He fired thousands of federal employees. He curtailed the entry of asylum seekers. He granted clemency to more than 1,500 people involved in the 2021 riot at the Capitol. He withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord. He ordered the end of offshore leases for wind energy. He repeated his threats about 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian goods. On Friday he proposed “getting rid of” the country’s emergency management agency. Perhaps on the seventh day (Sunday) he rests.
Is Donald Trump in his frantic dash to overturn Joe Biden’s initiatives and to upend the political consensus in the capital and the country in danger of presidential overreach?
“That’s the big question,” said Jason MacDonald, a West Virginia University political scientist. “All presidents experience public reactions against them. During the first Trump administration, the country got more liberal. That will probably happen again because the public always moves away from where the president is.”
Trump supporters crowded into Washington's Capitol One Arena on inauguration day to watch the new President sign an initial slate of executive orders.Mike Segar/Reuters
The weekend before the inauguration, a 'People's March on Washington' united critics of the new administration's policies and Mr. Trump's conduct after the 2020 election.Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
Presidents customarily begin their administrations with high hopes, high ambitions and high levels of energy. Mr. Trump, to be sure, has had four years to choreograph his re-entry into the White House. But even so, there are few if any precedents for what Mr. Trump has done, and undone, in his first several days.
But no presidential record remains perfect, and some are stained by overreach. One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intuitive gifts was, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once wrote, “perfectly sensing exactly how far the public was willing to go at [any] moment.” That was true until he overreached with his 1937 effort to change the composition of the Supreme Court. Thomas Jefferson overreached with his 1807 embargo during the Napoleonic wars. So, too, did John F. Kennedy with his Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 (a gambit immediately regarded as a fiasco), and Bill Clinton with his 1993 health care initiative, which died a slow death during his first year in office.
Already Mr. Trump is facing a cascade of leaks about plans to eliminate popular programs, including an effort to “disestablish” a Pentagon program to limit civilian deaths in military operations.
Margelis Tinoco from Colombia cries in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on inauguration day after her asylum appointment was cancelled. She and her family had been trying to enter the United States via CBP One, a Biden-era service that Mr. Trump shut down.Christian Chavez/The Associated Press
Community organizers in Tucson, Ariz., cut out wallet-sized lists of basic human rights that undocumented people have if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains them.Rebecca Noble/Reuters
One of the potential obstacles for Mr. Trump is legal action. Nearly half the states have already initiated suits over the President’s efforts to curb birthright citizenship, with a federal judge Thursday blocking it as “blatantly unconstitutional.” Another is congressional resistance to so much power flowing to the executive branch and depleting the prerogatives of the legislative branch. It did not go unnoticed that Mr. Trump did not mention the word “Congress” in his inaugural address.
A third potential problem: the inevitable cracks in a coalition that includes the nationalist right, mainstream conservatives, anti-tax crusaders and tech billionaires. So far Mr. Trump’s Republican allies – and almost all Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill are his allies or at least his supplicants – are sticking with him. While early polls show Mr. Trump with higher approval ratings than he generally scored in his first term, there are worrying signs over the public views of his Justice Department and immigration views.
There are, moreover, early indications of skepticism in the traditional conservative media. The Wall Street Journal criticized the Jan. 6 pardons, listing in lurid detail the crimes committed by the rioters. The next day the newspaper, owned by the Murdoch news empire and regarded as a barometer of mainstream conservative thought, wrote that, “Donald Trump doesn’t always separate his personal interests from his public obligations.” It cited as “a howling example … his sudden new status as a crypto billionaire,” and warned, “the President is inviting trouble with what looks like remarkably poor judgment.”
In addition, Journal columnist Daniel Henninger wondered whether, “we may be heading to the outer limits of what America’s traditional system of checks and balances can absorb,” adding, “among Mr. Trump’s first acts was to instruct his Justice Department not to enforce a ban on TikTok imposed by an act of Congress and affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court.”
Supporters of the Proud Boys – a right-wing militia whose members took part in 2021's Capitol riot – waited on Jan. 21 outside the DC Central Detention Facility, where some insurrectionists were being held. Mr. Trump's pardons released hundreds of people accused of criminal acts.ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
One of the people released was Henry (Enrique) Tarrio, former national chairman of the Proud Boys, who had been sentenced to 22 years in prison.Marco Bello/Reuters
If earlier patterns hold, the presidential honeymoon will be finite.
“When public opinion changes, then the sleeping bear is alive; something has awakened it and it is wise to watch where it will go and what it will do,” wrote James Stimson, a University of North Carolina political scientist, in his influential 2004 book Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. “Change happens when people care. When people care it is most unwise to stand against it.”
The first cracks may come on the immigration issue. Only slightly more than a third of Americans support using military personnel to ferret out undocumented immigrants, and only slightly more than a quarter want to use military funds to pay for deportations, according to an Axios poll. The survey also showed that just a third endorse separating families and only a third support deporting immigrants who came to the United States as children.
Protesters, one with a handcrafted Trump voodoo doll, rallied outside Los Angeles City Hall on inauguration day to oppose his agenda on immigration, the Israel-Hamas war and other issues.Damian Dovarganes/The Associated Press
But there also is little reason to believe these possible impediments may deter Mr. Trump. “He’s going to do a lot of things that the public isn’t going to like – but right now there’s no evidence there’s any consequence to that,” said Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “Even impeachment is not a check on him because he isn’t going to be convicted in the Senate.”
Most presidents fear impeachment, the ultimate sanction – which is precisely what the Founders hoped. At the Constitutional convention of 1787, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts saw impeachment as an impediment to presidential abuse of power. “A good magistrate will not fear [impeachments],” he said. “A bad one ought to be kept in fear of them.”
In his first term, Mr. Trump dreaded impeachment as a blemish on his historical record but was impeached twice (and acquitted by the Senate each time). A third impeachment, as unlikely as it may seem today, would not substantially change his historical record. He’d still be the president impeached the most.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article said Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the World Trade Organization. In fact, he ordered the country be withdrawn from the World Health Organization. This version has been corrected.
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