In the weeks since the presidential election, president-elect Donald Trump and his allies have made a series of moves that indicate their intent to dangerously consolidate executive power under the controversial “unitary executive” theory of the Constitution.

During the presidential campaign, Trump posted a video on Truth Social that referred to his second administration as a “unified Reich,” invoking Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany. As president-elect, Trump’s cabinet selections have corroborated his campaign pledge to be a dictator on day one.

With the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his core “official” functions, and the 920-page “Project 2025” right-wing blueprint for an autocratic government, Trump is positioning himself to change the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over all aspects of the executive branch — and thereby becoming a “unitary executive.”

The framers of the Constitution created a tripartite system of government with three overlapping and co-equal branches to check and balance each other. But the unitary executive paradigm would elevate the executive above the legislative branch. It says that the executive branch is “unitary” — that is, the president has complete command and control over it.

The unitary executive theory has its roots in the “imperial presidency” during the Civil War and reached its zenith during the Nixon administration. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus without congressional authorization. President Richard Nixon, who ultimately resigned for his lawbreaking during the Watergate scandal, famously declared, “When the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”

In 1988, in Morrison v. Olson, the Supreme Court upheld a provision of the 1978 Ethics in Government Act — passed in the wake of Watergate — that said a special prosecutor could be removed by the president only for good cause. This was an implicit rejection of the unitary executive theory. Antonin Scalia wrote a solitary dissent in which he maintained that the Constitution’s Article II Vesting Clause (which says, “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States”) “does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.”

During the George W. Bush administration, John Yoo, one of the primary authors of the “torture memos,” elevated the unitary executive model to a central tenet of the Bush presidency. Yoo told New Yorker writer Jane Mayer that Congress couldn’t prevent the president from ordering torture. When asked if any law prohibited the president from crushing the testicles of a child during interrogation of their parent, Yoo responded, “I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.” But torture is absolutely prohibited by U.S. and international law.

The unitary executive paradigm would elevate the executive above the legislative branch.

Seeking to empower the president to override the will of Congress, Yoo inserted the phrase “unitary executive” into Bush’s signing statements attached to legislation, in which the president reserved the right to disobey any parts of congressional statutes with which he disagreed.

Samuel Alito, while serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan administration, supported the unitary executive theory. He stated at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 2006: “The concept of unitary Executive doesn’t have to do with the scope of Executive power. It has to do with who within the Executive branch controls the exercise of........

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