Donald Trump Is Reshaping The Presidency In His Own Image

President Donald Trump’s second term in office has marked a significant authoritarian turn in the operation of the executive branch. As power centralizes in the White House, edicts flow to control and transform the federal bureaucracy and institutions across society, from the press to universities to scientific research to the states and cities run by Democrats.

This is a marked departure from how American government has operated in the past: While presidential power has increased steadily over time, Congress and the courts have traditionally played a role in shaping that development. But Trump’s authoritarian creep is collapsing the standard separation of powers between the three branches of government, and the federal government and the states, in a way that empowers the executive branch at the others’ expense.

Congress under Republican control has become a slavish body with no separate institutional identity from Trump and his Republican Party. The Supreme Court has taken Trump’s side in pursuit of a long-held project to create a unitary executive. States run by Democrats, whom Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has called part of a “domestic extremist organization,” are threatened with domestic military deployments and cuts to congressionally authorized funds if they deviate from presidential decrees. Trump seeks to set state-level election laws without any constitutional authority to do so. Elements of independence have completely fallen away within the executive branch as Trump now directs the Department of Justice and other regulators to investigate and indict his political enemies, while agencies have been told not to enforce certain laws.

“Fundamentally, it’s rule by the whim of the president,” said John Dearborn, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an expert on presidential power. “It’s a sort of mini-absolutist monarchy.”

As Trump’s poll numbers have fallen over the summer, his authoritarian push has only intensified. In August alone, he deployed the military to the streets of Washington, D.C., weaponized a federal housing regulator as a tool to punish his enemies, purported to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook based on that weaponization, impounded $4.9 billion in foreign aid, threatened to deploy troops in cities across the country and issued an executive order forming new “quick reaction” forces within each state’s National Guard “available for rapid nationwide deployment.” And in the first days of September, Trump has asserted the power to assassinate alleged drug smugglers.

These moves range from the legally dubious to outright illegal under existing law and current legal precedent. But working within the rule of law is not the point. Their real purpose is to instill fear in order to force institutions, government workers and other political actors to obey Trump.

“The rule of law has collapsed in the executive branch because Trump has established a unitary executive theory and supplemented this with the abuse of emergency powers,” said David Driesen, a professor at Syracuse University and author of a book on the judicial enabling of dictatorship. “There is no law-abiding executive branch anymore. They just obey Trump. So, it is a dictatorship.”

Whether or not the U.S. has definitively reached that point, Trump entertains the idea routinely. During the 2024 campaign, he said he would be a dictator on “day one.” In August, he stated, “A lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator” before claiming, “I’m not a dictator.”

Past presidential administrations have taken expansive views of executive power, pushing the boundaries of their authority and changing the presidency and the balance of power in government along the way. But Trump is going beyond what previous presidents have done, in both measure and kind.

Will his version of the presidency stick?

The history of the expansion of presidential power has been described as a ratchet by those who study it. It only ever moves in one direction: more power for the president. But it has come with a check. While presidents acted as disruptive agents increasing their own power, Congress also pushed back to defend its own powers and structure new assertions of presidential power.

That’s not happening this time.

“You can’t really talk about the expansion of the presidency without talking about the shrinking of Congress,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor at Bowdoin College and author of multiple books on executive branch power, including “The New Imperial Presidency.”

When President Franklin Roosevelt built the federal bureaucracy, he did so through laws passed by Congress. And when he sought to expand the power of the presidency over that bureaucracy, Congress pushed back, rejecting his initial proposal to reorganize the executive branch as granting the president too much unilateral power over agencies. Instead, Congress created the Executive Office of the President while leaving some agencies with a level of independence from the Whtie House.

As presidents in the 20th century used more and more unitary authority in their traditionally privileged realms of foreign policy, war and spying, which resulted in a string of scandals, abuses and catastrophes, Congress stepped in to reform the intelligence agencies, draw boundaries on the president’s war-making authority and establish institutional processes for foreign policy within the executive branch. The result was presidential authority without presidential authoritarianism.

“Over the course of our history, there had previously been these different arrangements where Congress, the president, and, to some degree, the courts figured out a way to allow the president to do more things over time and maybe not have total one-man rule by an individual president,” Dearborn said.

But this time, Trump is pushing ahead with his program of unitary control without concern for Congress or judicial precedent. Instead of defending Congress as an institution itself, the entire Republican Party appears to be on board with realizing the conservative legal project known as the unitary executive theory.

Concocted by conservative legal theorists in response to the frustrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan with Congress and the federal bureaucracy, the unitary executive theory envisions the president as wielding singular authority within the executive branch that cannot be constrained by Congress. Or as Trump put it in his first term, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Trump and his team believe that this view has been affirmed by the Supreme Court after the conservative justices set out an expansive, almost unlimited, view of presidential power when they protected Trump from criminal prosecution in the Trump v. U.S. case. That ruling underscores Trump’s confidence in ruling as a unitary autocrat. In defiance of the traditional scope of presidential power, he has fired vast swathes of federal workers, shut down entire agencies, fired independent agency officials and impounded congressionally authorized funds.

