We are taught that the United States has three branches of government.
Out checks and balances to protect the people. To protect democracy. To protect the nation.
In practice, it has always had four.
- The Executive,
- the Legislature,
- the Judiciary, and
- the Fourth Estate
—Journalism—form a system of checks and balances meant to prevent exactly what we are now living through.
Under Donald Trump, that system has not merely been stressed. It has been deliberately compromised.
What follows is not a poll or a projection.
These are judgment-based estimates—a way to make visible what otherwise feels abstract, normalized, or deliberately obscured.
Executive Branch — 90–95% Compromised
The executive branch is now the most damaged institution in American governance.
Trump has never treated the presidency as a constitutional office. He has treated it as a personal instrument. Loyalty is rewarded. Dissent is punished. Accountability is framed as persecution.
The United States Department of Justice, though nominally independent, has been pressured, hollowed out, or bypassed whenever it threatened personal consequence.
What integrity remains survives not because of leadership, but because of inertia—career professionals, internal processes, and laws not yet fully dismantled.
At 90–95% compromised, the executive still functions—but no longer reliably in service of the Constitution.
Congress — 80–85% Compromised
Congress did not lose its power overnight.
It abdicated it.
For decades, the United States Congress refused to reclaim authority ceded to the executive: war powers, emergency declarations, enforcement discretion, and meaningful oversight.
Under Trump, abdication hardened into submission. Oversight became performance. Accountability became conditional on party loyalty rather than constitutional duty.
At 80–85% compromised, Congress still convenes, votes, and speaks—but no longer consistently restrains executive abuse.
A branch that will not check power becomes complicit in its expansion.
Judiciary — 65–70% Compromised (and Uneven)
The judiciary is the most complex case—and the most misunderstood.
At the top, the Supreme Court of the United States has expanded executive immunity, weakened accountability, and narrowed the avenues through which presidential misconduct can be challenged.
Those decisions have shifted the presidency toward something dangerously close to untouchable.
But below that apex, the system has largely held.
Local courts. State courts. Lower federal courts. Judges applying evidence, procedure, and constitutional limits without regard to intimidation or spectacle.
That is why the judiciary is 65–70% compromised overall—badly damaged at the top, but still functioning as a democratic firewall at its foundation.
That distinction matters more than most people realize.
This Didn’t Start With Trump: A GOP Timeline
This is not a claim of a secret plot or single mastermind. It’s a retrospective timeline showing how a series of strategic choices, incentives, and norm-breaking decisions inside the GOP, beginning in the 1990s, steadily lowered guardrails and made an autocratic administration not only possible, but viable.
The GOP’s evolution setting conditions (whether intentionally or inadvertently) for an autocratic administration.
No analysis, no prose. Just Facts.
1994 — The Republican Revolution - Newt Gingrich begins lying to the American people on C-SPAN late at night to appear like he’s talking to a full Congress, in an empty room, setting the stage for imitating old Soviet Disinformation tactics that the GOP eventually takes on… with gusto.
1995–1999 — Permanent Opposition: Politics, to wit: “We look too much alike and must differentiate ourselves from the Democratic Party, at any or all costs, to any or all others, as long as it’s not the GOP.”
2000 — The Disputed Election Normalized: Questionable election win in a state where the winning presidential candidate’s brother is Governor. Did Democrats or the losing candidate serve up an insurrection? NO. Americans do not do that. Grace and decency rather than autocracy and immaturity.
2001–2008 — Security State Expansion: Fear drives America to trade freedom for security:“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”— exactly as Benjamin Franklin warned us.in 1755.
2009 — The Tea Party Insurgency: Conspiracy politics goes mainstream—QAnon before the branding.
2010 — Minority Rule via Structural Power
2012 — Radicalization After Electoral Loss
2014 — Media Ecosystem Capture
2015 — Strongman Candidate Emerges
2016 — Populism Overtakes the Party, Autocracy tests the waters.
2017 — Executive Power Stress Test
2018 — Institutional Loyalty Over Norms
2019 — Impunity as Precedent
2020 — Election Legitimacy Rejected
2021 — Coup Attempt Without Consequences
2022 — Normalization of Illiberalism
2023 — Party Subordination to One Man, one very, very defective man.
