President Donald Trump has failed to transform the United States from a republic into an authoritarian regime — but the country could still deteriorate unless Democrats take one decisive step to stop it, New York Times political analyst Jamelle Bouie argued Saturday.

In a column examining what he described as a bleak state of affairs in Trump's America (published in The New York Times), Bouie wrote that the president has already begun making moves to subvert the upcoming midterm elections. The November midterms will determine control of both chambers of Congress, and with them the ability of either party to check or enable the administration's agenda for the remainder of Trump's term.

"The president of the United States is engaged in a conspiracy against the voting rights of the American people, which is to say that the president is engaged in a conspiracy against the Constitution itself," Bouie wrote.

"This is part of a larger effort, spearheaded by the most fanatical of his allies, like Stephen Miller, to end the American republic and supplant it with an authoritarian regime in which President Trump holds sovereign authority over the whole nation," he continued.

Bouie grounded his argument in several actions taken by the administration: Trump's efforts to seize states' power to run their own elections, his waging of war abroad without permission from Congress, and the deployment of violent immigration agents into American cities to "terrorize" communities. The Constitution's Elections Clause assigns the administration of federal elections primarily to state legislatures, while Congress may alter those rules, and the framers assigned the power to declare war to Congress rather than the president — two separation-of-powers boundaries at issue in Bouie's argument.

"Thousands of people have been kidnapped in the street and whisked away to squalid detention centers, where dozens have died," Bouie wrote. "Many thousands more, including some American citizens, have been deported, sometimes to countries they've never seen or visited in their lives."

The columnist drew a direct comparison to the genocidal Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler when describing the Trump administration's interpretation of its mandate. The "Führerprinzip" he referenced denotes the Nazi-era doctrine of leader supremacy, under which all authority flowed from Hitler personally.

"The attitude of the president and his advisers is that the 2024 election was an enabling act for a constitutional revolution, in which rule by the people was replaced by the Führerprinzip," Bouie wrote.

That mandate, however, has failed, Bouie argued.

"I believe Trump has failed to accomplish authoritarian consolidation," he wrote. "But he has ripped an enormously damaging Trump-size hole in the constitutional order."

That damage, according to Bouie, is why Democrats must prioritize a single course of action. Trump was impeached twice during his first term, in 2019 and 2021, and acquitted both times by the Senate; a successful impeachment conviction would require a two-thirds Senate majority.

"Should Democrats capture a majority, they must make the reconstruction of the American political order their first priority," Bouie wrote. "That includes an impeachment trial against President Trump."