Trump's Power Has Peaked

In the space of a week, global stock markets sold off 15–20% on the announcement of U.S. tariffs and then rallied more than 10% when Trump announced a pause of reciprocal tariffs, while leaving a cross-the-board 10% tariff in place, before giving up some of those gains the next morning. China tariffs, however, were not only left in place but increased. The most obvious conclusion is that the administration was forced to backtrack in the face of the prospect of a domestic and global economic meltdown. The less obvious conclusion is that, on top of everything else that has happened in the past nearly three months, one thing should be clear to everyone: the U.S. federal government has too much power, and Trump may be – contrary to many impressions – squandering it.

The excess of presidential power long predates the current administration. In foreign policy, presidents have been accruing more tools since World War II, and more domestic power since the onset of the New Deal in the 1930s, followed by the massive expansion of domestic healthcare and welfare programs during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives in the 1960s. While the 1970s, in theory, saw the paring back of presidential power in the wake of Watergate, that only slowed — but did not halt — the rise of what historian Arthur Schlesinger called in his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency. The sway of the president over trade and tariffs grew incrementally in the 1960s through the 1990s, when most of the emergency and discretionary tariff authority that Trump now relies on was added to the menu of presidential powers by a Congress that wanted to give the executive more latitude in trade negotiations. And then, with the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration vastly expanded the reach of the presidency in the name of counterterrorism and the war in Iraq, including surveillance laws targeting U.S. citizens that would have been unacceptable before.

Then came the 2008–2009 financial crisis, which increased the powers of the regulatory state over all things financial, followed by a major expansion of immigration enforcement during President Obama’s first term, and then a major push during Obama’s second term to use executive orders to compensate for the deadlock in Congress. That paved the way for a more potent executive in Trump’s first term, which was largely thwarted by both the Trump administration’s incompetence and by a recalcitrant Democratic Congress. But then came the Covid crisis, which led to substantial presidential emergency powers — and also the expansion of the role of state governments in the face of a health crisis.

This potted history should give anyone pause who asserts that Trump part deux is somehow an aberration. He is not. He is a logical and unfortunate continuation of what has been in play for decades. Take the harsh use of Title VI civil rights funding requirements to punish universities. That seems extreme on the face of it, with the White House withholding billions of dollars in funding from schools such as Columbia and Cornell to force them to make reforms that the administration wants. And yet, the Biden administration also threatened schools with funding cuts under Title IX for failure to adopt the administration’s stance on LGBTQ policies. Yes, the Trump administration has gone much farther, but it has gone farther down a pre-existing path.

Read Obama and the End of the Imperial Presidency \ Written in 2013 by Zachary Karabell

The point of the balance of powers in the Constitution was an early and acute understanding in the 18th century about the nature of power and the inherent disposition of individuals and institutions to use whatever power they have and to try to gain more of it. Over the past 250 years, the branches of government have wrestled with each other for primacy, though arguably the judicial branch has been the least aggressive (that said, it has certainly and repeatedly thwarted both the legislative and the executive). The foreign policy demands of a global United States after World War II led to a tilt toward the executive that then gradually extended into domestic policy, and that is why there is so much agita about Trump: because he has inherited a suite of powers that he is trying to wield. That is far more the issue than the constant refrain that he is abusing power. The problem is that he is using power that the presidency has accrued.

The saving grace here is that even with its concerted effort to expand the imperial presidency, the Trump administration is being constantly thwarted by a federal system that passively and actively resists, and by a Washington that, in spite of DOGE, is very hard to manage. So while we witness daily the deportations, the bombing of the Houthis, the withholding of federal funds, the shuttering of a few agencies, these actions amount to much less than the sum of their collective parts once you turn down the noise from all parties. One side screams that democracy is being dismantled; the other, that security and government sanity and efficiency are being restored. And yet neither is really true.

In fact, the vast swath of the bureaucracy remains in place, even as the entire federal government is in cultural turmoil and hundreds of thousands of federal employees are unsettled, concerned about their jobs and bewildered by the shifting winds. There have been remarkably few deportations, even though the harsh rhetoric and seemingly random acts of federal enforcement against green card holders, student visas, and others have sown fear. And the vast majority of the executive orders remain press releases rather than policy that can or will be enforced outside of some executive branch offices.

It remains, however, that the federal government — and the executive branch in particular — has grown too powerful relative to the balance that was attempted in the Constitution. The ascension of Trump should be a reminder of that, which even Republicans such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz appear to recognize. And the past week, with a foolish and expansive use of tariff authority having backfired (for now) spectacularly, may mark the apex of that power. In fact, the Trump presidency overall might mark the beginning of the end of the imperial presidency, which has defied earlier predictions of its imminent demise. People want change, for sure, but they don’t want change that they don’t want. And you would be hard-pressed to find a plurality of Americans who want a more powerful government. That reality, more than the daily reality show of contemporary politics, is what will matter most to our future — and that is comfort indeed.