States Are Using the Pandemic to Roll Back Americans’ Rights

The coronavirus pandemic has led governments around the world to adopt draconian measures. Some of these, such as social-distancing mandates, are, quite obviously, bona fide and necessary efforts to control the rate of virus spread. Others, however, pretty clearly constitute a form of pandemic political opportunism, such as in Hungary, where the national Parliament dissolved itself after granting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule (indefinitely) directly and by decree.

To date, U.S. President Donald Trump has not used the crisis to seize power and establish autocracy in the United States. To be sure, Trump is doing plenty to undermine American institutions—repeatedly attacking the press and individual journalists, actively weakening essential forms of oversight and accountability (even as the federal government has committed more than $2 trillion in direct spending to combat the pandemic), and firing or reassigning government employees, including scientists who publicly contradict his error-laden daily talking points—but the president has not (yet) attempted to use law to directly stifle voices that criticize him