or public vilification.

Recent practice has brought these threats into sharp relief. Trump-aligned officials have denounced specific judges by name,¹² demanding investigations into their conduct,¹³ or floated impeachment proceedings against those deemed hostile to executive interests.¹⁴ In some states, legislatures have moved aggressively to strip funding from courts perceived as obstacles, a chilling signal that judicial independence is now subject to partisan and plutocratic veto.

The effect is pervasive self-censorship across the judiciary. When judges become aware their careers, or even personal safety, may hinge on pleasing those at the intersection of political power and concentrated wealth are less likely to challenge questionable administrative actions or scrutinize complex financial arrangements.¹⁶ Decisions become more cautious; controversial cases are avoided; dissents grow rare.

3.3.3 Disabling Judicial Remedies: The Supreme Court’s New Doctrine

When intimidation fails or proves too slow, P2025 prescribes outright circumvention of adverse rulings through legalistic maneuvering: use of emergency powers; expedited appeals directly to higher courts packed with loyalists; jurisdiction-stripping statutes designed specifically to insulate executive action from effective review.

This logic reached a new apex on June 28, 2025 when a 6–3 Supreme Court majority issued a ruling barring lower-court judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when those actions are likely illegal, unless higher courts have already ruled.¹⁷ The immediate effect was to allow President Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship to take effect in parts of the country despite every court that reviewed it having found it unconstitutional; infants born to undocumented immigrants or foreign visitors can now be denied basic citizenship documentation while litigation drags on.

But this decision’s implications reach far beyond immigration policy: it strips away one of the last practical checks on presidential power, the ability of federal district courts to issue immediate injunctions against likely unlawful executive action before irreparable harm occurs. As ongoing litigation lags behind aggressive executive orders, from shutting down agencies without Congressional approval,¹⁸ to sending migrants abroad without due process, the practical ability for law itself to constrain power vanishes. As lower courts are rendered unable to halt unlawful executive policies in real time, federal power can now be wielded (against protesters, immigrants, election officials, or entire states) without fear of timely legal remedy. Actions with irreversible consequences (agency shutdowns, voter purges, deportations) may proceed unchecked for months or years before higher courts rule, and by then, harm is often irreparable.

Such doctrinal shifts build upon years of incremental encroachment; what distinguishes their present potency is how they are now wielded within an environment primed by earlier erosion, one where multiple factions see advantage in normalizing legal delay or neutralizing oversight at scale. This ruling does not occur in isolation but as part of an accelerating feedback loop where every institutional check—Congressional oversight (now cowed), internal watchdogs (fired), independent agencies (steamrolled), courts (paralyzed)—is neutralized or bypassed (P2025, p. 653). Courts are no longer guardians but adversaries whose interventions must be minimized, whether through packing or through doctrines that render judicial review too slow or weak to matter.

This development is not an accident but a culmination of P2025’s vision for consolidating presidential power and hollowing out checks from within. As P2025 directs: “The White House Counsel’s office must protect the powers and privileges of the President from encroachments by Congress [and] the judiciary” (P2025, p.1). Now, with Supreme Court sanction, what was once an aspiration has become governing doctrine.

Already there are signs of this logic at work as agencies ignore federal court orders, invoke national security or emergency declarations pretextually for non-compliance,¹⁹ or simply delay implementation until panel composition can be altered through new appointments, all familiar tactics mirrored in Poland’s PiS government when Supreme Court directives threaten regime-favored business arrangements or expose illicit flows.²⁰

The consequence is an environment where law no longer constrains power but serves it, a regime in which legal uncertainty becomes a feature rather than a bug; where judicial independence collapses under pressure from both political masters and their plutocratic partners; where regulatory oversight atrophies; where constitutional guarantees become conditional upon favor at court’s highest levels, or among society’s wealthiest patrons.

