There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab
"The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.
Mr. Trump has the potential to do far more harm in the remainder of his term. If he continues down this path and Congress and the courts fail to stop him, it could fundamentally alter the character of American government. Future presidents, seeking to either continue or undo his policies, will be tempted to pursue a similarly unbound approach, in which they use the powers of the federal government to silence critics and reward allies.
It pains us to write these words. Whatever our policy differences with other modern presidents, every one of them fundamentally believed in democracy. They viewed freedom, constitutional checks and balances and respect for political opponents as “the bulwark of our Republic,” as Ronald Reagan said in the opening of his first Inaugural Address, while praising his predecessor Jimmy Carter.
The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. But it is to do so soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively. It is to build a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects — who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice — yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.
The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.
Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves criticism on these issues, and Congress members and grass-roots organizers should look for legal ways to thwart him. They even have a case study from his first term: the successful campaign to prevent him from repealing Obamacare, which relied on marshaling public opinion and pressuring other elected officials. Still, the distinction between Mr. Trump’s merely unwise actions and his undemocratic ones is crucial because it highlights the most urgent areas for political and legal opposition — and the ones that will require a grand coalition of people across the political spectrum. If Mr. Trump becomes the authoritarian president he seeks to be, the narrower policy fights will be lost anyway.
Pillars of democracy
Mr. Trump has attacked at least five pillars of American democracy in his first 100 days:
Separation of powers. There will always be debates about exactly where a president’s powers end and where the legislative and judicial branches are paramount. Mr. Trump’s recent predecessors, including Joe Biden and Barack Obama, tested these boundaries and at times overstepped them. But Mr. Trump’s approach is qualitatively different.
He, Vice President JD Vance and others in the administration have shown particular disdain for the judicial branch. They have resisted judges’ requests for information and, in at least two cases, seem to have defied clear orders. They have suggested that judges have no authority to review a president’s decisions — which happens to be judges’ precise role in many realms. Mr. Trump has insulted judges as lunatics and radicals and called for the impeachment of those with whom he disagrees. He and his allies have criticized judges so harshly and personally that many are anxious about their physical safety.
Mr. Trump’s steamrolling of Congress involves more legal complexity, many scholars believe. He has trampled on the law in several cases, including his refusal to enforce a mandated sale of TikTok that Congress approved on a bipartisan basis and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld. Other attempts to assert power over previously independent parts of the executive branch seem more defensible, however. The executive branch reports to the president, after all, and parts of it have suffered from too little accountability in recent decades.
Wherever the line is, the meekness of congressional Republicans is problematic. They have refused to oppose Mr. Trump’s power grabs and assert their own authority, even though they occupy the branch of government that the many founders considered the first among equals. They are easing the path toward an unchecked presidency.
Due process. The principle of justice depends on fair legal processes to weigh evidence, make judgments and determine consequences. In one realm after another, Mr. Trump has bypassed these processes and made unilateral decisions.
He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires. He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases. He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.
The starkest denial of due process was the deportation of 238 immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Officials did so in a hurry over a weekend in March, invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a law that had not been used since World War II. They made dubious allegations about all of the men being gang members and refused to let them defend themselves. In the 1940s, by contrast, when the government sought to deport accused Nazis, it gave them 30 days to defend themselves. The Trump administration has since admitted it deported one man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, by mistake, but it refuses to bring him home, saying he is now under a foreign country’s jurisdiction.
In a ruling that upbraided the administration, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a respected conservative jurist, explained why this behavior was so frightening. Mr. Trump’s government had claimed “a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Judge Wilkinson wrote. He pointed out that the administration could use the same logic to deport American citizens, as Mr. Trump has since threatened. When due process breaks down, so do fundamental human rights.
Equal justice under law. After Watergate, presidents of both parties kept their distancefrom the Justice Department in an effort to prevent law enforcement from becoming politicized. Mr. Trump has taken the opposite approach. He is using federal prosecutors and agents as an extension of his political operation.
