Lisa Miller clearly comes to condemn Trump, not to praise him. Yet her polemic captures a common justification of his administration’s violent, cruel, and authoritarian ethnonationalism. This striking tension should raise questions about both her diagnosis of our democratic malaise and her prescription for solving it.

The stark contrast Miller draws—between a democracy-stultifying system of “checks and balances” and a majoritarian expression of popular will—is also central to the MAGA movement’s rhetoric and actions. Echoing Trump’s own language, Miller stresses that political institutions are “dominated by elites,” leading to the “atrophy” of mass politics. Her invocation of “older traditions” of constitutional law, along with her call to mobilize “mass majorities” that respond to “ordinary people’s needs,” likewise echo the White House’s proclamations of constitutional fidelity and its appeals to “ordinary Americans.” And just as Miller decries the idea of states acting as “a veto of the national public interest,” so the Trump administration has sued blue states over trans athlete and immigration policies it perceives as un-American.

Of course, it is possible that MAGA is right about the cause of our political dysfunction but wrong about what’s to be done. Miller might distinguish her position from Trump’s by arguing that her proposals, unlike his, are actually grounded in the interests and wishes of ordinary Americans. She does cite polls showing majority support for certain progressive policies. But Trump can point to more than hypothetical majorities. He secured an actual electoral victory by campaigning on very different issues than the ones Miller foregrounds. He won the popular vote in November by more than 2 million ballots thanks to substantial rightward shifts among “seemingly every possible grouping of Americans,” as the New York Times put it. He won, moreover, without hiding his morally odious views or anti-democratic tendencies. And polling suggests that majorities still support some of his anti-immigrant and anti-trans policies, even after months of cruel crackdowns.

In short, it is hard to see how to embrace majoritarianism while condemning Trump’s evisceration of equality, due process, and free speech. Some might view these hateful majoritarian sentiments as mere false consciousness, whipped up by a fractured media environment rife with misinformation. That may or may not be true—I am skeptical that online discourse, in particular, deserves as much blame as it often gets on this score—but it misses the point. Having made an argument grounded in actual politics, Miller must confront it in all its messiness. Appeals to an imagined, sanitized people won’t do.

Since simple majoritarianism can’t be the right remedy, we have reason to be skeptical of Miller’s simple diagnosis: the specter she calls “checks and balances.” Miller never precisely defines the term, but she takes aim at congressional committees, the federal courts, and the constitutional authority of the states. She suggests that these features of our system are by their nature counter-majoritarian and thus anathema to democracy. There is reason to be concerned about the difficulty of enacting progressive legislation in our presidentialist system, but Miller’s argument paints with too broad a brush. Three considerations point to a more cautious position.

First, Miller treats Congress and the courts too rigidly, missing the many functions they perform. Congress does more than pass laws; it also acts as a “check” on lawless executive action through its investigative powers. The Senate’s investigation of Trump’s relations with Russia in his first term is a case in point: it exposed important information and shifted public opinion. To be sure, Congress’s investigations can misfire or be misused. But if the goal is to resist oligarchy and make government work for ordinary Americans, shouldn’t we welcome Congress’s checking power on the presidency?

As for courts, Miller focuses on judicial review of legislation, which she appears to reject entirely. But courts, like Congress, play multiple roles. Besides reviewing laws, they adjudicate claims of individual rights against state violence and cruelty. In the first hundred days of Trump’s second term, judicial intervention has been vital in slowing (if not completely stopping) the lawless abduction of noncitizens and citizens. Without judicial checks, it is safe to assume that far more horrific state violence would be carried out under the rubric of “immigration enforcement.” Courts have also been pivotal in preventing the White House from lawlessly withholding federal funds from states and universities. No doubt Miller does not intend to embrace lawless authoritarianism. But she offers no framework for distinguishing essential “checks” from the ones she thinks should be jettisoned.

Second, “checks and balances” cannot play as large a role in our democratic dysfunction as Miller contends for the simple reason that bicameralism, congressional veto-gates, and judicial review were all present during the New Deal and the Great Society. Many other factors have contributed to this moment, including shifting coalitions within both national political parties; the changing strategies of capital in the face of diminishing returns from investment; and demographic shifts that have deepened partisan polarization. It is tempting to identify a lone villain, and Miller is absolutely right that wealthy elites exert far too much influence over public policy outcomes. But in an era when masked officers and unmarked vans are disappearing students in broad daylight, we need a more measured accounting of the goods, as well as bads, of stratified government power.

Finally, as Tom Ginsburg and I have argued, there is now a standard playbook for eroding democracy from within. The tried-and-true strategy is to aggregate power within the executive branch, disarming checks from the courts or legislatures. Once these checks are gone, elected autocrats tilt the electoral playing field so that opposition parties might still be able to participate in elections but stand little chance of winning. It’s only thanks to the intervention of an independent check on the executive—say, a court or an autonomous election authority—that this process has ever been slowed or stopped.

For all these reasons, it’s hard for me to see how abolishing checks and balances is what this moment calls for. We should reckon with oligarchy, but not by mounting a wholesale assault on the very institutions that do indeed serve as a safeguard against tyranny.