It’s a time of enormous crimes and heavy punishments in the US. Unfortunately, there’s little connection between the two. The second Trump administration has been defined by personal enrichment, an indifference to legitimacy and an authoritarian attitude towards dissent. The disregard for the rule of law exceeds anything seen in previous administrations, including Trump’s own. Any tenuous respect for international law has evaporated, with the US proudly launching military interventions widely regarded as illegal in Iran, Venezuela and Somalia, among others. The administration brags about kidnapping a sitting head of government and posts lurid footage of lethal strikes carried out on vessels in the Caribbean. The scale of corruption within the administration is head spinning. Recounting the extent of it would not be possible in a column 20 times the length of this one. Some of it is technically legal, much of it flagrantly illegal. It doesn’t matter, as the rule of law around it has ceased to exist. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that the president enjoys broad immunity is just the top level of the retreat that the legal and political system has made from the notion of accountability. Often these twin illegalities combine, as in the case of the disappearing Venezuelan oil revenues, an act of colonial theft that would make the British Raj gasp. Dissent is being policed at the most authoritarian level in decades. Where the first, inexperienced Trump administration struggled to control a vast set of bureaucracies, the second one is adroit at exploiting its repressive capabilities. The heavy-handed tactics used against pro-Palestine protesters under Joe Biden have been expanded, including full exploitation of the immigration policing system. Some were held for months, as different courts battled over their treatment, and some are still living in limbo.Nowhere is this crackdown more evident than in the recent Prairieland case. After a protest at a Texas immigration detention facility, nine defendants were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years each for offences ranging from concealing supposedly inciting materials to a shooting that resulted in injuries to an officer, who survived. These unusually harsh sentences were inflated by tying them to terrorism. The judges, Reed O’Connor and Mark Pittman, have histories as conservative district judges. O’Connor – whose rulings are often overturned on appeal – explicitly tied the sentences to a desire to send a message to “anyone who shares a similar ideology”. The prosecution is one of a number directed against protesters, particularly those identified as “antifascism”. Last year the administration issued the national security directive NSPM-7, and it designated “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organisation, outlining an enormously broad set of characteristics as evidence of membership or support for the same. In July, the State Department released a report on “front groups and fellow travellers” of Cuba on the left, accusing Cuba of having infiltrated the “highest reaches” of US government, a pretext for both domestic repression and military intervention in Cuba. The US has a long history of weaponising policing and immigration bureaucracies against left-wing dissent. After the first World War, the Palmer Raids targeted socialists, communists, and anarchists for arrest and deportation. The FBI under long-time director J Edgar Hoover was a machine for violating civil liberties. The “Green Scare” of the early 2000s targeted environmental groups for long jail terms. Then as now, government repression is twinned with the threat of extrajudicial violence from a large, autonomous and armed population sympathetic to the aims of the administration. Those sympathisers convicted for their role in the January 6th insurrection have been pardoned, and the administration has attempted to compensate them for time served. [ The Iran conflict is escalating and Tehran is in no rush to end itOpens in new window ]Trump has paired these attacks with a ruthless assault on other possible centres of dissent: the media and universities. By attacking them both through the direct power of the executive and a series of tendentious lawsuits made viable by the transformation of the judiciary, he has cowed many into submission. Given that US media institutions are mostly profit-seeking, and dependent upon federal agencies for approval of mergers and acquisitions, there is also an economic incentive for them to fall into line. Some are also owned by people sympathetic to the administration. Self-censorship is increasingly common and despite the administration’s growing unpopularity, criticism is muted compared to his first term.The presidency has accumulated power since at least the second World War. Presidents like Richard Nixon and George W Bush tested the limits, launching illegal wars and attempting sabotage of their political opponents. With every step, they undermined the foundation of democratic stability. We now face an increasingly unpopular presidency that is less and less constrained by Congress, the Supreme Court, the media or civil society. As Trump threatens to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections, the country holds its breath to see if the walls will hold.