As Levitsky & Ziblatt warn: “To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must capture the referees…and rewrite the rules…to lock in their advantage.”²¹

In this model advanced explicitly by P2025, and now ratified at every level, the judiciary becomes less bulwark than instrumentality: securing regime consolidation and safeguarding privileges accruing disproportionately within America’s emergent cryptoplutocracy.

3.4 Lawfare and Legal Retaliation: The Legal Armature of Cryptoplutocratic Oligarchy

Beyond the stacking of courts or intimidation of judges, the most insidious aspect of P2025 is the systematic repurposing of law as a tool to punish political adversaries in service of a new cryptoplutocratic order. Lawfare as political tool has antecedents stretching back decades; what is new in this era, and made possible by prior drift, is its routine deployment as part of an ecosystem where regime priorities align with oligarchic impunity. “Lawfare,“ or the use of legal tools as instruments of political warfare, becomes central when democracy’s formal trappings remain but real power has migrated into the hands of an oligarchic class shielded by secrecy, regulatory capture, and legal impunity. In such an order, the legal system is employed to harass and neutralize economic competitors and civil society actors (such as unions, environmental groups, and consumer watchdogs) who threaten the profitability and impunity of the ruling class.

P2025 devotes significant attention to harnessing prosecutorial power for regime ends. It calls for installing “trusted conservatives“ throughout the Department of Justice and federal prosecutor ranks (P2025, ch. 17), demanding not only ideological alignment but explicit loyalty to presidential priorities, priorities increasingly indistinguishable from those of major donors, corporate actors, and allied financial networks. The blueprint frames this as restoring “accountability“ or combating “deep state“ resistance, but in reality, it means those who threaten elite interests, whether political rivals, investigative journalists, or regulatory watchdogs, become targets for investigation or prosecution while insiders enjoy de facto immunity. The line between legitimate oversight and punitive investigation has been deliberately blurred; criminal process becomes an extension not just of partisan struggle but class defense.

Comparative experience shows where such dynamics lead. In Turkey under Erdoğan, prosecutors have pursued opposition leaders and independent businesspeople who threatened regime-linked monopolies on charges ranging from corruption to terrorism, often based on thin evidence.²³ In Russia, judicial proceedings routinely disqualify dissidents from office while shielding oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin from scrutiny or sanction.²⁴ Venezuela has normalized criminal cases against opposition mayors and expropriated businesses that challenge Chavista clientelism.²⁵

P2025’s reforms would enable similar patterns in the U.S., both structurally (by placing loyalists in key prosecutorial roles) and rhetorically (by framing legal action against critics as necessary defense against “subversion“ or “sedition“). But uniquely American is the fusion with financial opacity: regulatory rollback on campaign finance disclosure; attacks on IRS scrutiny over dark money; shielding shell companies from transparency requirements—all found within P2025’s broader deregulatory agenda (P2025, sec. 3-5).

State attorneys general aligned with administration priorities are encouraged not only to pursue lawsuits against universities or media organizations deemed ideologically hostile (P2025, pp. 13, 332, 352-353), but also to selectively ignore corporate malfeasance by regime-aligned donors, a pattern already visible in recent refusals to investigate fraud allegations involving politically connected firms.²⁶

The consequences are corrosive at every level of public life. There is a chilling effect on dissent when legal jeopardy becomes a tool for silencing critics rather than punishing wrongdoing; individuals and organizations begin to self-censor out of fear that legal processes will be weaponized against them. Due process erodes as selective prosecution undermines equal protection under the law and public trust collapses when outcomes appear predetermined by wealth or connection rather than by justice. Impunity becomes normalized: state resources are marshaled toward pursuing enemies while misconduct by allies is systematically ignored or excused. Finally, regulatory dismantling ensures that tracing flows of dark money grows ever more difficult; opacity becomes entrenched as a feature rather than a bug of governance.

As Ginsburg & Huq argue, when the process for appointing prosecutors is corrupted by political or oligarchic interests, the safeguards against abusive use of criminal law quickly erode.²⁷

But what unravels here is more than rule-of-law, it is any remaining pretense that government serves citizens equally. Under P2025’s model and its cryptoplutocratic logic, the machinery once meant to defend constitutional order may be turned instead toward enforcing regime loyalty while insulating elite wealth from scrutiny or consequence.

