Executive Power

Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him?

There are far too few checks left on executive power.

Gene Healy | From the May 2026 issue

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson; Source images: iStock)

Karl Marx said that when history repeats itself, we're supposed to get tragedy first, then farce. But Donald J. Trump has spent his life flouting all the rules. Why should we expect him to obey the historical dialectic?

In Trump's two presidencies, farce came first. From the jump, his first turn at the helm was a head-spinning spectacle. He talked like a caudillo crossbred with an insult comic and seemed like a strongman auditioning for the part. In practice, however, Trump proved something of a "low energy" authoritarian. Very few of 45's autocratic fancies—from unilaterally revoking birthright citizenship to"hereby order[ing]" American companies out of China—ever made the transition from tweet to law of the land.

Trump 1.0 arguably ended up a less imperial president than George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Even on COVID-19—a workable excuse for an executive power grab if ever there was one—45 proved the rare president willing to let a good crisis go to waste.

Midway through Trump's shambolic first term,I warned in these pages that we should count ourselves lucky things hadn't gone worse, and should "set about reimposing limits on the office's powers before a competent authoritarian comes along."

I never imagined it would be the same guy. And yet it's Trump's second presidency that's delivered a mix of tragedy and genuine peril. Somehow, during the interregnum, Trump discovered you can just do things. In the process, he's revealed just how few meaningful constraints remain against one-man rule.

'Flood the Zone With Shit'

On day 1 of his first term, Trump issued only a single executive order. The Beltway freak-out over the new administration was largely about presidential style rather than policy substance. An NPR item—"Yes, All This Happened. Trump's First 2 Weeks As President"—captured the reigning zeitgeist. "All This" included some pro forma hand-wringing about actual policies, like the travel ban, but the real focus was Trump's lack of decorum: Look at this guy with his "alternative facts" about the crowd size at his inauguration! He made a travesty out of the National Prayer Breakfast! ("And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those [Celebrity Apprentice] ratings, OK,' the president said.") You can't take him anywhere!

In the reality-show arc, Trump 1.0 showed us what happens when the presidency stops being polite; Trump 2.0 was when it started getting real. On Day 1 of his second term, Trump came out of the gate with 26 executive orders. By the 100-day mark he'd issued 143—more than triple Biden's near-record-setting pace—while signing fewer bills into law than any first-year president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Everything everywhere all at once—or "flood the zone with shit," as Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon once put it. All told, it was an unmistakable inflection point: the moment our long slide toward pen-and-phone governance took a dizzying lurch downward.

Crank tweets from the first term became executive orders in the second. One purported to rewrite the 14th Amendment by eliminating birthright citizenship; another dusted off the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as authority for summary deportations and warrantless searches of homes.

In his first term, Trump sent the markets into a tailspin with an August 2019 tweet ("Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China"), following up with a statutory citation: "try looking at the Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Case closed!" Nothing came of it until 2025, when Trump recovered the presidential pen and issued a series of directives using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to hike duties on Mexico, Canada, and China, purportedly for failure to stem fentanyl trafficking, and then to impose new tariffs worldwide—declaring the longstanding U.S. trade deficit a "national emergency."

In so doing, he converted the 50-year-old foreign-policy sanctions statute into his personal Oval Office "tariff button"—allowing him to launch trade wars from his desk as easily as ordering a Diet Coke.

Outside U.S. borders, Trump forged new frontiers in presidential warmaking. With a September 2025 airstrike against a suspected cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela, he took the war on drugs from metaphor to reality. In January, Trump followed up by sending Delta Force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then, in the early morning hours........

© Reason.com