Journalist Garrett Graff is sounding increasingly urgent alarms about America’s slide into authoritarianism.

He said that what is happening under the Trump administration is not a constitutional crisis, which “normally means that there's some sort of tension in the system, disagreements between the two branches.” Instead, he insisted that the tension is absent because “what we are seeing is a Congress that is willingly abdicating many of its constitutional and statutory authorities to the President.”

What is happening now is “a constitutional crash. And I mean that in the medical sense, where we are seeing the unwinding of our constitutional system writ large, and sort of a collective failure of checks and balances across the board.”

“Checks and balances only work if Congress actually cares,” Graff continued. “And what we're seeing right now is Congress just not caring what the President does... They seem unwilling to stand up for both their traditional role and also their own personal power in Washington, lest it basically anger Donald Trump's hoards of supporters and turns MAGA against them.”

Garrett Graff, a former editor of Politico and Washingtonian magazines, is a frequent guest on television news shows and a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. His oral history of the 2008 financial crisis, “The Weekend That Shook The World,” was published this week in the Washington Post op-ed section.

“I think the 2008 financial crisis is a moment that we have not fully reckoned with in terms of how it shaped and changed the trajectory of our country,” noted Graff. “It caused an enormous loss of faith in the system and in institutions among voters and Americans. It launched the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, which we have seen go in the years since from the fringe to the mainstream of the party.”

“The fact that there were no Wall Street executives who were publicly held to account in criminal prosecution — basically that there were no CEOs who were perp walked on TV — caused a lot of people to rightly feel that the system was not working for them, that basically the powerful were being protected and they were being made to pay the price as ordinary mortgage holders or shareholders across the country. It also a big part of the rise of Donald Trump, who, in the wake of the financial crisis, begins his regular commentary for Fox News as this businessman and entrepreneur, and begins the way that he moves to the center of gravity in the Republican Party.”

Graff was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 history of Watergate. He is the author of numerous books about history and national security, including “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9-11,” and “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here ― and Out There,”

Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario. 

Recently, Graff, who lives in Burlington, turned his lens closer to home. He is the editor of a new book from the Vermont Historical Society, “Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont.” (Disclosure: VTDigger reporter Erin Petenko was interviewed for “Life Became Very Blurry.”

Graff wrote that “it’s possible that Covid will prove as transformational a moment for the (Vermont) population and culture as the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s.”

He predicted that the “national revolution around remote work” will benefit Vermont in the long term" and bring "a new generation of Vermonters to the state who can make successful careers here.”

Graff notes that nationally, the pandemic gave rise to nostalgia that has fueled Trump's promise to return the country to a mythical past, even to a time when the U.S. was ruled by a king.

"Right now, hour by hour, we are watching the court cases play out about whether the President can rendition people without criminal records to torture gulags in El Salvador and then declare them beyond the reach of US courts for any sort of due process whatsoever. It does not take a law degree to note that that is one of the most fundamentally unconstitutional sentences I could have possibly uttered, and goes against sort of every American tradition in the legal process and due process in our 250 year history. It sounds much more like something King George III was doing to the colonists when they declared independence than anything that we have seen a US president do ever since."

Are we on the road to authoritarianism?

"I think we are in a moment where we are trying to answer that question anew almost every single day."