What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Second Trump Administration
Or: slouching towards authoritarianism.
A recurring theme in Donald Trump’s political career has been the use of the epithet “low energy.” From his use of the phrase to taunt and belittle Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primaries to his denigration of President Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” Trump has described his opponents as lethargic and lacking in vitality, while he consistently portrays himself as energetic, active, and decisive.
Other than angry, vindictive presidential tweets launched out into the world at 3am, there was little evidence of such energy during the first Trump administration. I suspect that’s mainly because Trump didn’t expect to win, he didn’t have a clue about what a president does or can do, and his staff was almost entirely made up of normie Republican apparatchiks who had no interest in helping him to accomplish many of the more extreme or unorthodox things he talked about doing when running for president.
Things are very different today.
Energy in the Executive
By the last year of his first administration, Trump had begun to gather a group of loyalists around himself who knew how to get things done and were eager to lend their talents to his agenda. During the intervening four years out of power, that circle has grown while their policy ambitions have intensified. The team Trump has tapped to work in the West Wing and to staff the top ranks of the executive branch are eager to do big things and make big waves.
The opening week of the administration is likely to leave our heads spinning as Trump surges out of the gate with a series of sweeping executive orders reversing Biden’s own orders and pushing into new territory on immigration (including an attempt to close the southern border on public health grounds), government rules (specifically, the elimination of DEI considerations from all hiring and promotion at the federal level), and other policy areas.
As soon as Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, gets confirmed, the OMB will become the front line of the administration’s efforts to make sweeping changes—attempting to eliminate the ostensible independence of a range of federal agencies; encouraging the president to begin impounding funds Congress has appropriated; and reviving “Schedule F” to redesignate tens of thousands of civil servants as “at will” employees who can be fired to save money and, in some cases, be replaced by loyalists.
Most of these moves will face obstacles to implementation. Any attempt to revive the impoundment power, for example, will run afoul of a 1974 law that explicitly eliminated the power from the presidency. The attempt to revive Schedule F will likewise confront a new rule issued by the Biden administration in April 2024 that created an appeals system for employees whose jobs have been involuntarily reclassified. Any effort to rescind that rule will take time.
But now imagine similar defiant moves from Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department; from Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services; from Kash Patel’s FBI; and so forth, across the executive branch. There may be limits to how much the new administration can actually accomplish right out of the gate. But it won’t be for lack of trying—with aggression, on multiple fronts.
That points to what I predict will be one important characteristic of the incoming administration. The Federalist Papers spoke about the need for “energy in the executive.” But for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, separation of powers meant that ambition displayed by one branch would be checked by ambition displayed in the others. They wanted presidents to attempt bold things, and for Congress to respond by pushing back boldly with its own, sometimes contrary agenda, with each branch acting jealously to guard its own powers and prerogatives.
I suspect we’re going to see a lot of energy in the executive branch during this second Trump administration. The question is whether Congress—with both houses narrowly controlled by the president’s own party in a sharply polarized era—will act as an effective check on the president’s overweening ambitions. If so, we’ll see a lot of what the constitutional framers might have considered salutary turbulence. But if not—if congressional Republicans fall in line by bowing down before their party’s Great Leader—then we will have pretty much the opposite of what Hamilton and Madison intended. We’ll have a president making bold, ambitious moves with little pushback from a legislative branch happy to stand back and let the executive lead the way.
Going Nuclear
Whether or not Congress stands up to the president, the courts often will.
The question then becomes: When the Trump administration attempts to close the southern border, impose Schedule F, revive the impoundment power, and make other bold moves, and those moves end up getting blocked by judges (which they will be), how will the administration respond? Will it play by the normal rules and patiently fight it out in the courts?
If so, then, however radical the administration’s aims may be, it will be staying within bounds set by the rule of law. That’s hugely important. It doesn’t make Trump’s priorities any less objectionable. But following the rules ensures that the democratic system remains intact, which ensures, in turn, that policy changes Trump accomplishes can be reversed by his successors. What is done can be undone.
The most dangerous thing to watch for during Trump 2.0 will be signs that the president or his appointees will actively defy a judge’s orders.
