The war in Iran has heightened key questions about the relationship between the president and the military. Although he did not ultimately follow through on his threats to cripple Iran, the threat itself raised real questions about whether the orders would have been followed by troops on the ground.

This comes as Secretary of Defense Hegseth has interfered numerous times with the promotion of senior members of the Armed Forces, often for reasons that appear discriminatory. An apolitical, professional military is one of the great strengths of our democracy, and this administration has been working to undermine it since entering office.

At the same time, Trump is trying to work around Congress to pay all DHS employees, a clear attempt to pull funding authority from the legislature.

President Trump signed an executive order that purports to create federal voting lists that can be used to control who receives a mail-in ballot. The order is already facing legal challenges – states are responsible for running elections, and the president does not have the Constitutional power to exercise his authority in this way. The president’s ultimate goal, though, as it was with the SAVE Act, is to suggest that our elections are corrupt.

As Alexandra Chandler, Protect Democracy’s Director of Impact Programs for Free and Fair Elections explained:

“This executive order is more like an attempted executive override of the states’ authority to run our elections. Meant to solve for a problem that exists only in the false rhetoric of the Trump administration and its political fortunes, the EO is a classic example of their playbook to deceive the American people and disrupt the election process in order to deny any future results that don’t suit them.”

The administration has made good on their campaign promise to deploy ICE agents across the country to target vulnerable communities through racial profiling. These deployments seem designed to indiscriminately spread fear and intimidate potential critics, with dozens of documented instances where U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained.

Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed a law that would allow him and other state officials the power to label groups as foreign or domestic terrorists, and expel state university students who support those groups. The law could suppress legitimate speech at campuses across the state of Florida, and provide a template for other states who want to suppress disfavored speech.

Even as they continue to perpetuate the Big Lie, the Trump administration is also spreading misinformation about the 2026 midterms and how they’ll play out. This misinformation is the groundwork for attempts to dispute the results of the election after the fact. Elections in the United States remain free and fair, but we have to work to keep them that way.

Many of the Trump administration’s efforts to ignore the law have hit major roadblocks in the federal courts. In the past few weeks:

• A judge ruled that construction on the new White House ballroom had to be halted until the president received approval from Congress
• Ex-FBI agents who investigated the president sued the FBI and the Department of Justice over their firings
• A judge ruled that the administration unlawfully revoked the status of migrants who used an entry app
• The Supreme Court seemed largely skeptical of the administration’s attempts to redefine the 14th Amendment – despite Trump sitting in the courtroom

The firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose attempts to weaponize DOJ were unprecedented, highlights the challenges in unlawfully consolidating legal power.

Although ICE deployments are still a real threat to American civil liberties, challenges to these deployments across the country speak to the meaningful resistance they’re facing. After a leaked memo in January suggested that ICE had been giving agents the authority to break into people’s homes, we sued to defend the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens and immigrants alike.

The Fourth Amendment was drafted by our Founders to protect against the general warrants used under British colonial rule, where British officers could rummage through people’s homes at will. This is part of a much larger effort by the Trump administration to use immigration enforcement as a tool to violate civil liberties enshrined in our Constitution.