Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been marked by a relentless barrage of grievances, with his administration launching attacks on a wide array of institutions and individuals perceived as adversaries. Scarcely a day passes without President Trump exerting pressure on a new target, from escalating his campaign against Harvard by threatening to restrict foreign student enrollment to publicly denouncing musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, and issuing thinly veiled threats against major corporations like Walmart and Apple concerning their responses to his trade policies.
While this pervasive belligerence might initially appear as a scattershot approach lacking a unifying principle beyond sheer animosity, many experts contend that the confrontations instigated by Trump since resuming office are strategically aimed at a fundamental goal: the erosion of the separation of powers that underpins the U.S. Constitution.
Although debates regarding the appropriate scope of presidential authority have been a recurring theme throughout American history, numerous historians and constitutional scholars argue that Trump’s endeavor to consolidate power over American life distinguishes itself not only in its intensity but also in its fundamental nature from that of his predecessors. Throughout history, presidents have occasionally pursued individual aspects of Trump’s agenda to maximize executive influence. However, none have combined Trump’s resolute efforts to marginalize Congress, circumvent the judiciary, enforce absolute control over the executive branch, and deploy the full force of the federal government against anyone he deems an obstacle to his objectives—including state and local governments, segments of civil society such as law firms, universities, and nonprofit organizations, and even private citizens.
“The sheer level of aggression and the speed at which [the administration has] moved” is unprecedented, according to Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. “They are engaging in a whole range of behaviors that I think are clearly breaking through conventional understandings of what the law says, and of what the Constitution says.”
Yuval Levin, director of social, cultural, and constitutional studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also posits that Trump is pursuing the most expansive vision of presidential power since Woodrow Wilson over a century ago. However, Levin anticipates that Trump’s efforts will ultimately backfire, compelling the Supreme Court to resist his overreach and more explicitly define limitations on presidential authority. “I think it is likely that the presidency as an institution will emerge from these four years weaker and not stronger,” Levin wrote in an email. “The reaction that Trump’s excessive assertiveness will draw from the Court will backfire against the executive branch in the long run.”
Other analysts express less optimism that the current Supreme Court, with its six-member Republican-appointed majority, will effectively restrain Trump from accumulating power to the point of destabilizing the constitutional system. It remains uncertain whether any institution within the intricate political framework devised by the nation’s founders possesses the capacity to do so.
A defining characteristic of Trump’s second term is his simultaneous assault on the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution to prevent the arbitrary exercise of presidential power. He has marginalized Congress by effectively dismantling statutorily authorized agencies and asserting the right to impound congressionally approved funds. He has openly stated his intention not to enforce laws he opposes, such as the statute prohibiting American companies from bribing foreign officials, and has pursued significant policy shifts, particularly on tariffs and immigration, through emergency orders rather than legislative action.
Trump has asserted absolute dominion over the executive branch through widespread personnel changes, the weakening of civil service protections for federal employees, the wholesale removal of inspectors general, and the dismissal of commissioners at independent regulatory agencies—a move that also undermines the authority of Congress, which designed these agencies to operate independently of direct presidential control.
He has arguably already transgressed into open defiance of lower federal courts by resisting orders to reinstate government grants and spending and by refusing to actively pursue the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant whom the administration has acknowledged was wrongly deported to El Salvador. While Trump has thus far refrained from directly disregarding a Supreme Court order, his efforts to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return have been minimal.
President Trump has also disregarded traditional notions of federalism, particularly those historically championed by conservatives, by systematically attempting to impose conservative priorities, especially on cultural issues, onto states with different political leanings. His administration has arrested a judge in Wisconsin and a mayor in New Jersey over disputes related to immigration. (Last week, the administration dropped the case against the Newark mayor and instead filed an assault charge against Democratic U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver.)
Most unprecedented have been President Trump’s actions to pressure civil society. He has sought to punish law firms that have represented Democrats or other causes he opposes, cut off federal research grants and threatened the tax-exempt status of universities that pursue policies he disapproves of, directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the primary grassroots fundraising arm for Democrats, and even instructed the DOJ to investigate individual critics from his first term. Courts have already rejected some of these actions as violations of fundamental constitutional rights such as free speech and due process.
It is difficult to conceive of almost any prior president undertaking any of these actions, let alone all of them. “This ability to just deter other actors from exercising their core rights and responsibilities at this kind of scope is something we haven’t had before,” observed Eric Schickler, co-author of the book “Partisan Nation.”
For President Trump’s supporters, the sweeping nature of this campaign against the separation of powers is viewed as a positive attribute rather than a flaw. Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key architect of Trump’s second term agenda, has argued that centralizing greater authority within the presidency will actually restore the Constitution’s intended checks and balances. In Vought’s interpretation, liberals have “radically perverted” the founders’ design by diminishing the influence of both the president and Congress, thereby shifting power towards “all-empowered career ‘experts'” within federal agencies. To rectify this imbalance, Vought contends, “The Right needs to” liberate the presidency by discarding precedents and legal paradigms that have purportedly developed erroneously over the past two centuries. President Trump himself succinctly summarized this perspective during his first term, famously declaring, “I have an Article II [of the Constitution], where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Regardless of other assessments of the initial months of Trump’s second term, his unwavering belief in this assertion is evident.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed a proclamation commemorating the 250th anniversary of Patrick Henry’s iconic “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Notably absent from Trump’s proclamation was any mention of the speech Henry delivered thirteen years later to the Virginia convention considering the newly drafted U.S. Constitution. In that address, Henry opposed ratification, primarily due to his conviction that the Constitution afforded insufficient safeguards against a malevolent or corrupt president. “If your American chief, be a man of ambition, and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute!” Henry warned. He cautioned that if a president sought to misuse the vast authority at his disposal, the nation would be left with inadequate defenses against such a force, potentially leading to “absolute despotism.”
