Reviewing Ungoverning (September 2025)

‘Ungoverning’ is the term Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum use to describe “the attack on the capacity and legitimacy of government, especially the part of government that goes by the term ‘administrative state.’” The ‘administrative state’ is the government bureaucracy, that “vast array of government agencies that shape, implement, adjudicate, and enforce public policies of every kind.”(1) Muirhead is Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College, and Rosenblum is Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government Emerita at Harvard University. In 2024, they published Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos.

The authors’ writings on ungoverning are part of a fairly recent spate of literature describing the contemporary challenges faced by liberal democracies worldwide. The adjective ‘liberal’ is important because it makes clear that the democratic state does not possess unlimited powers.(2) In a liberal democracy, a constitution establishes the ground rules for governance, enumerating the responsibilities of the various agencies of the state and defining the limits of state power vis-à-vis individuals. In an illiberal or authoritarian democracy, elections are not vigorously contested, and the authority of the executive body of the state is expansive with respect to what we call the separation of powers as well as individual civil liberties. Unsurprisingly, this concentration of power in the executive of necessity includes control over the election process itself. The authors cite Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela and Narendra Modi’s India as examples of authoritarian democracies.(3)

The book covers Trump’s first term in office as well as his actions and pronouncements as former president during the Biden administration. The compelling evidence the authors submit in support of their analysis and assessment of the ungoverning threat against America is even greater in Trump’s second term. In their most recently published collaboration, ‘Ungoverning America: The Logic Behind Trump’s Assault on the Administrative State’ published September 5, 2025 in Foreign Affairs, they write that “ungoverning has become the core logic of the Republican Party that Trump now dominates. It is thus not surprising that Trump’s second-term agenda centers on tearing Washington apart.”

The authors attempt to distinguish fascism from ungoverning. Acknowledging the value of the charge of ‘fascism’ for mobilizing resistance against Trump, they argue that ”fascist foreboding can be misleading.” For instance, they write that

In [Nazi] Germany, the bureaucratic apparatus was taken over and redirected. Ungoverning does not strengthen and redirect bureaucracy, it incapacitates the state. . . . [T]he reactionary movement [MAGA] and the Republican Party have neither capacity nor inclination for totalist ideology. The aim is to destroy constraints; it is not to do, it is to undo.

Ungoverning has also been described as “Lenin dismantling the institutions,” a not so subtle reference to Vladimir Lenin’s famous proclamation that under Communism, the state will wither away. But ungoverning is not a preliminary stage to reform; it is destruction, in America’s case, of the liberal democratic system of government. What comes next is authoritarian populism.

In America, the purpose of ungoverning is to establish the personal rule of one man, Donald J. Trump. The legislature, the courts and the bureaucracy all have to be forced into submission to the president. Separation of powers, checks and balances, expertise, (non-arbitrary) proceduralism, a mutually respected two-party political system—all of these must bend to the demands of the chief executive of the moment.

The authors add that uncontested personal rule is prone to corruption, writing that “Trump’s own zeal for personal enrichment encouraged something more comprehensive that looked like a “lawless feeding frenzy, [which] [w]e might see it as incipient kleptocracy.”(4)

Trump’s power lies in his control of the MAGA movement. It is by means of this movement that Trump was able to take control of the Republican Party, and it was his domination of the party and its membership that enabled him to maneuver Congress effectively enough to pass Reagan-like tax cuts, fend off two impeachment convictions and appoint enough loyal justices to control the Supreme Court. In his second term, Trump has accelerated and intensified his war on the administrative state, which the authors regard as the last stronghold of the progressive politics that have shaped modern America since the New Deal era. This is the so-called Deep State that is legally obligated to execute extant U.S. law even if the laws’ interventionist and regulatory socioeconomic and business philosophy is anathema to the White House of the day.

What distinguishes Trump’s America is that it is “a twisted version of democracy” where “the connection between the leader and the people is direct, personal, immediate, and emotional.” For a populist authoritarian such as Trump,

The leader’s relation to followers requires his constant presence, with ceremonial occasions that stage the strongman signing orders or appearing with military officers, with frequent rallies, and with a never-ending stream of tweets. The people are constantly present to the leader, and, importantly, the leader is present to them. He understands and shares his followers’ antipathies and their desire for action “right now.” He cultivates a dynamic of constant, mutual recognition.

Here, the authors quote the Italian political theorist and Columbia professor of political science, Nadia Urbinati, who makes the point somewhat more succinctly: “the populist leader needs to stay in permanent campaign mode because . . . the formality of elections has less value than the strength of the audience.”

