Just a month into Donald Trump‘s second’s term, there are fears that America is heading for a constitutional crisis, the type of which it has never seen before. For some, it is already there.
European leaders have been left reeling by the President’s bullish efforts to reshape the global security order.
But at home, Trump is firing thousands of civil servants, scrapping entire government departments, and asking billionaire Elon Musk to cut so-called “woke” waste in the federal budget.
Critics say he is acting without any of the guardrails that usually limit a president’s action. With Republicans also controlling the House and the Senate, Trump has a “trifecta” of government power over the most powerful branches of state.
And a majority of congressional Republicans seem happy to allow Trump to get on with governing without them. “Right now, you’ve got to give him space,” Senator John Thune said this week, when asked about Trump upending years of Washington foreign policy towards Russia.
On the other side of the aisle, Democrats – still smarting from Kamala Harris’s defeat to Trump last November – have struggled to respond to the rapid flurry of Trump’s executive orders, ranging from everything from an attempt to end birthright citizenship, to withdrawing from the World Heath Organisation.
Many of these orders have already ended up before the courts, and ten judges have so far ruled against the administration, suggesting there is still some check on Trump’s power.
But this begs another question – if Trump simply ignores the courts, riding roughshod over Washington’s famous system of “checks and balances”, who will be able to stop him?
Meredith McGehee, an independent Congressional expert based in DC, said that US presidents often enter office with a desire to push the limits of their power.
Yet the way Trump has done so – especially in regard to ignoring constitutional “norms” – is without precedent.
“People have pushed to the limits, but not on this scale and not in this way,” said McGehee, who runs McGehee Strategies.
One of the most glaring examples, she said, is the role that Musk and his team from the newly created Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been permitted to play – “sending their people into these agencies and accessing information”.
Musk has claimed he can find $2trn in cuts in the federal budget. It is not clear how many government employees have lost their jobs as part of efforts to trim the 2.3 million-strong federal workforce, though at least 9,500 employees have been fired.
Another 75,000 have agreed to take redundancy as part of the administration’s controversial buyout offer.
Those losses have taken place across the government, in the departments of energy, health and human resources, agriculture and the internal revenue service.
Ousted federal workers are being replaced by individuals who have vowed fealty to the 78-year-old president. Often, the firings appear haphazard.
Among those fired at the department of energy were members of its National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the nation’s nuclear weapons fleet and is tasked with securing radiological materials around the world.
Those employees were swiftly reappointed after the importance of their jobs became clear to Musk’s team.
Last week, the acting head of the Social Security Administration, Michelle King, stood down after being ordered to hand over highly sensitive personal data about millions of Americans by Musk’s team.
Some Republicans in Congress appear to be anxious about the extent of Musk’s cuts, as polls show to be them widely unpopular.
Aware they will face voters in two years time, some such as Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska, have tried to gently push back, while trying not to be labelled as critics of the President.
Yet even such mild criticism has been rare. In the main, Republicans on Capitol Hill have been happy to get out of the way of processes they would normally have a role in.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told a meeting of Republicans held last month at Trump’s Florida golf course, the president had “been using his executive authority, I think, in an appropriate manner. He got a mandate from the American people”.
He added: “Let’s not forget he ran on restoring common sense and fiscal sanity and ensuring that the government would be more efficient. It was a major theme of the campaign.”
Summing up the “don’t-mess-with-Trump” attitude of some Republican hardliners, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, warned Senators in her own party earlier this month, there would be “absolutely be hell to pay” if they did not confirm the president’s cabinet choices.
“There is not a single Republican Senator that can win their elections without the Mega base in their state,” she added, implying they would face a primary challenge if they broke ranks.
Indeed, only a handful of Republican senators voted not to confirm some of his most controversial cabinet selections, among them RFK Jr, to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, and former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence.
The speed with which Trump has embarked on its attempts to press through change via executive actions has left Democrats stunned.
Last Monday, the “President’s Day” federal holiday, there were anti-Trump marches in many cities, including Washington DC, Orlando, Seattle, Boston and Denver.