Brown University political scientist Corey Brettschneider, who highlighted this speech in his recent book “The Presidents and the People,” wrote that Henry was among the founders who most clearly recognized the inherent danger of the presidency, viewing its ostensibly benign powers as potentially susceptible to misuse. Even proponents of the Constitution shared some of Henry’s concerns. Preventing a slide into tyranny was a central theme of the Federalist Papers, the essays authored primarily by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to encourage states to adopt the Constitution.
For Madison, a key virtue of the proposed government was its division of power, designed to prevent any single individual or political faction from achieving absolute authority. A fundamental principle of the Constitution’s design was that officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches would fiercely protect the prerogatives of their respective institutions and resist encroachments from the others. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51. “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Madison believed the Constitution established a dual safeguard against despotism, not only through the diffusion of power among the three federal branches but also through its distribution “between two distinct governments” at the national and state levels, a system of federalism that would provide what he termed “a double security [for] the rights of the people.”
The Constitution, despite its merits, was not without flaws, most notably its acceptance of slavery. Its protections have also wavered at times when presidents have threatened fundamental rights, often during or immediately following periods of war. However, as Pierson and Schickler argued in “Partisan Nation,” the separation of powers generally functioned as intended throughout much of U.S. history. “For almost a quarter of a millennium,” they wrote, “the operation of American government tended to frustrate the efforts of a particular coalition or individual to consolidate power, dispersing political authority and encouraging pluralism.”
The founders’ strategy, however, showed signs of strain even before Trump’s emergence on the national stage. In recent decades, Pierson and Schickler contend, the increasing polarization and nationalization of political parties have weakened the Constitution’s system of checks and balances and separation of powers, often referred to as the Madisonian system. While Madison and his contemporaries anticipated that officials would primarily focus on defending their institutional prerogatives, modern politics reveals a tendency among state and federal officials, and even judicial appointees, to prioritize their partisan allegiance to the Democratic or Republican party. This has steadily diminished the willingness of other power centers to push back against a president from their own party who oversteps their constitutional boundaries, in the manner Madison envisioned. Trump is both capitalizing on this trend and escalating it to an unprecedented level of ambition.
The fundamental question now is whether President Trump will succeed in overwhelming the separation of powers and concentrating authority within the presidency, potentially to the point of undermining American freedom and democracy itself. Even posing these questions reflects possibilities that Americans have rarely had to seriously contemplate.
Brettschneider’s book traces the history of public resistance to presidents who have threatened civil liberties and the rule of law, including John Adams, Andrew Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He suggests that these historical precedents offer reason for optimism, though not unbridled confidence, that the constitutional system will endure Trump’s current offensive. “We have these past victories to draw on,” Brettschneider said. “But we shouldn’t be naïve: The system is fragile. We just don’t know if American democracy will survive.”
Levin, the author of “American Covenant,” an insightful analysis of the Constitution, does not believe Trump presents such an existential threat. He concurs that Congress is unlikely to mount significant resistance to Trump’s assertions of unchecked authority: “The weakness of Congress, and the vacuum that weakness creates, is the deepest challenge confronting our constitutional system, even now,” Levin wrote. However, he anticipates that the Supreme Court will ultimately serve as a constraint on Trump’s actions. Levin predicts that the court will differentiate between the “unitary executive” theory, which advocates for greater presidential control over the executive branch, and the more extreme “unitary government” theory, which would extend presidential power over other branches and civil society. “So this court will simultaneously strengthen the president’s command of the executive branch … and restrain the president’s attempts to violate the separation of powers,” Levin predicts. This expectation underpins his belief that Trump’s power grabs will ultimately weaken rather than strengthen the presidency in the long term.
Analysts on the left of Levin are far less certain that the same Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority that voted to effectively shield Trump from criminal prosecution for official acts will consistently restrain him—or that Trump is guaranteed to comply if it does. They tend to view President Trump’s second term as presenting an almost unparalleled stress test for the Constitution’s intricate mechanisms designed to preserve freedom and democracy.
The fact that the Madisonian system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism has “sustained itself for 235 years can give you a lot of confidence” in its resilience, Schickler noted. “What I would say is: We shouldn’t be too confident. It broke once before in the Civil War. It’s not going to break in the same way, but the possibility of it breaking is real.”
The initial months of Trump’s return to office have clearly demonstrated his determination to dismantle the safeguards that the constitutional system has erected against the abuse of presidential power. Less certain is whether officials from the other branches of government, leaders in civil society, and even ordinary American citizens will exhibit the same resolve in defending them.
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