3.5 Weaponizing Prosecution & Impunity for Allies

P2025’s legal architecture does not simply seek to capture the judiciary or chill dissent through intimidation; it aims to fundamentally repurpose prosecutorial power as an offensive tool against adversaries and a shield for allies. This logic emerged piecemeal over prior administrations—in selective prosecutions here, politicized clemency there—but now finds systematic expression through explicit doctrine (as in P2025) and coordinated practice across multiple branches. This is the logic of weaponized prosecution, a logic that, when fused with cryptoplutocratic interests, transforms law enforcement from a public trust into an armory wielded at the pleasure of private, unaccountable wealth.

3.5.1 Selective Prosecution as Political Warfare

Under P2025, prosecutorial discretion is reengineered: “trusted conservatives“ are embedded throughout the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement (P2025, ch. 17), ensuring that charging decisions align with regime, and by extension, plutocratic, priorities. While “deep state” resistance is denounced rhetorically, aggressive pursuit targets those deemed subversive or oppositional. In practice, this means adversaries, including political rivals, journalists investigating elite corruption, regulatory watchdogs challenging lucrative contracts, are exposed to investigation or prosecution even absent of substantive wrongdoing.

This sets the stage for the broad intrusion of federal power to override local prosecutors who “have abdicated this duty” and “initiate legal action against local officials, including District Attorneys, who deny American citizens the ’equal protection of the laws’ by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions” (P2025, p. 553).

This perspective is specifically targeted at specific ideological “out-groups” within P2025. By “Announcing a Campaign to Enforce the Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail” (P2025, p. 562), their ambition to undercut reproductive rights gains legal sanction for further eroding abortion access.

The arrest and release of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in June 2025 exemplifies this trend where an elected financial watchdog was detained by masked federal agents after insisting on due process in an immigration court hallway. No crime was evident; no charges were filed. Yet the audacity itself was the message: oversight officials who threaten regime-aligned interests may be subject to arbitrary detention under color of law.³³ Such spectacles are designed less to secure convictions than to chill scrutiny and reinforce impunity for those at the top.

3.5.2 Legal Immunity and Presidential Clemency for Insiders

Just as prosecution can be wielded against critics, it can be withheld from friends, and even from violent loyalists whose actions serve regime goals. President Trump’s sweeping January 2025 pardons and commutations make this dynamic clear, granted to nearly all individuals convicted or charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack, including those convicted of assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy.³⁴ In one stroke, years of federal investigation were erased; hundreds who used violence on behalf of regime power were not only released but publicly rebranded as victims rather than perpetrators.

These “full, complete and unconditional” pardons sent an unambiguous signal, that those willing to use force on behalf of a politically powerful faction, or in defense of oligarchic privilege, can expect protection at the highest level. Conversely, accountability falls disproportionately on those outside these networks, whereby protesters without elite backing face harsh sentences while violent insurrectionists acting on behalf of regime interests receive clemency.

The January 6 pardons were a political signal of impunity for loyal foot soldiers. But the pardons and dropped investigations for financial criminals connected to the regime are even more structurally significant. They signal the creation of a two-tiered system of economic justice: aggressive enforcement for outsiders and complete immunity for allied corporate and financial actors. This is the ultimate shield that allows the oligarchy to operate without fear of consequence.

P2025’s agenda further includes rolling back regulatory scrutiny over campaign finance (“dark money,“ P2025, p. 863), weakening IRS oversight favored by elites (P2025, p. 701), and encouraging state attorneys general to selectively investigate or ignore misconduct depending on political alignment (P2025, p. 559). This results in a dual-track justice system: for insiders, including political allies or economic patrons, even violent criminal liability can be erased; for outsiders/everyone else, even technical violations can trigger investigations meant more as intimidation than adjudication.

