“No other president could do some of this s—- I’m doing.” President Donald J. Trump on March 9 at a policy dinner. 

Back in 1941, Ernst Fraenkel — a German-Jewish lawyer and political scientist in exile — coined the concept of the “Dual State.” It was among the first rigorous attempts to define fascism, not as mere brutality, but as a system. 

On one side stood the normative state: formal institutions bound by rules, procedures, courts of law, agencies and constitutional convention. 

On the other, the prerogative state: an extra-legal order deriving its authority entirely from the will of the leader, operating above and beside the law simultaneously.

The crucial point Fraenkel made was that dualism was not a flaw — it was the architecture. 

The prerogative state doesn’t announce itself, nor does it need to. It operates through the normative state’s own corridors appointing loyalists to regulatory bodies, installing political enforcers inside agencies, and using the machinery of law to dismantle the rule of law itself. 

What looks like dysfunction from the outside is, from the inside, a feature. Every institutional norm violated is a test of how much the edifice will absorb before anyone pushes back.

So far, that sounds about on brand, does it not?

None of this is blundering — from the gutting of the federal government, to the dismantling of American soft power, and the conversion of allies into adversaries and adversaries into partners.

It is a state capture, conducted in broad daylight, with a smile and a draconian press conference. The illusion of separation between private power and public governance — the fiction that held this republic’s self-image together for generations — has not cracked, it’s dissolved.

What makes this moment distinct from prior American authoritarianism isn’t ambition. It’s the openness. The prerogative state no longer hides behind the normative one; it shoves it aside on camera.

Mind you, we are also a country at war, albeit we have been for the entire 21st century, in one way or another. What a war removed from the actual consequences does to the psyche is brain-bending.

But war, and the hypermilitarized police forces roaming our republic on the hunt for “illegals,” is one of the most visible sites of the combination of the prerogative and normative states at work. 

After all, we must recall that our glorious leader deemed the acts of violence committed on Jan. 6, 2021 as a “day of love.” 

What happened to those right-wing militias that took part in the attempted coup? Could they have joined the president’s personal goon squad? 

All while men, women and children scream as they are taken away to treacherous camps — named with humor such as “Alligator Alcatraz” — while those in power gloat over the confinement and “desapariciones” of other human beings.

There is also a sizable and unflinching cohort of this country for whom this is not a crisis. For whom this is, in fact, the point. 

That cohort, filled with barons of capital and normal everyday Americans, is quite the juxtaposition, as those so-called barons of modern capitalism — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, to note a few — have purposefully manipulated the public to their whims. 

Call it neo-fascism, neo-feudalism or the bluntest term available: authoritarianism. The label matters less than the recognition that it has a constituency. One that is organized, funded and entirely comfortable with where this is heading.

Which raises the question the respectable press still refuses to ask plainly: who, exactly, is making decisions?

Look at the man at the top. The evidence of serious cognitive decline is not a partisan talking point, it is an apparent truth. 

What that means, in practice, is that the feeble king on the throne becomes less relevant than the court circling him. JD Vance, Marco Rubio and the architect of ethno-nationalist policy who has outlasted anyone that tried to contain him — Stephen Miller.

These are the men watching the clock. These are the men who understand that the prerogative state’s window is open, and that windows close.

The opposition? Feckless. Absent. Busy triangulating toward a majority it no longer knows how to imagine holding. That absence is notable. In other countries, there would possibly be a “popular front” in attempts to stave off the chauvinistic and reactionary regime — but that is not how the land of the free operates. 

Fraenkel wrote his analysis from exile, watching a republic he had believed in consume itself from within. He understood that the Dual State doesn’t require a dictator who is competent, or even fully conscious. 

It requires only that the normative institutions fail to defend themselves, and that the people charged with that defense decide, for whatever reason, that it isn’t worth the cost.

We are at that moment. The back is bending and the question remains whether it breaks.

Ethan Grandin is the Editor-in-Chief at The Review. His opinions are his own and do not represent the majority opinion of The Review staff. He may be reached at egrand@udel.edu.