Donald Trump Is at the Peak of His Powers
This week revealed that Trump is more powerful than any recent president
Donald Trump proved this week that he is a more powerful president than any of his recent predecessors.
His powers are nearly unchecked on three fronts that no modern president has ever successfully combined. He is dominating Congress. He has turned the executive branch into a political cudgel he wields against opponents. And he is using his office to benefit himself personally with corrupt practices that face no consequences.
Start with Congress. Trump successfully pushed his budget and economic agenda through the House with only minor resistance. The bill passed 215- 214. It is both an enormously consequential bill and a deeply unpopular one. It is likely to pass Congress after two more rounds of legislative dealmaking—one in the Senate and perhaps one more in the House—and be signed into law by Trump this summer.
Whatever one thinks of the bill’s details—the trillions of dollars it will add to the national debt, the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, the loss of health insurance for millions of Americans, the elimination of incentives to curb carbon emissions—this bill would not be much different than what a President Ron DeSantis or even Nikki Haley would have pursued.
There are a couple of signature Trumpian touches, including funding for more border wall and a missile defense system, but overall, it’s typical GOP fare. Deficit-financed tax cuts, work requirements for beneficiaries, significant increases for the Pentagon, and more money for border security have been Republican policies for generations.
This aspect of the Trump presidency is all fairly routine. Since 2001, four new presidents began their terms with their own party narrowly controlling Congress. Each of them then muscled through their top legislative priorities using budget reconciliation, a legislative process that can’t be filibustered in the Senate. Three of the four presidents then suffered a backlash in the midterms, though the intensity ranged from severe (Barack Obama in 2010 and Trump in 2018) to mild (Joe Biden in 2022).
It might be reasonable to predict that Trump looks to be on the same trajectory—yet another first-term president who overestimates his political mandate and receives a midterm spanking.
But Trump has introduced something new to American politics to mitigate the possibility of rejection at the polls.
He is not just trying to defeat his political opponents legislatively. He is systematically attacking the institutions that he thinks sustain his opposition, and he is now expanding his use of the government to attack them personally.
This assault is far-reaching, unprecedented, and undercovered. Trump is weaponizing the state against the media through both petty attacks, such as banning the Associated Press from the White House pool and kicking disfavored news organizations out of Pentagon working space, and through more serious legal challenges. The FCC, under an openly political chairman, Brendan Carr, has launched regulatory investigations of NPR, PBS, NBC, ABC, and CBS. The Department of Justice has rescinded protections for journalists, including a ban on subpoenaing reporters’ notes, and opened its first criminal leak inquiry.
In a disturbing escalation, the FTC this week launched an investigation of Media Matters for America, which monitors and reports on right-wing media, “over whether it illegally colluded with advertisers” when it published a report in 2023 about anti-semitism on Elon Musk’s X. The government is demanding a trove of sensitive internal documents from MMFA.
We may mark this week as the start of the second wave of weaponization. The primary tool of the first wave of attacks was the executive order, which targeted law firms, universities, various Trump adversaries, and the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue.
Now that Trump has loyalists in place and control over the government’s formidable investigative apparatus, criminal investigations are underway. They started last month with New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a massive fraud judgment against Trump in 2024. (James campaigned on going after Trump, and her case against him seemed spurious to some legal analysts, but neither of those facts justify a political prosecution against her.)
On Monday, the Trump administration indicted Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on assault charges over a scuffle at an ICE detention facility. One might take these charges against her more seriously if one of Trump’s first acts as president wasn’t pardoning every January 6th criminal, and if the U.S. attorney who announced the charges wasn’t Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer who in March said she hoped to use her new job to “help” the “cause” of “turn[ing] New Jersey red.”
On Tuesday, news leaked that the DOJ is going after Andrew Cuomo, the leading Democratic candidate for mayor of New York. One might take this criminal investigation more seriously if it weren’t overseen by Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host who ran for New York attorney general against Cuomo and has been excoriating him on air for years.
Additionally, this week, Trump dramatically escalated his assault on Harvard by withdrawing authorization for 7,000 foreign students to attend the university. “With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body,” the school said in a lawsuit it immediately filed against the administration. (A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the ban on foreign students while the case moves forward.) I have no personal attachment to Harvard, and I’m sympathetic to plenty of the criticisms leveled about ideological capture, but even the school’s most vociferous critics should be aghast at how the president of the United States is using every tool of state power to try to destroy a private university.
Meanwhile, the White House, where the briefing room is now dotted with useful idiots eager to serve as mouthpieces for administration propaganda, took another step toward nearly parodic Baghdad Bob-like behavior. Transcripts of Trump’s remarks, the most basic information about the president, are being removed from the White House website.
Finally, Trump has developed a third power that no previous president dared to consider. He has normalized corrupt behavior simply by disclosing it. The U.S. government officially accepted a $200 million Boeing 747 from Qatar on Wednesday, which is to be retrofitted to serve as Air Force One. Republicans in Congress barely raised an objection, and an attempt by Senate Democrats to stop the deal was quickly killed by Trump’s allies.
Trump is at the peak of his powers.
He is getting almost everything he wants on Capitol Hill.
His extreme assertion of presidential power only occasionally gets checked by a temporary restraining order. However, the key word there is ‘temporary.’ It will take years for all the lawsuits to be settled. And for Trump, the final outcome is beside the point, anyway, as the purpose of most of his actions against individuals and institutions is harassment, intimidation, and to warn others to adjust their behavior to escape his wrath. (How many universities can afford to fight Trump the way Harvard has? Can Harvard even afford it?)
Perhaps most important to him, Trump is finding new ways to benefit himself personally without triggering any rebuke from his party or anyone with the authority to stop him.
This is all just the very beginning. Trump has served less than 9% of his second term.
I never in my life thought I’d see a dismantling of our country like what has occurred since January 20. Sadly, I think it’s going to get far worse. We have to persevere, no matter how tough it gets.
A small yet staggeringly scary item in the reconciliation bill would neuter the judiciary by declaring that the courts shall not find in contempt any actions by the executive to defy or ignore any court ruling… This needs more coverage!