Comparative autocracies demonstrate where this road leads. In Russia and Turkey alike, oligarchs loyal to the regime enjoy virtual immunity from prosecution while dissidents are routinely targeted with spurious charges ranging from corruption to terrorism.

3.5.3 Consequences: From Rule-of-Law to Rule-by-Oligarchy

This weaponization produces not only chilling effects on dissent but also a profound corrosion of public trust in equal justice itself. Whistleblowers hesitate, journalists self-censor, even elected officials tasked with oversight risk becoming targets if their investigations threaten powerful interests.

P2025’s fusion of executive ambition with plutocratic interest does more than tilt the scales, it seeks to make them unreadable; law becomes not a constraint on wealth and power but their most reliable servant.

3.6 Disabling Oversight & Internal Watchdogs

The incremental weakening of oversight structures, from underfunding inspectors general to political firings, paved the way for today’s comprehensive assault. What had been tolerated as sporadic dysfunction became, post-2016, a deliberate strategy for neutralizing any institutional brake on elite predation.

An oligarchy cannot survive transparency. Its fusion of public power and private enrichment depends on secrecy. Therefore, the internal watchdogs of the state (inspectors general, ethics offices, whistleblower channels) are not just bureaucratic obstacles but existential threats that must be systematically dismantled. A functioning democracy depends not only on impartial courts but also on robust oversight involving inspectors general, ethics boards, whistleblower protections, and independent investigative agencies. These watchdogs are the connective tissue that links government to public accountability and forms a last line of defense against both official corruption and private-sector malfeasance. For an aspiring cryptoplutocratic order, such mechanisms are intolerable obstacles.

P2025 systematically targets these internal checks for neutralization or outright dismantlement. The blueprint calls for expanding presidential authority over the appointment and removal of inspectors general (P2025, p. 553), enabling rapid replacement of any watchdog who “obstructs policy implementation,” a euphemism for those who scrutinize questionable contracts, regulatory rollbacks, or conflicts of interest that might imperil elite networks. Whistleblower protections are hollowed out (P2025, p. 653), while reporting requirements for financial disclosures are weakened (P2025, p. 863).

But even where statutory oversight powers remain on paper, administrative action can render them toothless in practice. In June 2025, ICE imposed new restrictions on congressional visits to immigration facilities, requiring up to a week’s advance notice and reserving the right to deny or cancel tours at will.³⁵ This policy directly undermines federal law permitting unannounced inspections by lawmakers charged with executive branch oversight. As one DHS spokesperson put it: “A week is sufficient to ensure no intrusion on the president’s constitutional authority,” making explicit the intent to subordinate legislative scrutiny to executive prerogative.

The judiciary has also facilitated this erosion of transparency at the highest level. In June 2025, the Supreme Court allowed DOGE access to millions of Americans’ sensitive Social Security records despite ongoing legal challenges over privacy.³⁶ On the same day, the Court blocked a government watchdog group from obtaining internal DOGE documents under FOIA while litigation proceeds, thus shielding potentially explosive information about how DOGE has wielded its extraordinary powers.

This logic is now reinforced by new judicial doctrine and appellate rulings that empower President Trump to remove members, even Democrats confirmed for fixed terms, from “independent” oversight agencies such as the Federal Labor Relations Authority or National Labor Relations Board.³⁷ These decisions cite recent Supreme Court precedent in holding that presidents may clear out nonpartisan boards designed by Congress to be insulated from political pressure, so long as their members exercise “considerable authority.” As a result, statutory independence further collapses for any body with meaningful oversight functions.

As independent oversight bodies lose autonomy, and as even legislative attempts at real-time inspections are stymied, the White House asserts near-total veto power over scrutiny it finds inconvenient or threatening.

Recent practice foreshadows these dangers with growing clarity. Multiple agency inspectors general have been summarily dismissed after raising alarms about no-bid federal contracts awarded to companies linked to major campaign donors.³⁸ Congressional attempts at oversight are routinely stonewalled by executive refusals to comply with subpoenas or provide unredacted documents vital for accountability. Even federal courts now sometimes abet secrecy rather than challenge it, as demonstrated in recent rulings allowing exemptions such as those shielding DOGE records from FOIA requests.

