In just three weeks, President Trump has set an all-too-familiar tone for his White House sequel: chaotic, dishonest, bullying and contemptuous of the rule of law.
Only it’s worse this time because Trump erroneously believes his narrow victory last November — he won the popular vote by just 1.5 percent — has given him a mandate to rule the U.S. by decree.
He’s lashing out madly in every direction — threatening our neighbors with massive tariffs, bullying small countries like Denmark and Panama whose territory he covets, proposing to depopulate and take over Gaza and settling scores with the very government he heads, which he imagines to be his worst enemy.
Americans are witnessing a naked power grab that would shred the Constitution’s checks and balances, rob Congress of its most important powers, neuter the courts and create the imperial presidency that Richard Nixon dreamt of long ago.
Echoing a discredited theory advanced by Nixon, Trump claims he can “impound” funds Congress has appropriated — that is, spend them or not spend them as he sees fit. The Constitution plainly gives the legislative branch, not the president, the power of the purse.
Nor can Trump, by executive order, expunge the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to children born in the U.S. He can’t shut down federal agencies either, though he’s given Elon Musk carte blanche to gut them.
No one voted for Musk to serve as Trump’s co-president and demolition man for the administrative state. The excitable billionaire was Trump’s single biggest financial supporter — he spent $288 million to elect him — but the fortune he’s made as a tech entrepreneur hardly qualifies him to perform radical surgery on public sector institutions.
The White House says Musk is a “special government employee,” which usually connotes a private sector consultant. An executive order also has turned a formerly obscure White House office into the U.S. DOGE Service, Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” staffed by young assistants barely out of their teens.
Musk believes Trump’s edicts have empowered him and his minions to dismantle federal agencies, berate government workers, order them to stay home and encourage them to quit before they’re fired. He believes he can scrutinize personnel files and contracts and take control of the U.S. Treasury’s payment systems. Top agency officials who have resisted these legally dubious moves have been summarily fired.
The tech oligarch seems to really have it in for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which delivers humanitarian aid and works on economic development in many of the world’s poorest countries. Musk bizarrely calls it a “criminal organization.” He recently told employees of the government’s main foreign aid agency not to report for work indefinitely and has urged the Treasury to cut its funding.
Musk’s ill-informed whims apparently have the force of law: Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Edward R. Martin Jr. has assured Musk that his office will prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” Too bad Martin’s punctilious zeal to enforce the law was nowhere to be seen after the 2020 election, when he emerged as one of Trump’s top election deniers.
Trump also has sicced Musk and DOGE on the Department of Education. Congress created the department by statute, so Trump can’t kill it by executive order. But Musk evidently feels licensed to eviscerate the department by cutting staff and spending without bothering to consult lawmakers.
The federal government is in urgent need of reform and reinvention. Making it work better, though, is not really what Trump and Musk have in mind. They’re trying to incapacitate federal functions they don’t like — foreign aid, support for public schools, consumer protection — and replace independent civil servants with MAGA automatons who will blindly do Trump’s bidding.
Determined to politicize every nook and cranny of American life, Trump tramples daily on the unwritten norms of democracy, including the idea that public employees are supposed to serve the public interest, not the political and personal interests of whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office.
He’s orchestrating a totalitarian-style purge of officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI who had anything to do with investigating and prosecuting the criminal Jan. 6, 2021, assault on Congress.
What were these law enforcement officials supposed to do? Ignore the brutal beatings of police, the threats against lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence, the vandalizing of the U.S. Capitol? They are losing their jobs for doing their jobs.
Who can stop Trump’s flagrant abuse of presidential power? Musk’s free-booting raids on the federal government are sparking a rash of lawsuits.
But where is Congress? So far, the Republican-controlled House and Senate have meekly gone along with Trump’s brazen bid to usurp their powers, leaving it to Democrats to “stop the steal” by defending the legislature’s constitutional prerogatives and duties.
Senate Republicans, in particular, are exhibiting a striking profile in political cowardice. Few spoke out against Trump’s perverse pardon of more than 1,500 supporters convicted of crimes during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Instead, they’ve been busy rubber-stamping his picks for high administration posts with few exceptions; probably the sorriest collection of crackpots and partisan hacks in U.S. political history.
At some point, Trump’s depredations may become too much even for his timorous Republican enablers in Congress to stomach. Until then, the courts may be our only line of defense against Trump’s attempt to rule by decree — unless U.S. citizens wake up and speak out about the mortifying mess he’s making of the rule of law in America.
Will Marshall is president and founder of Progressive Policy Institute.