This day-to-day manipulation of his ‘audience’ is what enables Trump to keep the Republican Party membership loyal and obedient. What has so far worked best for Trump in animating and deploying his populist base is the promise of a restoration—Make American Great Again—of the white Christian nation to replace the weak America that subscribes to multiculturalism, pluralism, secularism and international rules. His followers give their loyalty in exchange for his recognition of and promise to redress their grievances. And their loyalty extends to employing extralegal violence as the January 6^th Insurrection, notwithstanding the U.S. military’s refusal, at that point in history, to interfere in the election on President Trump’s behalf.

The strength of his base—upwards of 70 million based on voting in the 2020 presidential election—is the leverage that he wields against enemies and to corral his opportunistic supporters. The Republicans, in turn, take their orders from Trump and attack whomever and wherever he directs. Although not mentioned in the book, one of the more alarming examples of Republican fealty to Trump was demonstrated when the Republican House launched an impeachment investigation against President Biden, in retaliation for the Democratic House’s double impeachment of Trump. The insult to Trump was not assuaged by the genuflecting Republican senators who refused to convict Trump on the articles of impeachment.

The Republican’s primary objective is to prevent the Democrats from governing (at the federal, state and local level), silence Trump’s opponents and deny federal agencies the freedom to act consonant with their professional expertise and approved standards if the president so wishes. And perhaps no other American has made more effective use of the courts to intimidate his opponents, escape justice (he is, until pardoned, an unsentenced convicted felon) and win virtual immunity from prosecution from the highest court in the land. And this court, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts with six Trump supporters, is promoting the unitary executive doctrine, whereby the President, under Article II of the Constitution, is entitled to exercise absolute authority over the executive branch and all of its subordinate and even independent agencies. The objective: to consolidate executive authority in the Office of the President, so that the president can dismiss agency staff and appoint their replacements with ease as a means of compelling agencies to follow presidential directives. Thus, the Fed could be commanded to lower interest rates prior to an election, the SEC could be ordered to investigate a company owned by an enemy of the president, the FCC could be directed to revoke the licenses of unfriendly networks, the FEC could be forced to investigate an opposition candidate in a presidential election, the FBI could be made to investigate a political opponent, and the IRS could be coerced into auditing whomever the president chose.

For Americans who do not view government bureaucracy favourably—its convoluted immensity, inefficient workings and officious airs—the alternative of a presidentially-micromanaged bureaucracy carrying out the whims and fancies of one man surely must be worse.

In the authors’ most recent update to Ungoverning, they report a state of affairs in American government that is arguably even more extreme than the first Trump administration.

In the first seven months of his second term, U.S. President Donald Trump has made unprecedented changes to the way the American government operates. He has launched an extraordinary and erratic tariff scheme, eliminated U.S. foreign aid programs, upended U.S. alliances, and waged war on the administrative state. He has detained and deported scores of foreign students and scholars for their political views; strong-armed universities, law firms, corporations, and media outlets into doing his bidding; and emasculated the government’s regulatory agencies. He has deployed the U.S. National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., purportedly to fight disorder and crime, and threatened to send the military to Chicago, New York City, and beyond. (‘Ungoverning America,’ Foreign Affairs)

Trump’s relentless pursuit of ‘ungovernance’ represents “the comprehensive and intentional destruction of state capacity.” In its wake, Trump’s personal rule, founded on a large, vocal populist base, exemplifies the motto attributed to Louis XIV, the 17^th century absolute monarch of France: L'état, C'est moi. Such an assertion would not be out of character for Trump who has expressed enthusiastic envy for the perpetual regimes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

The authors’ outlook is grim. In their parting words, they write “The shadow ungoverning casts over American political life will remain until citizens appreciate and assert the necessity for institutions that give government the capacity to govern.” “Appreciate and assert”—that is so vague that it might imply a wide range of possible responses, some of which the authors probably wouldn’t care to publicly endorse. It seems to this reviewer to be a fatuous statement to make at the conclusion of a damning analysis of Trump’s presidency and a dismal assessment of the prospects for liberal democracy in America.

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Endnotes

But the authors are quick to observe that laws are not self-executing. Therefore, “everything that is required to give laws content and bring them into the world is administration—and much of it is unseen.”

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Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations for U.S. Agencies

FEC - Federal Election Commission

Fed - Federal Reserve System

FCC - Federal Communications Commission

FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation

IRS - Internal Revenue Service

SEC - Securities and Exchange Commission