Dismantle the Education Department? On it. End foreign aid? Sure. Fire thousands of federal workers? Done.
With a combination of chutzpah, a disregard for the legal niceties and a politicalopposition in such turmoil that it’s struggling to challenge him, President Trump in seven weeks has been putting in place goals that conservatives have been dreaming about for decades.
He’s also uprooted what the GOP has long decried as social engineering by liberals, reflected recently by programs known as DEI (for diversity, equity and inclusion) − now banned in the federal government.
Trump’s latest action is an executive order, expected to be signed as early as Monday, that would aim to abolish the Education Department 46 years after Congress voted to establish it in 1979. Since 1980, the Republican Party platform has supported shutting down the agency, calling it an example of federal overreach into state and local affairs.
“I want to just do it,” Trump said Thursday when reporters asked when he would sign the order. “Let the states run the schools.”
President Ronald Reagan had endorsed closing the department, too, but he and other Republican leaders have never been able to pass legislation in Congress to shutter it. That’s not a step Trump apparently is going to bother with, though some legal scholars say it’s required by law.
The 47th president has regularly tested the limits of executive power, setting up confrontations that the courts are likely to be arbitrating for months and years ahead. In the process, he has burnished his image as decisive and won the adoration of his core supporters.
And the alarm of opponents who warn they are the actions of a would-be despot.
“Just do it:” Simply ignoring the role of Congress and the potential restraints of the Constitution is one ingredient behind Trump’s success in checking off items that have long been on conservatives’ wish lists.
Here are some other factors that have helped.
Trump’s command of the Republican Party is so complete that not even GOP legislative leaders have objected to actions he has taken that infringe on Congress’ power, including withholding funds Congress had appropriated.
“I’ve been asked so many times, ‘Aren’t you uncomfortable with this?” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters last month. “No, I’m not.”
Trump has also ignored the dictates in some laws, including the mandate in a bill passed with bipartisan support that demanded the sale or shutdown of TikTok by Jan. 19 because of national security concerns. On the day he took office, Trump unilaterally extended that deadline by 75 days.
Republican officials have generally been unwilling to challenge the legality or the wisdom of the president’s actions, even when they conflict with their own past positions on issues such as aid to Ukraine.
That stance − or the failure to take a stance − has bolstered his sense of authority.
Sure, it’s a cliche. That doesn’t mean it’s not true.
The failure of Democrats to coalesce behind a coherent strategy against Trump’s blizzard of controversial policies was on display during his address to a Joint Session of Congress last week.
Some Democratic members of Congress didn’t show up. Rep. Al Green of Texas was there but didn’t last long; he was escorted out after standing and heckling the president. (He was later censured for the disruption.) A handful of others walked out during the speech, with messages like “Resist” on the back of their shirts. Some raised black-and-white paddles with words like “False” and “Lies”.
Most simply sat on their hands.
For his part, Trump not only didn’t reach out for their support. He mocked them as irrelevant.
The president’s first targets have been agencies that don’t have the broadest public support, from foreign-aid programs to the Internal Revenue Service. That makes it more difficult to rally his opposition.
The governmental bureaucracy in general has long been another lightning rod for conservatives.
While Democrats have tried to put human faces on the ranks of the federal employees who have been abruptly fired, inviting some to sit in the gallery at the president’s speech to Congress, Trump has portrayed the workforce with a broad brush as bloated, unproductive and even corrupt.
“We had too many people in government,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Friday, defending his sweeping layoffs. “This is for 40 years; this isn’t just now. This built up and got worse and worse, and they just hire more and more people.”
His administration has set a goal of slashing half of the IRS workforce,. It has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and imposed a six-week freeze on its funding. In an ongoing legal battle over that, a divided Supreme Court last week cleared the way for a federal judge to order billions of dollars in the aid to be released.
What about Social Security and Medicare? Those massive programs consume about a third of the federal budget, but Trump has promised their popular benefits won’t be touched.
Then there’s the third branch of government: The judiciary.
More than 100 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, challenging the unliteral firing of civil servants, the freezing of federal spending, the pursuit of undocumented immigrants into churches, the end of birthright citizenship and more.
Judges already have issued more than 40 orders to temporarily block Trump’s actions.
“An American President is not a king − not even an ‘elected’ one,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said in one ruling Thursday. “The President’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power − or, more aptly, his aspiration − is flat wrong.”
In what might prove to be a test case, the judge reinstated Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board after Trump had removed her without cause.
The administration quickly filed an appeal, and Howell joked she was a “speed bump” for the case on its way to the Supreme Court.
Many of those cases may be headed to the high court, but it will take time for appeals to be exhausted and final rulings made. By then − even if Trump’s initial action is ultimately judged to have been improper − they could have had an impact that is difficult to undo, after programs have been slashed and workers fired.
Which is presumably part of the president’s point.
