Congress is the institution our textbooks taught us is supposed to stop such a president, but lawmakers seem to be completely useless in this regard. Besides their repeated surrender of powers to the executive over many years, Trump’s policy actions have put him in a position to dominate them, as well — and by extension the party bases that put the members into office.

Obviously the biggest threat in Congress comes from the majority — Trump’s increasingly enthusiastic Republican Party. Trump’s brilliant move here was to kick off his policy blitz not with classic Republican red meat such as tax cuts, but with the global abortion gag rule and two big strikes against so-called “free trade” agreements.

With one hand he rewarded the most indispensable core of the GOP base, the element most capable of giving him trouble if they had any principles other than their bigotry. And with the other hand, he forced the party’s powers-that-be to nod and smile while he eviscerated orthodox Republican policy.

The notion that a Republican president would kill a major trade agreement and put another — NAFTA, no less — on life support in the first week of his administration would have been an absurdity at any other point in the last 60 years.

But Trump has altered the very grounds of U.S. politics to the extent that all the contexts are now uncertain and the entire process disorienting in the extreme. The fact that Republicans are now celebrating protectionism with nary a word of protest from any quarter means that essentially any policy could flip on them, and so the only point of reference they have is doing what Trump wants of them.

The Gag Rule and the Muslim Ban in particular have secured the undivided support of the party’s grassroots for Trump, so congressional capitulation is not only the only coherent path, it’s the only politically safe one. The GOP Congress will be to Trump what the Reichstag was to Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein’s council of representatives was to the Iraqi despot — a rubber stamp.

It’s actually this phony imprimatur of legal authority that will make Trump a dictator and not an autocrat.

As for congressional Democrats, the less said the better. What exactly have they done to even slow down Trump or lodge anything but impotent protest? The protectionist decree won praise from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an act of absolute betrayal to whatever shreds of the socialist tradition he still had claim to — abandoning any reference to the global working class most at risk under these trade regimes and empowering a reactionary strongman for no reason whatsoever.

Old white men from the union aristocracy gave Trump even more cover and even Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren approved Trump’s nominee Ben Carson for secretary of housing and urban development, a role for which he has no credentials beside being from a city. She showed up to the Logan Airport protests, but this only highlights the incoherence of liberalism in this crisis.

Instead the Democrats have demonstrated a lack of any principles beyond their own sense of intellectual superiority and a vague wish that the president were nicer. Unless something changes dramatically, there is no chance that they will ever beat Trump at the ballot box — even if Trump keeps his voter suppression at a minimum. Which he won’t.

The press, the federal bureaucracy, Congress and the opposition party — Trump has made serious blows towards neutralizing them all in a very short period of time. What’s left?

First there are the courts, and Trump is already on the path to some collisions here. A well-respected liberal good-government group and several noted law professors filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump is in violation of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, though the suit is a decided long shot.

More likely to be a problem are the legal challenges certain to be filed against his executive orders. Many of these orders are being rushed with insufficient legal review, ensuring that some of them are likely illegal.

How Trump responds when the courts say — like they did with Obama — that his actions overstepped his powers will be a crucial test. At this point submitting to court decisions is essentially a custom — the courts have no power to force him to comply.

One early test was not encouraging. Even after federal judges blocked elements of Trump’s order barring entry into the country by travelers — including refugees, green card and visa holders — from certain Muslim nations on Jan. 28, Customs and Border Protection agents continued detaining travelers, anyway — in blatant defiance of judicial authority.