Am I being hysterical in even raising this possibility? No: I’m merely responding to the fact that in recent years MAGA itself has delighted in playing irresponsible and incendiary rhetorical games around this possibility. From JD Vance on down, figures on the populist right have taken to citing an apocryphal quote from President Andrew Jackson calling the bluff of a Supreme Court that dared to defy the executive branch: “the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.”
Their reasoning goes something like: The power of the judiciary is entirely a function of our willingness to bow down voluntarily before its self-proclaimed authority, and we’ve determined that on this issue we won’t do it. The court says we can’t do what we want, but we answer to the people, the people put us in office to do what needs to be done to make America great again, and making America great again requires doing what the Supreme Court has forbidden. In this case, then, we decline to follow the rules.
If that happens, we will have crossed over into a much graver situation marked by outright constitutional crisis.
Energy in the Electorate
There’s been a lot of loose, imprecise talk in recent years about incipient fascism or authoritarianism in the United States. But an eventuality like the one sketched above—where the president attempted to do something, was blocked by a judge whose ruling was eventually upheld by a Supreme Court majority, and the president outrightly defied the decision—would be the real thing. Not fascism per se, but definitely a move in the direction of an authoritarian transformation of the American presidency.
I hope you’ll take it as a good sign that I consider this series of events highly unlikely. I think JD Vance’s invocation of the apocryphal Jackson quote was itself a bluff. Trump and his advisers are politically savvy enough to understand that any such move would be highly likely to spark an intense backlash against the president at the level of public opinion. In that respect, it appears that American self-government and the rule of law may ultimately depend on something like energy in the electorate. It relies for its defense, that is, on the voters rising up in rage against a president who disregards the democratic rules of the game.
But that raises its own ominous possibility.
I’ve long considered the more likely path to authoritarianism one in which mass public protests give Trump a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops to numerous American cities. This in turn would cause further protest and widespread violence, leading to the Act remaining in force while the Republican majority in Congress acquiesces to what amounts to the de facto imposition of martial law.
I’ve tended to envision such protests arising in response to the administration rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants for deportation. But it’s also possible to imagine them being sparked by outrage at the president’s outright defiance of a Supreme Court ruling.
That’s why relying on energy in the electorate to defend American democracy can be tricky. On the one hand, you need that energy to be generated in response to provocation. But on the other, you need that energy to remain within certain bounds: either expressed to pollsters and at the ballot box or demonstrated in street protests that remain firmly within the bounds of law, forswearing looting, rioting, and other forms of violence.
That’s quite a tightrope to walk. I worry about such expressions of popular discontent going too far and backfiring.
Slouching Toward Authoritarianism?
The other possibility—indifference—is also a danger.
Liberals and progressives feel pretty demoralized at the moment. The first Trump administration was greeted by large protests, but recent anti-Trump protests have attracted nowhere near the numbers that previous ones did. Will people organize to express discontent with mass roundups of immigrants? Would they do so if President Trump defied a Supreme Court ruling?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I don’t even know for sure if either eventuality would lead the president’s approval rating to collapse. When Trump left office in January 2021, two weeks after inciting an insurrectionary riot against the national legislature in order to overturn an election, he had 38.6 percent approval, two points above where Joe Biden sat a week away from leaving office.
In such a world—in such a country—it would be foolish to place much faith in any institution, or even in the electorate as a whole. What if Trump made an authoritarian grab and the voters and their elected representatives responded with a collective shrug of indifference?
I sincerely hope we don’t get a chance to test out that hypothetical over what is bound to be four stormy years for American democracy.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
A version of this piece recently appeared in Notes from the Middleground.
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*Trump's first term was notable for far less authoritarianism than Biden's, which saw official White House efforts (successful, for a time) to literally silence and suppress critics of its policies in everything from Covid response to border control to foreign policy to election procedures and more. But by all means continue this fantasy of Trump killing Democracy. (Just kidding. Please stop it.)
When you worry about the President disregarding and defying judicial orders, haven’t we already seen this we Biden. If you want to be taken seriously, then don’t be a fact denier. Everything which you has already been done by the Biden administration.