Comparative experience again warns where this path leads. In Hungary and Russia alike, anti-corruption offices have been defanged or staffed by loyalists; what remains is a façade of accountability behind which oligarchic enrichment proceeds unchecked.³⁹ In Venezuela under Maduro, internal watchdogs became little more than enforcers against political rivals while turning a blind eye to regime-favored embezzlement schemes.⁴⁰

The cumulative effect is systemic opacity: where whistleblowers fear retaliation more than exposure; financial flows between government and private actors become harder, and riskier, to trace; and regulatory agencies lose their capacity and will to investigate misconduct at the top.

For a cryptoplutocratic order in which political power serves as an extension of concentrated wealth, disabling independent oversight is not collateral damage; it is central strategy.

3.7 Erosion of Due Process & Civil Liberties

The hollowing-out of due process did not begin with P2025, it reflects decades of bipartisan erosions (from expanded executive discretion to anti-terror legislation). Yet only recently has such hollowing become central blueprint policy, a marker that cumulative drift has tipped into conscious regime logic.

The ultimate test of any constitutional democracy lies not in its formal declarations but in its ability to guarantee equal protection and due process to all, especially when power is abused or contested. Under P2025’s capture architecture these guarantees are systematically hollowed out. Legal protections that once shielded citizens from arbitrary detention or selective prosecution become conditional privileges dispensed at executive pleasure, or set aside altogether when regime priorities demand it.

3.7.1 Administrative Obstruction: Insulating State Power from Oversight

The erosion begins with deliberate insulation of executive power from democratic checks. ICE’s overhaul of congressional visitation policy, demanding up to a week’s notice for lawmakers seeking entry into detention facilities,⁴¹ contradicting federal law, transforms oversight from a right into an executive-dispensed privilege. Zones where legal rights can be suspended without consequence now proliferate across immigration enforcement infrastructure, insulating lucrative contractors from scrutiny while rendering basic legal protections contingent on regime favor.

3.7.2 Intimidation and Criminalization of Public Officials

Obstruction is reinforced by direct intimidation against officials who attempt constitutional duties, from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander detained without charge for demanding a judicial warrant,⁴² to Senator Alex Padilla handcuffed after questioning DHS Secretary Noem.⁴³ Such episodes signal that even those with formal constitutional standing are vulnerable if they challenge regime priorities, a precedent chilling both current officials and would-be dissenters throughout civil society.

3.7.3 Routine Circumvention of Judicial Orders

Beyond intimidation lies routine circumvention, or outright nullification, of law itself. The Mahmoud Khalil case remains emblematic: after a federal judge ordered his release as unjustified under existing law,⁴⁴ ICE refused compliance while seeking new pretexts, demonstrating how adverse court rulings are increasingly treated as optional guidelines rather than binding constraints when they threaten regime interests.

Newly released DOJ correspondence reveals an even starker precedent: Attorney General Pam Bondi sent letters pledging immunity for major tech firms, including Google and Apple, to ignore Congress’s TikTok ban law.⁴⁵ These letters declare that because President Trump determined enforcement would interfere with his “constitutional duties,” companies could openly violate statute, with “no liability” during his declared suspension period, even though Congress passed the law with bipartisan majorities and the Supreme Court upheld it unanimously earlier in 2025.

Legal scholars describe this as an unprecedented claim that presidents can immunize private parties from liability under duly enacted statutes, a move far exceeding prior exercises of prosecutorial discretion.⁴⁶ The effect is chillingly clear: laws themselves become provisional instruments subject not only to selective enforcement but prospective suspension whenever they conflict with presidential priorities, a fundamental breach in rule-of-law tradition dating back nearly two centuries.