Last week he ordered the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, a fund-raising platform that supports elected Democrats and liberal groups, even though there is no evidence that ActBlue did anything wrong. The investigation is an exercise of raw political power, meant to prevent the opposition party from winning elections. And the ActBlue inquiry is part of a pattern. Mr. Trump has borrowed from the playbook of aspiring autocrats like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey who use government power as a cudgel against their political opponents.
Mr. Trump’s punishment of law firms is intended to make it harder for his critics to find legal representation. His withdrawal of protective security from some former officials is meant to chill criticism of him and his administration. On the flip side, his pardoning of the Jan. 6 rioters and the dropping of charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York demonstrate that Trump allies may break the law with impunity.
We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases. But Mr. Biden and his political aides did not order them. And two of the cases involved truly outrageous behavior, including Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn a legitimate election result and his role in a violent attack on Congress. There are no such subtleties in Mr. Trump’s use of investigatory powers. In his administration, justice is not blind; it is whatever serves his interests.
Free speech and freedom of the press. Mr. Trump likes to say that he has “brought back free speech in America.” In truth, he has done more to restrict speech than the woke left he decries.
The Naval Academy has removed hundreds of books from its library, mostly about race, slavery or gender, including a novel by Geraldine Brooks, a memoir by Maya Angelou and histories by the Harvard scholars Randall Kennedy and Imani Perry. Mr. Trump has also sued ABC, CBS and The Des Moines Register over coverage he did not like. He has used executive orders to punish people for things they said, including Chris Krebs, a cybersecurity official from his first term who acknowledged that the 2020 election was legitimate.
Among the biggest targets have been immigrants who have publicly criticized Israel. The State Department has canceled several of their visas. In one case, masked agents arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, who was an author of a pro-Palestinian opinion essay in the student newspaper.
In each of these cases, Mr. Trump mischaracterizes legitimate speech as false or anti-American and uses government powers to discipline the speaker. The message to everybody else is: Watch what you say.
Government for the people. Amid everything else from the past 100 days, Mr. Trump’s efforts to enrich himself and his allies sometimes go overlooked. They are remarkable.Mr. Trump has not only continued using government resources to benefit his companies (such as the reported lobbying of Prime Minister Keir Starmer to hold the British Open at a Trump resort); he has also created a mechanism for Americans and foreigners to send him financial tributes.
Just before his inauguration, the Trumps announced two new crypto coins, $Trump and $Melania, which effectively allow investors to funnel money anonymously to Mr. Trump and his family. He has paired this scheme with a pullback of crypto regulation, despite the sector’s history of scams. He has gone easy on corruption in other ways, too. On his first day in office, he rescinded a Biden administration policy that barred executive branch employees from accepting major gifts from lobbyists, and he has purged officials across the government whose job was to uncover malfeasance.
The net result is that Mr. Trump and his circle can more easily enrich themselves at the nation’s expense.
Principled, effective opposition
It remains possible that our concerns will look overwrought a year or two from now. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s shambolic approach to governance will undermine his ambitions. Perhaps federal courts will continue to constrain him and he will ultimately accept their judgments.
But there is another plausible scenario, in which his assault on the pillars of American democracy becomes even more aggressive and effective. If you listen to Mr. Trump’s own words, he is vowing just that. His larger strategy seems plain enough. He is trying to frighten people who might otherwise criticize him, and he is attempting to rig the political system so that his allies will have an easier time winning elections.
This strategy follows the modern blueprint for sabotaging democracy. To varying degrees, Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban and Mr. Erdogan have used it, as have Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. None have conducted a traditional coup. All originally won elections and then used their authority to amass more power. They repressed dissent, stifled speech, intimidated political opponents and tilted media coverage and election rules in their favor. Like them, Mr. Trump has signaled that he wants to consolidate power in himself.
The task facing Americans today is to prevent this second scenario from coming to pass. And there is cause for hope.
