Constitutional crisis?
In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful.
President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.
The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next.
What went wrong
The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”
But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan.
Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate.
How this ends
This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king.
Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say.
Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration.
A chart shows expert ratings of U.S. democracy on a scale of zero to 100 at various points from February 2017 to February 2025. At the start of the first Trump term, experts rated U.S. democracy at around a 68 out of 100. At the start of the second Trump term, the rating has dropped to 55 out of 100.
Source: Bright Line Watch | By The New York Times
The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account.
Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze.
“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”
In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful.
President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.
The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.
In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked. Today’s newsletter looks at why — and where things could go next.
What went wrong
The framers wanted to avoid crowning another king. They believed that no one person could truly represent the whole country. (Consider that Trump won less than half of the vote.) So they dispersed power among the three branches. The president is just one person, Yuval Levin, a conservative analyst, told The Times. In a vast country, representation “has to be done by a plural institution like Congress.”
But polarization has made it harder for Congress to play that role. For much of American history, the two parties were made up of broad coalitions of voters. Seventy years ago, liberals, minority groups and racial segregationists were all part of the Democratic Party. A president could not always rely on members of his party to let him do what he wanted, because they were genuinely divided. When George W. Bush won re-election in 2004, for instance, he wanted to privatize Social Security. His own party helped quash the plan.
Today, the two parties are more homogeneous. The Republican Party has adopted Trump’s views — against foreign interventions, “wokeism” and immigration. And the G.O.P. controls all three branches of government. So the conflict that’s supposed to drive interactions among the branches is muted; Congress, and potentially the courts, are less likely to rein in the president. Now he can impose drastic changes even without a majority’s mandate.
How this ends
This is about the separation of powers, not a specific policy. Maybe you think that TikTok should remain online or that the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown makes sense because the government should spend more on Americans and less on foreign aid. But other government branches’ lack of pushback sets a precedent that Trump can act like a king.
Maybe next time he’d undo the Education Department, vaccine programs or food stamps. Or his administration could repurpose federal funds to imprison unauthorized migrants in detention camps. It could, in a far-fetched scenario, take possession of the Gaza Strip. Normally, these are policies on which Congress must get a say.
Nyhan’s research team has surveyed political scientists at American universities about how worried they are right now. During most of Trump’s first term, the respondents’ opinions about the health of our democracy were largely stable. But their confidence has plunged since Trump’s second inauguration.
A chart shows expert ratings of U.S. democracy on a scale of zero to 100 at various points from February 2017 to February 2025. At the start of the first Trump term, experts rated U.S. democracy at around a 68 out of 100. At the start of the second Trump term, the rating has dropped to 55 out of 100.
Source: Bright Line Watch | By The New York Times
The courts may still intervene, as a judge did yesterday to halt Trump’s offer to pay federal employees to quit. The courts might not reverse every action; several U.S.A.I.D. programs have already stopped dispensing food and medicine abroad, for lack of funds. But the courts could stop Trump from taking similar actions in the future. Maybe the conservative Supreme Court would hold the White House to account.
Nyhan worries about another scenario: What if Trump ignores the courts? Before he was vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump should do that if the court blocked efforts to remake the federal government. “Stand before the country and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said, referring to an apocryphal Andrew Jackson quote. Perhaps Trump is already flirting with that kind of defiance. Some federal loans and grants remain frozen despite court orders against Trump’s freeze.
“We’re talking about the idea of whether the president has to follow the law at all,” Nyhan said. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to say about the United States, but here we are.”
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