The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform [View all]

[justaprogressive]

Donald Trump is teaching us about the limitations of America’s constitutional system. We may have believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers, checks and balances, and guarantees of rights would protect us from a president with authoritarian and corrupt ambitions. But the framework we have counted on is failing.

Trump’s abuses of his office have met no effective opposition from the other branches of government. As he has overreached his executive powers, Congress has done nothing to deter him, and the Supreme Court has done more to embolden than to contain him. In his first term, the “adults” Trump appointed to top positions had some cautionary influence on him, but he has now thrown off restraints and surrounded himself with sycophants, enablers, and ideologues. Only half a year into a second term, he is acting, in the words of the conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, with “utter contempt for the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Trump governs like a monarch, issuing proclamations—143 executive orders in his first hundred days—that assume he has unilateral power to abolish federal agencies, nullify or suspend laws, impound congressionally authorized spending, and defy the Constitution. He has attacked universities and law firms, denying them due process and demanding concessions to which the government has no right; sent noncitizens to foreign gulags, also without due process; deployed the military in an American city based on the false claim that protests were out of control; and launched a trade war against practically the entire world, partner and rival countries alike, based on a fictitious economic emergency. The world, even his own party, hangs on his whims, unsure what he will do next.

These usurpations have enabled Trump to turn the White House and his private clubs into an itinerant royal court, where people come to beg for favors and he basks in their subservience and exploits the presidency for profit. Most dangerously, he has appointed partisans to top positions in the Justice Department and FBI and singled out enemies for them to investigate and prosecute, while he pardons supporters for their crimes. His use of the presidency for personal ends is undisguised; the corruption is open and at an unprecedented scale.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-31-premature-guide-to-post-trump-reform/]