3.7.4 Mass Enforcement, Datafication, and Procedural Shortcuts

These erosions are compounded by mass enforcement operations that treat due process as an obstacle rather than a guarantee. Under pressure from White House officials who have set unprecedented daily arrest quotas for ICE, procedural shortcuts now routinely bypass individualized review in favor of speed and spectacle.⁴⁷ Agents rely on sweeping data-mining tools developed in partnership with regime-aligned private tech firms (Palantir/DOGE), aggregating information from across government agencies with minimal transparency or accountability. The result is a machinery optimized not for justice but for volume, and increasingly insulated from public scrutiny.

3.7.5 Expansion of Emergency Powers & Suspension of Core Rights

At the apex of this architecture lies the aggressive expansion, and abuse, of emergency powers by the executive branch. President Trump’s declaration of dubious emergencies, to deploy military force against protesters or threaten suspension of habeas corpus for entire classes of detainees, is part of a calculated strategy to normalize governance outside traditional legal constraints.⁴⁸ Framed as responses to “invasion” or “rebellion,” these moves echo classic authoritarian playbooks where perpetual crisis becomes pretext for unchecked power and indefinite suspension of civil liberties. The legal rationale for such expansion is explicitly rooted in P2025’s doctrine of presidential supremacy: “Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will…” (P2025, p. 43). The report leaves no doubt about where it vests authority: “In its opening words, Article II of the U.S. Constitution makes it abundantly clear that ‘[t]he executive power shall be vested in a President…’ That enormous power is not vested in departments or agencies…” (ibid). In this view, any constitutional guardrail, be it agency independence or judicial review, is subordinate to presidential command and can be overridden whenever deemed necessary for consolidating executive power or advancing aligned elite interests.

3.7.6 Oligarchic Logic & Systemic Consequences

These erosions serve not only regime security but also elite economic interests, the core dynamic underlying cryptoplutocratic oligarchy. By insulating favored firms from statutory liability while selectively prosecuting adversaries; by bypassing congressional intent through executive fiat; by rendering judicial remedy slow or inaccessible; P2025’s logic ensures that law becomes both sword against out-groups and shield for insiders.

The practical outcome is less democratic decay than structural transformation, a captured system where due process, civil liberties, statutory guarantees themselves become privileges dispensed (or withheld) according to regime whim.

3.7.7 The Collapse of Legal Equality

As these practices become normalized, protections once seen as fundamental, such as independent oversight and legal accountability, are methodically dismantled at the policy level as well. P2025 calls for Congress to “sunset the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection… [because] it is redundant with activities… [of] Office of Inspector General” (P2025, p. 653), while also proposing elimination of independent legal counsel within agencies (P2025, p. 549) and even advocating for legislation “to eliminate the 10-year term for the [FBI] Director” (P2025, p. 551). These moves are justified by an underlying assertion that career bureaucrats, including those tasked with internal oversight, lack both “independent constitutional status” and “separate moral legitimacy” (P2025, p. 80). The cumulative effect is not just immediate injustice but a collapse of legal equality itself, a system where all protections become privileges dispensed at the discretion of those who have seized control.

When legal protections become conditional, when oversight collapses and courts can be bypassed or ignored, the consequence (beyond the immediate injustice) is the collapse of any credible promise of equality before the law. Citizens withdraw from civic life out of fear; trust in government and justice erodes; and those tasked with public service face impossible choices between professional integrity and complicity in arbitrary power. In this environment, each new violation sets a precedent, normalizing what was once unthinkable and redefining the boundaries of permissible state action.

This accelerating breakdown is not simply the sum of individual abuses but evidence of a deeper transformation: a captured system where due process, civil liberties, and constitutional guarantees are no longer foundational principles but privileges dispensed, or denied, at the discretion of those who have seized control. Only by confronting this reality can we begin to imagine, and demand, a path toward genuine constitutional renewal.