But unlike in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton – but did not win the popular vote – the organised “resistance” has been decidedly muted.
The Democratic Party still holding an internal debate about what it got wrong in 2024 and how it needs to connect with voters on issues that matter. Officials are mindful Trump not only won the popular vote, but each of the seven swing states that decided the races and made big inroads into traditionally Democratic voting blocs, including Black and Latino men.
Sandeep Kaushik, a Democratic strategist based in Seattle who has worked on many city and state wise races, says he believes as they ready for the 2026 midterms – where the party has a real chance of retaking the House – it has to show it is listening to voters’ concerns.
“I think there is going to be a vibe shift. I think there will be a move away from “woke”,” she said.
“And because Republicans control everything in Washington DC, there will be more importance on local action, such as state lawyers challenging Trump’s actions.”
Opponents of Trump hope that it will the courts that offer the most solid resistance. Many lower courts have already frozen a number of his executive orders, including on birthright citizenship.
But Trump is pushing ahead and appealing many of them to the Supreme Court.Last week, the top court was asked to weigh in on whether the president has the right to fire Hampton Dellinger, the head of an independent agency that protects government whistleblowers, setting up a potential clash between different branches of government.
Indeed, hanging over all of this has been the question of what happens if Trump refuses to obey the courts and push the country into what many experts believe would be a full blown constitutional crisis.
Last week, the President repeated a quotation attributed to Napoleon on his Truth Social platform: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
And Vice President JD Vance has urged Trump to ignore the courts if they rule against him.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he posted on social media.
“If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
McGehee, the Congressional expert, said she did not believe America had entered a constitutional crisis yet – but that would change if Trump openly defied the courts.
“We’ll know whether we are truly in a constitutional crisis when the Supreme Court or some other court hands down an order [and we will see if ] this administration abides by it,” she said.
“Until then, we’re in a world where he is challenging these norms, but that is within his power, mostly because the Congress is permitting him to get away with it.”
However, other experts believe that Trump’s actions have already tipped the country intro full blown crisis.
Kirby Goidel, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, said there is no parallel in modern US history to the way Trump has so “aggressively tried to take control of government”.
What makes it so exceptional – and the reason he thinks the country has already entered a constituional crisis – is the lack of resistance from Congressional Republicans .
“I can’t think of a time where at least some [Republican] members of Congress didn’t think of themselves as institutionalists – people such as Mitch McConnell – who would say ‘We have some say over these things’,” he Goidel said.
“This Congress has just said ‘do what you want’.”
He adds: “We have to worry about what it means if we’re going to live in a democracy without a legislative branch that is going to stand up.”
In another sign of Trump’s efforts to seize control of institutions that have typically remained independent of the White House, he this week signed an executive order that would place them under his control – among them being the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Notably, it did not include the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and Open Market Committee.
The White House has flatly rejected suggestions that Trump is doing anything wrong.
“It’s extremely rich of Democrats to now be concerned about a constitutional crisis when they advocated for and participated in the greatest constitutional crisis in American history – the weaponisation of all three branches of government with witch hunt after witch hunt against President Trump,” says Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields.
She adds: “The real crisis Democrats are facing is their inability to accept defeat, but elections have consequences and the American people decisively rejected their tried-and-failed resistance playbook at the ballot box.”
For many of those who voted for Trump, he is simply doing what he promised to do on the campaign trail.
Janie Frenette, 72, a Trump supporter from the battleground state of Arizona, says the president has kept to his word, and she approves of the steps he has taken, especially in regard to immigration and the economy.
She does not believe he is overstepping the bounds of presidential power.
“Everything he’s done has been legal. They’re always trying to say he’s like Hitler and all this nonsense. Well, Hitler didn’t have free speech and you didn’t have more than one party to vote for,” she says, speaking from Pinal County.
“I think he’s doing a pretty good job. He’s doing what he said he would do and that’s what 77 million people voted for.”
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