U.S. President Donald Trump before departing for Florida from the South Lawn at the White House on Jan. 16.Nathan Howard/Reuters
The first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been a stress test for democracy.
The result of that stress test: inconclusive at best, worrisome at worst.
Until Mr. Trump took the oath of office last January – indeed, since the 1865 surrender of the Confederate army at Appomattox Court House that effectively ended the Civil War – such a stress test would have returned an unambiguously positive verdict, with a healthy report of all the functions of the body politic.
And until the recent and relentless assault on American institutions, the disregard for conventions and customs, the creeping and then galloping attacks on once-independent government agencies, and the excesses of force in the drive to bring immigration under control, there were no doubts about the resiliency of the American political system, no questions about the sturdiness of the country’s balance of power, surely no uncertainty about the survival of democratic values in the longest, and most powerful, republic in history.
In one short year, none of that is true anymore.
There have been moments, to be sure, when stress fractures in democracy were diagnosed.
Abraham Lincoln trampled on civil liberties, but then, in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, pronounced a “new birth of freedom” and vowed “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth” – a pledge that five generations of Americans, many of whom had memorized the phrase and considered it a secular liturgy, and their presidents, who recognized the nobility of the notion, have kept.
Woodrow Wilson’s racist views reshaped the federal government, but then he pronounced the Fourteen Points that sought to export democratic values abroad. Richard Nixon tested the guardrails of democracy during the Watergate scandal, but then, realizing that Americans’ devotion to presidential restraint was greater than his drive for survival, relinquished the White House amid claims – huzzahs, really – that “the system worked” and, in a phrase that became the title of a famous Jimmy Breslin book, “the good guys finally won.”
It was then, in the harsh summer of 1974, that Gerald Ford, who assumed the presidency after the Nixon resignation, said in his first remarks as president, “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
At least half the country now would not make that statement.
A measure of the divide in the United States right now is that a strong, vocal and adamantine minority – you might employ the MAGA movement as a shorthand for that group, though it may be broader than that – is arguing that Mr. Trump has returned the United States to a steady course. They believe the U.S. has been rescued from another force, on the left, that itself had hijacked the country and was guiding it toward a perdition where borders were open, identity politics ran wild, and atheism and anarchism replaced patriotism and old-style Americanism.
As Democrats marked the end of the first year of Trump II with criticism and concern, Mr. Trump sent a message to supporters saying, “Despite all of our success, the Democrats are more unhinged, angry, and dangerous than ever before.”
The gap between those who deplore the Trump initiatives and those who welcome them is like the gap in a spark plug – one that is critical for delivering the precise voltage for combustion.
But even the MAGA forces understand that Mr. Trump is exploring new political ground.
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For years – since the Reagan administration, four decades ago – conversation about elements of the “unitary executive” theory percolated below the surface of American politics. The idea that the Constitution provides the president with unlimited power over government departments and agencies was developed in tucked-away meetings of activist groups and during brown-bag lunches at conservative redoubts like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. The notion wasn’t polished enough, the conditions for its spread were not fertile enough, the country wasn’t ready enough, for broad dissemination. In the period before it went viral, it was considered in mainstream circles, if at all, as a peculiar virus, outlandish if not freakish.
Meanwhile, the solidification of a liberal consensus in American politics – the two Republican presidents of the period 1989-2017, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, did not mount a frontal attack on what was regarded as the natural state of government and politics – brought a backlash. Then came the pandemic, when new notions of freedom emerged amid school closures, store lockdowns and mask mandates.
So when Mr. Trump arrived at the White House for the second time, the conditions for a wholesale re-evaluation of the role of government in society – far more dramatic than anything Mr. Reagan sparked, or contemplated – emerged. The irony at the heart of this situation was the notion, now in full flower, that it would take a strong executive – one far stronger than any in the past, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt – to rein in government.
In short: to make the government weaker, it required making the executive stronger.
This theory rests on the language in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1, of the Constitution, which says that “the executive power shall be vested” in the president, who as a result has the power to control the actions and personnel of all executive departments and agencies. This notion collides with the once-prevailing argument that agencies created by Congress are at least minimally controlled by Congress.
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Break down that barrier, and the result is a strong president armed with virtually unassailable, unilateral power.
The maturation of this theory explains the past year in American politics. It is acknowledged by the MAGA insurgency, which applauds Mr. Trump’s initiatives, and is deplored by the progressive forces, which disdain them.
One of the realities of the current political era is that when Republican presidents are routinely followed by Democratic ones, and when the balance of power on Capitol Hill is fragile – no matter which party is in control – powers claimed or seized by one president can be claimed and employed by another.
In that way, Mr. Trump likely has changed American politics forever.
His expansions of power may have become normalized during the course of his presidency – but they also will be regarded as normal for his successor, who could be one of the “radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics” that the President spoke of in a September appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
If the past decade has taught us anything, it is that one group’s “lunatics” are another group’s theorists – and that powers seized or granted eventually can be entrenched powers easily grasped and effectively used.