3.8 Feedback Loops & Systemic Consequences

The combined effect of DOJ purges, oversight board paralysis, and elevation of figures like Emil Bove is systemic recalibration, not just episodic abuse: loyalty replaces legality at every level; oversight becomes impossible; courts are stacked not just with ideologues but with proven executors willing to disregard lawful constraint when expedient for regime objectives.

Authoritarian capture almost never arrives all at once. In America as elsewhere, it advances through recursive feedback between accident and ambition, where each success emboldens more systematic assault. Drift creates opportunity; convergence breeds design; together they entrench oligarchic power behind legal form. Under P2025, these feedback loops are not incidental, they are deliberately engineered to entrench cryptoplutocratic oligarchy.

What follows are the central feedback mechanisms by which capture becomes self-reinforcing.

3.8.1 The Cycle of Capture

Loyalty purges of career officials, such as through Schedule F, create an environment where dissent leads to removal and self-censorship becomes the norm. As experienced staff exit, institutions are hollowed out, leaving them vulnerable to further capture by loyalists from aligned political and corporate networks. Each successful purge enables deeper politicization, accelerating the cycle and making institutional reversal increasingly improbable.⁴⁹

3.8.2 Regulatory Demolition Weakens Oversight

As oversight bodies are gutted through elimination of fixed terms for agency heads, sunsetting whistleblower protections, or starving watchdogs of resources, the state’s ability to detect or resist abuse collapses. ICE’s new rules blocking congressional oversight⁵⁰ render detention facilities into legal black holes shielded from scrutiny by lawmakers, journalists, advocates, or even courts whose rulings can be ignored with impunity (see Mahmoud Khalil case). In this vacuum, regulatory demolition proceeds unchecked: agencies tasked with protecting public goods are repurposed to serve aligned industries or cronies, channeling lucrative contracts and deregulatory windfalls directly into elite networks.

3.8.3 Judicial Subordination Enables Executive Overreach

Judicial independence is systematically undermined through loyalty-based appointments and threats to tenure or jurisdiction. Once courts are packed with ideologically vetted loyalists or cowed into acquiescence, as P2025 prescribes, executive overreach faces little effective resistance. The Supreme Court’s July 2025 order allowing the administration to proceed with mass firings and agency closures, even as lower courts questioned their legality, demonstrates the judiciary’s abdication of its checking function.⁵¹⁵² When adverse rulings do occur they are often ignored outright or circumvented via procedural maneuvers.⁵³ Each instance signals that legal constraint is contingent on regime interests, a reality keenly understood by officials inside government and ordinary citizens seeking redress.

Crucially this subordination insulates not only executive power but also economic actors most closely tied to regime fortunes, from favored contractors in surveillance/detention industries to donors whose interests shape enforcement priorities.

3.8.4 Emergency Powers Normalize Suspension

P2025’s invocation of unitary executive theory provides ideological cover for escalating uses of emergency powers: indefinite military deployments,⁵⁴ mass detentions without individualized review,⁵⁵ sweeping data-mining operations by regime-aligned tech firms, all justified as necessary responses to perpetual crisis or “rebellion.” With each exercise left unchallenged, or retroactively ratified by compliant institutions, what was once extraordinary becomes routine, and resistance erodes further. This cycle disproportionately benefits those who profit from crisis: private security firms securing border contracts; data companies monetizing surveillance tools; financiers protected from regulatory scrutiny in the name of national emergency.

3.8.5 Oligarchic Networks Harden Capture

At every stage these feedback loops reinforce not just regime maintenance but cryptoplutocratic consolidation itself: regulatory rollbacks enrich connected elites; mass enforcement powers target out-groups while immunizing insiders (“Issue guidance to ensure that litigation decisions are consistent with the President’s agenda…” P2025 p. 559); oversight structures once meant as checks become levers for settling scores or securing patronage within an inner circle straddling both state offices and private fortunes. As these networks embed themselves deeper within government structure, with personnel pipelines running from think tanks and industry lobbies into agency leadership, the harder it becomes for any future administration, or even broad public mobilization, to disentangle elite privilege from nominally public authority.