True, there is no simple way to defend American democracy from him. The founders sought to create so many checks and balances partly because they understood that a president who aspired to be a king might very well succeed. Neither Congress nor the courts have military forces or intelligence agencies at their disposal to enforce their decisions. Only the president does. As a result, our constitutional order depends to a significant degree on the good faith of a president.
If a president acts in bad faith, it requires a sophisticated, multifaceted campaign to restrain him. Other parts of the government, along with civil society and corporate America, must think carefully and rigorously about what to do. That’s especially true when the most powerful alternative — Congress — is prostrate.
The most promising path to stopping Mr. Trump involves making him pay a political price for pursuing his authoritarian dreams. The less popular he becomes, the easier it will be for his targets to stand up to him and the harder it will be for congressional Republicans to remain silent without worrying that they are risking their political careers.
Already, Mr. Trump’s political standing has weakened. His approval rating has fallen to around 40 percent, and most Americans say his policies have gone too far, polls show. This situation contrasts in a crucial way with the recent history of countries like Hungary and India where leaders amassed power. There, as Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has noted, the leaders generally remained popular while they were doing so. Their popularity helped them erode democracy. Mr. Trump’s unpopularity will make it harder for him to do so.
Given the threat that Mr. Trump presents, we understand the urge to speak out in maximalist ways about almost everything he does. It can feel emotionally satisfying, and simply like the right thing to do, during dark times. But the stakes are too high to prioritize emotion over effectiveness. The best way to support American democracy is to build the largest possible coalition to defend it. It is to call out all Mr. Trump’s constitutional violations while diligently avoiding exaggeration about what qualifies as a violation. Liberals who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies risk sending conservatives back into Mr. Trump’s camp.
To be clear, some of his legal — or plausibly legal — policies also deserve opposition from liberals, moderates and conservatives alike. He has damaged America’s standing in the world, especially through his chaotic tariffs. He has made it easier for China and Russia to spy on the United States. He has sowed doubt about the dollar and the Federal Reserve’s independence. He has set back critical research on medical treatments. In each of these areas, he has acted in defiance of public opinion.
The leaders of Harvard University have offered a model of principled opposition that maximizes the chances of success. When Mr. Trump began threatening the university with canceled funds this spring, many Harvard professors and students urged administrators to head straight to the ramparts and denounce him. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, took a wiser approach. He acknowledged that some of Mr. Trump’s criticisms had merit. Harvard, like much of elite higher education, has, in fact, been blasé about antisemitism, and it has too often prioritized progressive ideology over an independent search for truth.
By admitting as much, Mr. Garber strengthened Harvard’s political position. He said what many Americans believed. But when the administration issued a list of ludicrous demands, Harvard fought back hard. It filed a lawsuit, with help from a legal team that included conservative litigators, and became a national symbol of resistance to his lawlessness. Mr. Garber made Harvard look reasonable and Mr. Trump unreasonable.
Many federal judges, including most Supreme Court justices, have also responded sensibly. They have not picked fights with him or overreached. They have issued narrow, firm rulings directing him to obey the law. Only after he has ignored those rulings have they escalated. The one-paragraph emergency order that seven Supreme Court justices (all but Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas) issued in the middle of the night two weeks ago was particularly important. It blocked the Trump administration from deporting a group of detained men under the Alien Enemies Act. The order’s speed and breadth were signs that Chief Justice John Roberts and most of his colleagues recognize the threat that Mr. Trump’s bad faith poses.
The order put Mr. Trump in a bind. It left him without any evident ways to violate the ruling’s spirit while adhering to its text. If he is going to defy the judiciary now, he will need to do so in an obvious way that will probably further damage his standing with the American public. Every attempt to defend American democracy should be similarly thoughtful.
The past 100 days have wounded this country, and there is no guarantee that we will fully recover. But nobody should give up. American democracy retreated before, during the post-Reconstruction era, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, Watergate and other times. It recovered from those periods not because its survival was inevitable but because Americans — including many who disagreed with one another on other subjects — fought bravely and smartly for this country’s ideals. That is our duty today.
Source photograph by Wirestock, via Getty Images.
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The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom."