“If you look at one of the things that especially distinguishes this term, they are just going ahead and doing these things,” Dearborn said.

How they are doing it is also different. Trump’s actions are part of a “pure personalization” of the presidency that is focused on a “retribution agenda” enacted through “personalized attacks,” according to Rudalevige.

The attempt to remove Cook is an instructive example. A Democratic appointee, Cook was accused of mortgage fraud by Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte. This unproven allegation, resulting from Pulte combing through Cook’s records to concoct a charge, served as a pretext for Trump to remove Cook “for cause,” which is required for any dismissal of a federal reserve governor. Cook has denied the allegations and is fighting her removal.

It’s part of a long-standing pattern of how Trump attacks those who stand in the way of his agenda — personal attacks, as enabled by a politicized federal bureaucracy. He went after New York Attorney General Letitia James, who oversaw his trial for civil fraud, by opening an investigation into her real estate dealings and having the DOJ examine her office for civil rights violations. Similarly, he went after California Sen. Adam Schiff, a key player in his first impeachment, again on allegations of mortgage fraud.

Nor is Trump’s strategy limited to attacks on individuals. Pretextual claims are at the heart of Trump’s efforts to enable him to do as he pleases. He has declared numerous emergencies where no emergency exists on immigration, energy, trade, crime and to quell protests in order to unlock powers that allow him to rule rather than govern. This is what he has done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., by deploying the military on pretexts of rebellion and crime, respectively.

His executive orders on gender and on diversity, equity and inclusion also serve as pretexts by a politicized bureaucracy to browbeat colleges, universities and law firms into submitting to conservative control and to impound funds. His destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development was similarly based on a false claim of fraud and waste.

What Trump has done is turn the ratchet as far as it can seemingly go.

“It’s been placed on an extreme trajectory where the broadest claims, the kind of claims that we used to write about, where we’d say, ‘Well, the extreme version of this claim would be crazy,’ are what we’re seeing,” Rudalevige said.

If the march of executive power is a ratchet, then it is more than likely that this transformation of the presidency will not go away.

“I don’t see why a future president would repudiate it,” Rudalevige said. “If you say I’m able to exercise these powers, well, the genie’s out of the lamp.”

But it appears that Trump and Republicans have not considered that a Democrat will one day be president again — maybe even in just four years — and whether they want to see this model of the presidency turned against them.

“Maybe Republicans think, ‘Well, Democrats, that’s not how they would govern,’” Dearborn said. “But at this point, given what’s happened, you wonder what a Democratic president would do with the authority that the Supreme Court has already given Trump.”

Imagine a President JB Pritzker, Gavin Newsom or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wielding these same claims of authority. Where Trump dismantled USAID and threatens to eliminate the Department of Education, a Democratic president could dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement and return its authorities to where they belonged before the Department of Homeland Security was established. They could even dismantle Homeland Security entirely.

A Democratic president could declare a health care emergency and reimpose the expansive universal health care coverage system in place during the COVID-19 emergency. What about a jobs emergency to put the COVID unemployment system back in place? A Democrat could issue executive orders raising the minimum wage and declaring right-to-work laws illegal, and then use the federal bureaucracy to punish states that do not follow suit. They could declare a green energy emergency and require states to build out renewable energy by threatening federal funds and oil lease approvals. How about declaring a crime emergency to ban assault weapons?

Just as Trump used federal government loans to Intel to take a stake in the company and deployed vast national security claims for many of his actions, a Democratic president could seize control of SpaceX and Starlink from Elon Musk — both rely on federal money and serve national security purposes.

Indeed, many of Trump’s transformative actions may need to be replicated if a Democrat is going to be able to govern. They may need to fire those put in place by Trump throughout the federal bureaucracy, including independent agency officials, and act unilaterally to rebuild and restaff the agencies gutted under Trump.

In a speech calling on Trump not to send troops into Chicago, Pritzker noted that “the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year.”

“You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually,” Pritzker said. “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.”

Perhaps Republicans think that Democrats would never use these tools that Trump has put before them. Or maybe they think that Democrats already did this, and failed, by prosecuting Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election.

Or perhaps they just think they’ll never be out of power.

“The hypothesis that this might be reversed depends on there being free and fair elections,” Driesen said. He notes that Republicans are actively working to make that not the case. “There’s an effort underway to make the elections unfair, and that has been the way that competitive autocracies, like in Hungary and Turkey, have entrenched themselves in power.”

But nothing is set in stone — yet. Trump is increasingly unpopular. His policies are increasingly unpopular. District and appeals courts are repeatedly rejecting these policies. The inflation that helped him win back the White House is only getting worse due to his tariff policies. He is not young — in fact, he’s the oldest elected president ever. This ongoing power grab could all fall apart as resistance mounts.

“He doesn’t have widespread popular support for any of this,” said Rudalevige. “They’re trying to move fast enough to ignore that. It’s like when Wile E. Coyote runs out over the canyon edge and he doesn’t fall right away — maybe he can cross! There could be a fall in the offing. But what is going to prompt the political system to respond?”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated John Dearborn’s school affiliation.