Each act—purge enabling purge; impunity breeding impunity—sets new precedents that lower standards across all branches: professional exodus accelerates among civil servants unwilling to enforce arbitrary policy; trust in equal justice collapses among citizens witnessing selective prosecution (or protection) determined less by law than proximity to power. These cycles erode democratic practice, but perhaps more troublingly, they reconstitute government itself into an armature for wealth extraction and elite immunity.

Recent Supreme Court emergency orders exemplify this dynamic: by green-lighting mass layoffs and granting administration requests to override statutory constraints on agency structure, the Court ensures that even if overreach is later found illegal, the institutional damage is already done; an “egg that cannot be unscrambled,” as challengers argued.⁵⁶

This yields a system structurally resistant not only to democratic correction but even basic transparency, a regime where law remains ever-present as form but is hollowed out in substance, redeployed as both sword against adversaries and shield for those who have mastered its capture.

To interrupt these self-reinforcing cycles requires more than isolated reforms, it demands constitutional reconstruction robust enough to break oligarchic feedback loops before their logic becomes irreversible.

3.9 Conclusion: Toward an Authoritarian Legal State—and What Must Be Defended

The system designed by P2025 is not simply executive overreach or partisan excess, it is systematic construction of cryptoplutocratic oligarchy: legal form remains but constitutional substance has been eroded, leaving state power to protect elite interests while punishing dissent. Each act builds atop precedent set by years (or decades) when smaller violations went unpunished, normalizing what was once unthinkable until today’s systemic reengineering seems almost inexorable. But it was precisely this interplay between past opportunism and current design that brought us here, a warning that reversal will require more than technical fixes; it will demand structural renewal rooted in historical memory and bold innovation.

The blueprint is both explicit and operationalized. P2025’s core doctrine declares that “the executive power shall be vested in a President… That enormous power is not vested in departments or agencies” (P2025, p. 43), and that “an autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy” (P2025, p. 80). The result is a government designed to be purged, repopulated, directed at will, where professional expertise/institutional memory are liabilities rather than assets.

In practice these principles have become policy—oversight bodies hollowed-out/brought under direct presidential control;⁵⁷ judicial independence subordinated through loyalty-based appointments and threats to tenure (P2025, pp. 21, 27, 560); emergency powers normalized as routine governance tools (P2025, p. 44), justifying indefinite military deployments/mass detentions/surveillance—all disproportionately benefiting those already privileged by wealth/proximity.⁵⁸

To frame this as mere backsliding is to miss its strategic function and structural transformation: law becomes both sword and shield for oligarchic consolidation; democracy’s promise replaced by conditional privilege; public institutions serve private enrichment rather than civic accountability.

The stakes could not be higher as recent events show: the arrest of elected officials demanding due process,⁵⁹ ICE facilities turned into black sites beyond congressional reach,⁶⁰ courts defied with impunity,⁶¹ emergency powers invoked at will, the collapse of legal equality is no longer hypothetical but present-tense reality.

What must be defended now is nothing less than the foundational architecture of constitutional democracy: the principle that all stand equal before law—not merely as formal rhetoric but as enforceable reality; the institutions whose independence was meant to check ambition with ambition—not subordinate all ambition to one; the very idea that public power should serve the many rather than entrenching privilege for the few.

Diagnosing this architecture is necessary, but if feedback loops remain unbroken even well-intentioned reform may prove futile against an order structurally resistant to accountability/reversal.

It is this imperative, to break oligarchic feedback loops before their logic becomes irreversible, that demands nothing less than constitutional reconstruction: legal redesign robust enough for genuine checks on power; institutional hardening against capture; civic renewal grounded in shared democratic purpose rather than factional loyalty and elite self-dealing.

Only by naming and confronting what has been lost can we begin charting a path back from this brink.

Once the machinery of governance and the rule of law have been subordinated, the project requires severing the link between the people and power itself. The next cluster deconstructs the systematic nullification of the vote, the essential precondition for entrenching minority rule.