Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.
The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked.
Since President Donald Trump took office, federal courts have been busy hitting the brakes on the most ambitious parts of his shock-and-awe agenda. Courts have temporarily blocked the administration’s ability to implement a federal funding freeze, its attempts to cull the federal workforce, the president’s order ending birthright citizenship and even a plan to move three incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities.
What it tells us is that Trump’s second term seems likely to be defined by a different kind of conflict than his first. This time around, he understands the gears and levers of government better. He’s surrounded by loyalists in every agency. Congress has bent the knee and shows zero interest in serving as a check on the executive branch. Now, it’s the judiciary, which is fielding a deluge of legal challenges against the White House agenda, that’s barreling towards a confrontation with a president who already holds it in low regard.
The contours of the fight between the two branches of government — and exactly how a newly emboldened Trump plans to take on obstinate judges — are just now coming into focus.
After a district judge issued a temporary restraining order on the Trump administration’s ability to implement a blanket federal spending freeze on Monday, many EPA climate and infrastructure grants remain frozen as of today.
The Justice Department has acknowledged receipt of the judge’s order. But the Trump administration has not yet complied with portions of the order. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), described the standoff this way: “It’s hard to tell what is incompetence and what is confusion and what is basically contemptuous trickery.”
The incident might be a one-off, an innocent oversight in the fog of assembling a new administration. But it might also be a preview of what’s to come. There are few enforcement mechanisms that the judiciary can rely on to make other branches of the federal government comply with their orders. If the Trump administration decides to willfully ignore orders from federal judges, it would, at minimum, present a constitutional crisis with no obvious solutions.
