| There was a peaceful transfer of power, but it put an election denier back into office. “Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” Trump said. “But as you see today, here I am. The American people have spoken.” Historians struggle to put into context that a former president who was indicted for trying to stay in power after he lost and gave a speech to supporters in Washington shortly before members of the group attacked the U.S. Capitol is now back in power. “Once January 6th happened, we stepped outside the larger sweep of American history,” Jill Lepore, a historian at Harvard University, told me last summer. “We’ve already been in a process over the last 10 years of democratic decay,” Daniel Ziblatt, a government professor at Harvard University and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” told The Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison after Trump won the election. “This election will just hasten that decline.” What he’s going to try to do: Get tough on immigration, curtail transgender rights Trump and his allies have spent the past four years preparing to be in office again. They say they’re ready to go with “dozens” of executive orders on his first day. In his inaugural address, Trump made clear his government plans to launch a full-scale attack on: - Federal climate change initiatives: “We will drill, baby drill,” he said, also promising to roll back President Joe Biden’s efforts to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and promising to transfer the country and American-made cars back to planet-warming fossil fuels.
- Transgender rights: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said, also vowing to make progress on other culture wars popular on the right, like affirmative action and what the right has called censorship of conservative viewpoints in government and media.
- Migrants coming to the southern border: Trump announced a federal emergency at the border, which will allow him to build more wall and deploy federal troops to make it harder for migrants to cross illegally and seek asylum, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.
- The Justice Department: Trump strongly suggested he will revamp the Justice Department — the agency tasked with enforcing federal laws — in a way that could make it difficult to enforce the laws against him or his allies. “The scales of justice will be rebalanced,” he said. “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of our Justice Department will end.” At the same time, Trump made an odd declaration — for him, at least: That “never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” He could have just meant he’s ending what he’s called persecutions against him, but if so, this was a broader comment than experts expected him to make.
But the federal government is more like a shipping container than a speedboat, as Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and host of the “Passing Judgment” podcast, put it to me recently. For example, tech billionaire Elon Musk and his allies are likely to need congressional approval to substantially cut government spending through their “Department of Government Efficiency” panel. Trump has majorities in both chambers of Congress, but only narrow ones, and plenty of division within his party on spending. And there will be lawsuits slowing down things. In a sign that Musk is someone Trump opponents see as a great danger, his government-efficiency group was sued minutes after Trump took office, reports The Post’s Jeff Stein, for not being set up correctly. “The constitutional foundations created something that works slowly, and protects the status quo, and there is a reason for that,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, an expert on presidential transitions at the Brookings Institution and University of Virginia. “That may be lost on people who want radical change.” A really big change that Trump could probably do by executive order is to make the federal workforce easier to fire for not being sufficiently loyal to him. That would hinder the jobs of so many experts in the federal government tasked with protecting food and water safety, alerting people of extreme weather, leading disaster recoveries and protecting the rule of law, Tenpas said. What could halt his progress: Being a lame duck, the courts and the military Trump is stronger in many ways in a second term than in his first but potentially weaker in others. Americans elected a leader who made clear his authoritarian tendencies, and they probably gave him a lot of tools with which to carry it out: a Republican-led Congress, a conservative-leaning judiciary, a Supreme Court that offered him and all presidents immunity from their official acts in office, a media with a lower public approval rating than Congress and tech titans and CEOs by his side as he was inaugurated. But analysts also predict Trump will soon be viewed as a lame-duck president because the constitution says he can’t run for a third term. One Republican strategist thought Trump had about 18 months, at most, to get stuff done — before members of Congress start turning their attention to their futures, which aren’t likely to include Trump. Trump also has been open about wanting to use the presidency for retribution and silencing his critics. In a sign his opponents are taking it seriously, Biden preemptively pardoned his own family, a former general, members of Congress and Trump administration officials like Anthony S. Fauci who crossed Trump by not doing his bidding. Trump can use mostly antiquated laws to restrict civil liberties, like suspending certain legal protections known as habeas corpus, or calling in the military for domestic law enforcement. It’s an open question if the courts would step in to stop this. “A president probably couldn’t suspend habeas corpus on his own,” said David Alexander Bateman, a constitutional law expert at Cornell University and the author of “Disenfranchising Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France,” in a recent interview. “But would the courts stop him?” “For me, is the judiciary going to hold?” added Levinson. “That’s the question.” If Trump really wanted to push the rule of law to its edge, in the most extreme cases, it would be up to the U.S. military to refuse to comply, said Josh Chafetz, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. “If a president is truly determined to make himself a dictator,” Chafetz said, “the question at the end of the day is whether the military and other force-deploying agencies of the federal government are willing to go along. If they are, there’s not much Congress or the courts could do about it.” |
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