2024 — Return Campaign on Retribution, Vengeance and the demise of the US Constitution.
2025 — Autocratic Governance Phase I
2026 — Authoritarian Consolidation Phase: AKA, Executive Power Normalized. Democracy by Permission. The Autocratic State Stabilizes. Rule by Loyalty, Not Law. Autocracy Without the Coup.
Read. Then look again. This is the stupid, stupid regime logic we’re being saturated with today—as nonsense feels ever more normal:
It Can’t Happen Here Authoritarianism via American populism. Elections, rallies, flags, courts…no tanks required.
1984 State power, loyalty enforcement, reality distortion. Criminalizing dissent and redefining truth.
WeThe blueprint. Total transparency, worship of efficiency, individuality treated as pathology.
The Handmaid’s Tale Theocratic authoritarianism. Rights removed “temporarily,” morality weaponized as governance.
Animal Farm Revolution captured by elites. Language shifts, history rewritten, hierarchy returns instantly.
Parable of the Sower Collapse through inequality, climate stress, and private power. Feels less like fiction every year.
Brave New World Control through distraction and pleasure. Pacification beats repression when people cooperate.
Fahrenheit 451 Censorship by apathy. Books vanish because attention spans and curiosity collapse.
Oryx and Crake Corporate dominance and engineered catastrophe. Ethics outsourced to profit.
The Iron Heel Oligarchy and crushed labor. Corporate power fused with state violence.
Never Let Me Go Compliance through politeness. Atrocity survives because no one wants to be “difficult.”
The Man in the High Castle Normalization after the fall. Fascism isn’t loud once it’s won…it’s administrative.
These books don’t contradict each other…they describe different phases of the same disease. Anyone citing them while advocating the systems inside them either didn’t read them, or read them as instructions instead of warnings.
The Fourth Estate (Journalism) — 35–45% Compromised
Journalism is not a formal branch of government, but it is a functional one. Without it, no other check operates in daylight.
Trump’s strategy toward the press has never been control. It has been delegitimization: flood the zone, exhaust the public, convince citizens that nothing is true and no one is trustworthy.
That strategy has worked—partially.
Corporate consolidation, collapsing local newsrooms, algorithm-driven outrage, and false equivalence have weakened journalism at precisely the moment it was most needed.
And yet, at 35–45% compromised, the Fourth Estate remains the least captured of the four.
Investigative reporting continues. Corruption is still exposed. Courts and citizens still rely on journalists to surface facts that power would rather bury.
Wounded, yes. Captured, no.
Which is why it remains under constant attack.
The Reality the Percentages Reveal
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The executive has been personalized (90–95%).
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Congress has surrendered its role (80–85%).
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The Supreme Court has enabled executive overreach, while lower courts resist (65–70% overall).
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Journalism remains the most intact check (35–45%), despite relentless pressure.
The two institutions that have most consistently slowed the slide toward autocracy are not the most powerful ones.
They are local and lower courts, and the Fourth Estate.
If those fail, there is no remaining mechanism to stop what follows.
Percentages make this unavoidable:
We are no longer arguing about direction. We are arguing about how much has already been lost.
The Final Variable: The Citizen
There is one factor these percentages do not capture, because it does not belong to any branch of government.
The public.
Citizens are waking up. They are organizing. They are protesting. And—quietly but measurably—it is working.
Trump has been pushed back. Not by deference, not by decorum, but by visible resistance. Congress, slow and reluctant, is beginning to stir—not out of principle, but out of pressure. That distinction matters, but so does the result.
What is most damning is not that citizens are acting. It is that they had to.
It should never require mass protest for a government to behave like a government. The institutions we enable, fund, and legitimize are meant to protect the public—not demand protection from it.
And yet here we are.
If there is a narrow hope in this moment, it is this: the Constitution ultimately rests not in buildings or robes or chambers, but in an engaged citizenry willing to insist that power answer to law.
That is not how a healthy system should function.
But it is how this one is being forced to remember itself.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
