Aaron Zitner informed the Wall Street Journal’s mostly conservative readers that Trump has kicked Congress aside in his unprecedented power grab, upending a foundational system of checks and balances that in all likelihood neither Trump nor his MAGA base understands, or even knows about. “The result, if Trump’s assertions of power survive the courts, would significantly rebalance power in Washington, centralizing unprecedented authority over federal spending, executive-branch personnel and a range of policy subjects in the Oval Office at the expense of Congress— the branch that the nation’s founders envisioned would have the more direct connection with voters and their interests... Modern presidents have continually pushed to expand the contours of their power. But Trump is proving to be unique, say legal experts, in both the breadth of authority he is asserting and his claims that even if Congress has put its preferences into law, he has the power to chart a different course. ‘This president appears to believe that even if there is a duly enacted law, he’s going to blow past it and see what happens in the courts,’ said Jeh Johnson, a former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Democratic President Barack Obama.”
Trevor Morrison, a law professor at New York University, said that Trump’s willingness to ignore laws passed by Congress across a range of policy and personnel areas marked him as distinct from prior presidents. “Trump is asserting a constitutional prerogative to ignore, disregard or even openly violate laws that are inconsistent with his policy,” he said.
Among the most blatant, Morrison said, was Trump’s effort to invalidate birthright citizenship— the constitutional provision that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen—which was one of the first executive orders he signed… A federal judge quickly placed a temporary block on Trump’s citizenship directive.
Many of Trump’s other actions are sure to draw legal challenges— some of which have been filed already— that could place central questions of presidential power before a conservative Supreme Court that includes three members Trump appointed in his first term. How the judiciary navigates those disputes could set new contours on the relative powers of three branches of government that, in theory, are coequal.
Congress so far has offered the barest protest in response to Trump’s various orders. In one of the few exceptions, a Republican and a Democratic senator jointly asked Trump to explain his justification for firing the inspectors general.
“The framers intended for the legislature to exert itself no matter who was on the Supreme Court or who was the executive,” said former Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC). But Congress, he said, isn’t defending its prerogatives. “This is a slow creep to a diminished legislative branch,” he said.
Perhaps the biggest test for Congress is Trump’s bid to wrestle power over one of the legislature’s core functions: deciding what programs get funded, and at what cost. In an unprecedented action, the Trump administration offered 2 million federal employees a chance to resign now and receive eight months of pay, implying an expenditure of money not authorized by Congress. Further, Trump and his allies have said they would contest a Nixon-era law that requires him to spend money on programs as appropriated by Congress. Trump allies have said the law is unconstitutional and that the president can impound, or refuse to spend, money for programs he doesn’t like.
The tepid response so far offers the latest measure of how much Congress has ceded its authority since earlier eras in which powerful committee chairmen defended their constitutional turf no matter who was in the White House. Today, Trump dominates his party, and many GOP lawmakers fear that challenging him could cost them their jobs, as the president and his allies could back primary challenges against them.
One sign of Republican support for Trump’s boundary-pushing actions came last week, when a Senate panel voted 11-0 to back the confirmation of Russell Vought, a chief architect of Trump’s strategy for expanding executive-branch authority, for the powerful position of White House budget chief. All Republicans on the panel voted to send the nomination to the full Senate, while Democrats boycotted the vote to protest Trump’s efforts to freeze federal spending.
This never-before-seen level of congressional subservience began when Trump was allowed by House Republicans to pick the speaker, MAGA Mike, more like a Trump spokesperson than an independent entity in governance. As part of George W. Bush’s regime, conservative Canadian David Frum helped turn the Republican Party is today. Recently he disavowed that party and it now busy trying to wreck the Democratic Party by making a case that it should be a conservative vehicle to fight Trump’s fascism. He’s another anti-progressive fanatic and propagandist. He wrote yesterday that he’s confused about how to respond to what Bannon called the Trump strategy of “flooding the zone with shit. Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.”
Most, American voters, by far, even Republicans, say they would rather see government programs funded by making the ultra-wealthy and corporations pay their fair share of taxes rather than by using tariffs. Just take a look at these numbers!
Frum reminded his readers that “First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions… First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.”
Leave it to David Frum to present Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan as heroes. Only in his world! Meanwhile, this time around, Trump “has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him. Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar— but how permanently, who can say?”
Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information— so voracious in 2017— has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.
Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.
What’s changed?
…Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue— immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender— Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion.
…A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.
[Let’s hope a neoliberal like Frum, who has never uttered a mea culpa for his role in changing the GOP into what it is today, would trample minorities and arm Israel for more and more genocide, is never part of the solution. Here’s his ugly program:]
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.
Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.
Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.
Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.
These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.
… The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.
The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.
Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.
The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.
Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.
The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? [Probably the corrupt conservatives who Biden has listened to for decades.] Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.
A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.
The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that democratic accountability and action will grind down its authoritarian aspirations and corrupt schemes. The MAGA elite’s best plan for success is to persuade the American majority to abandon hope and surrender the fight. Its most useful allies are the extremists who have too often misled the great American center into doomed leftward detours.
November 2024 was bad. January and February 2025 are worse. The story is not over yet— unless you agree to lay down in despair the pen that can write the remainder of the story.
237 years of history are at risk now. As per Franklin in 1787:
“A republic, if you can keep it.” --Benjamin Franklin's response to Elizabeth Willing Powel's question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
Our "conservative" party, which has been steadily losing its collective mind since the Reagan Error, is totally down with Trump, Musk, et al doing to our democratic republic roughly what the IDF has done to Gaza. The "opposition" party either doesn't know or doesn't particularly care that what remains of constitutional norms are at serious risk.
The old Chinese curse:
“May you live in interesting times.”
applies more than ever now.