Trump tests boundaries of presidency

It is broadly within a president’s power, for instance, to order mass deportations, to pull out of an international climate agreement or to fire holdover political appointees, however debatable the decisions might be. But as so often happens with Trump, he takes even those decisions one step further.

“The theme of this week was vengeance and retribution when all other presidents have used their inaugurations to heal wounds, bring people together and focus on the future,” said Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and author of several books on the presidency. “That sounds like a norm, but it’s actually fundamental to the survival of the republic.”

Trump has never been too impressed with the argument that he should or should not do something because that is the way it has been done. As a government novice in his first term, he found himself flummoxed at times by how Washington worked and unable to exert his will to achieve major priorities.

He returns for this second term more prepared and more determined to crash through obstacles and any supposed “deep state” in his way. Ideas that establishment advisers talked him out of the last time, he is pursuing this time with a new cast of more like-minded aides who share his willingness to disrupt the system.

He decided to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as it has been understood for over a century to declare it does not guarantee automatic citizenship to all children born in the United States. It took just three days for a federal judge to temporarily block the move, which he called “a blatantly unconstitutional order”, but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.

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While other presidents put their assets in a blind trust or otherwise distanced themselves from their personal business interests upon taking office to avoid even the whiff of a conflict of interest, Trump exploited his political celebrity to make enormous amounts of money in a scheme that could potentially be fuelled by investors with a stake in federal government policies.

Just three days before his inauguration, he released a crypto token called $Trump that together with other family tokens rose to about $US10 billion ($15.9 billion) in value on paper. The tokens create new opportunities for companies and other financial players inside and outside the US to curry favour with the new administration.

Moreover, while other presidents had wealthy patrons who enjoyed access to the Oval Office, Trump has gone so far as to surround himself with billionaires on the inaugural platform and give Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a mandate to revamp the federal government that puts billions of dollars in his pocket through various contracts.

And unlike any president in modern times, Trump has taken it upon himself to redraw the map of the world, symbolically and otherwise. He has declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, sought to pressure Canada into becoming the 51st state and held out the possible use of force to take over Greenland and seize the Panama Canal. Unlike mass deportation or new tariffs, none of these were major topics on the campaign trail.

“The imperialist policy was not on the ballot, and so it represents a challenge to democratic norms,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University. “Under no definition of the term could President Trump be said to have a mandate to take the Panama Canal treaty away from Panama or Greenland from Denmark.”

Naftali, who was founding director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and is writing a biography of John F. Kennedy, said Trump had single-handedly altered the terms of the national conversation in less than a week in office in a way that none of his predecessors had.

“Some of this is evanescent, but the vibe has changed,” Naftali said. “Our political and cultural vibe, to the extent that we have a national one, has changed in a matter of days. Yes, FDR made people feel better about banks reasonably fast, but he didn’t alter the political culture in the first four days, and even after the first 100 days, it took a while.”

Trump is hardly the first president to push the limits of presidential power, of course. Nixon comes to mind, among others. Indeed, some of Trump’s allies see a more immediate precedent for violating the conventions of the office in his own predecessor: President Joe Biden, who spoke strongly in favour of traditional standards even as he stretched his authority.

In his final days in office, Biden issued pre-emptive pardons to a half-dozen members of his own family and other targets of Trump’s wrath, a first-of-its-kind move he described as a means to prevent political prosecutions against them. Trump has in fact made such threats, but even some Democrats objected to the pardons, describing them as self-serving and a terrible precedent.

Biden also declared in his final days as president that the Equal Rights Amendment had met the requirements of ratification and therefore was, in his view, now the 28th Amendment of the Constitution. In doing so, he disregarded time limits established by Congress that were exceeded. Some analysts asked how it was different for Biden to declare his interpretation of the Constitution in this way than for Trump to try to impose his own interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

“Joe Biden vastly expanded the presidential parameters of everything from executive orders to border non-enforcement to Biden family pardons, all to implement policies and agendas that for the most part did not enjoy popular support,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and author of The Case for Trump. He added that Biden “thereby ironically empowered Trump to follow that latitude, but to enact agendas that did earn public approval.”

Not all of Trump’s assertions are popular. An Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll found disapproval of the January 6 pardons and little support for ending birthright citizenship.

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But Jonathan Madison, who studies democracy and governance at the R Street Institute, a free-market research organisation in Washington, said Biden “used executive power in unprecedented ways” after the election and that “Trump’s first week in office has reinforced this shift” in power.

“Notably,” Madison added, “members of Congress from both parties have shown little inclination to challenge executive overreach when it comes from their own side.”

But Trump, so far, has proved far more effective at squelching opposition than Biden ever was. He dominates his own party as no president in generations. Through force of will and fear of reprisals, Trump has compelled Republicans to bend to his wishes repeatedly and even give support to cabinet nominees who would not have passed muster in the past, like Pete Hegseth for defence secretary.

Trump has forced technology billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, corporate executives and media owners who previously opposed him to show newfound deference and, in many cases, flood his political accounts with millions of dollars. The resistance that sprang up when he was first inaugurated eight years ago has faded, with many progressives and anti-Trump conservatives deflated or afraid of being targeted.

That leaves Trump as the single most important player in any decision he cares to involve himself in, whether it be who is the speaker of the House or the fact-checking policies at Meta’s Facebook. Even the bureaucracy is to be tamed if he has his way, as he moves to convert nonpartisan civil servants into political appointees answerable to him.

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“We’re not talking about drilling for oil, where obviously, he’s going to pursue different policies; we’re not talking about supporting Ukraine,” said Michael Klarman, a professor of legal history at Harvard Law School. “These are all signs that he’s not going to have opposition from the Republican Party, he’s not going to have opposition from the civil service, he’s not going to have opposition from the media. Those are all part of the authoritarian playbook.”

Trump’s allies reject the notion that he has authoritarian aspirations. After all, he is still subject to the 22nd Amendment, which bars him from running again in four years. Yet just last week, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Trump to run for a third term.

It has no realistic chance of passing, but as it happens, the Congress member’s campaign finances are under investigation by the FBI, a bureau overseen by the new president.

“It would be my greatest honour to serve not once but twice,” Trump told an audience Saturday. “Maybe three times.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.