After just five days in office, President Donald Trump is already stress-testing American democracy.
With a series of presidential pardons, executive orders and agency directives, Trump is laying the groundwork to aggrandize the executive branch and limit the checks and balances that have kept America from lapsing into authoritarianism.
Within hours of taking his oath of office, Trump quickly moved to undermine the rule of law with the stroke of a pen. Let’s start with his shameful decision to pardon or commute the sentences of virtually every person charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy and rioters who had pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers.
Trump’s sweeping decision, which goes further than he had suggested while campaigning, is a stain on the presidential pardon power, something historically used sparingly and only after careful consideration. While some Republicans have spoken up — and, to be fair, there’s nothing they can do legislatively about the pardons — House Speaker Mike Johnson said he wouldn’t “second guess” Trump’s decision and too many others have stayed silent. It’s worth noting, too, that some of these lawmakers were targets of the rioters, protected by Capitol Police who bore the brunt of the attack.
At the same time he was freeing those convicted of these crimes, he was working to redefine who counts as an American with a brazen attempt to undermine the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, passed after the Civil War to ensure that everyone born on American soil is a citizen. Democratic attorneys general across the country have already organized to sue him over this unilateral attempt to reduce our constitutional rights, and it has already lost one court fight.
And then there’s his decision to rescind Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson during the Civil Rights Movement to ban discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion and national origin by federal contractors. For nearly six decades, this order has helped ensure that the leadership of a huge portion of corporate America works to build a diverse workforce, leading the way for the rest of the private sector to treat all potential employees fairly.
While these orders reflect Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration and race, the decision to issue them by executive action instead of by working through Congress will set up a game of chicken between Trump and the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, three members of which he appointed. Will the court allow him to continue to take powers that he does not have? Or will it eventually step in and put a stop to at least some of his actions?
Trump has also shown he will challenge Congress’ authority. Before even taking office, he said he would reject a law — inspired by his own suggestion, for what it’s worth — that would ban the social media app TikTok as a national security threat. While he has some ability to delay enforcement as president, if he continues to ignore the law past that deadline, it will be another test of whether the legislative or judicial branch can rein him in.
The president will also test the nonpartisan traditions of America’s federal workforce. In his first week in office, Trump reinstated his first-term “Schedule F” policy to make it easier for him to replace long-serving federal workers with MAGA loyalists. It’s a move quite literally right out of the Project 2025 playbook.
Trump is not the first president to seek to expand his powers. Over the years, we’ve seen presidents assert more and more control over the federal government. Both parties have been responsible for this expansion of power, and both have also criticized it when they were out of power. When President Barack Obama took some executive actions they disagreed with, Republicans angrily criticized him. But now they are essentially ceding to Trump their own power to legislate in exchange for nothing.
None of this should be a surprise. The Trump campaign telegraphed these plans throughout the 2024 election, and we all saw how he tested the guardrails during his first term. But the scale and depth of these new attacks should cause us all concern. Whether Trump gets away with these power grabs will depend on how lawmakers, judges, corporations, the news media and even everyday citizens respond. The question now is: Are we up to the challenge?
For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
