Faced with stacking national crises and a do-nothing Congress that went on holiday just as 30–40 million Americans looked like they could lose their homes, Donald Trump has engaged in that most storied tradition of American presidents: issuing a flurry of executive orders to get around the United States’ malfunctioning political system. And both the Left and anyone else with any interest in seeing Trumpism defeated have reason to worry about it.

The first reason to worry is the deeply illiberal nature of his “anarchist jurisdiction” order, which essentially tries to blackmail blue states into cracking down on the ongoing historic protests against police violence. (In what has become a hallmark of the Trump era, both anti-Trump liberals and the pro-Trump right seem to live in the same alternate universe where Democratic officials haven’t already been doing that from the start).

As the coronavirus pandemic rages through the country and we enter what may be the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Trump is threatening to withhold desperately needed federal funds from states and cities that are either: refusing to send police to quash protests; “disempower[ing] or defund[ing] police departments”; resisting Trump’s offers to send his own forces to do the job; or for “any other related factors the Attorney General deems appropriate.”