In the 12 months since Donald Trump returned to the presidency on January 20, 2025, the country has witnessed a torrent of unilateral activity.Footnote 1 Immigration rules have been rewritten through executive orders and agency memoranda. Environmental regulations have been rolled back or suspended by proclamation. Long-standing trade relationships have been obliterated by the unilateral imposition of tariffs. Without any authorization or even meaningful deliberation within Congress, Venezuelan shipping vessels assumed to be narcotic traffickers have been summarily destroyed, and then its sitting president was extracted from his home country and placed in a New York City jail. National-security commitments have been reevaluated—sometimes over social media—leaving treaties and alliances shaken or dismantled. Trump has demanded that the US Department of Justice pay him $230 million, and then he insisted that the Internal Revenue Service owed him another $10 billion. Even obscure provisions of the federal code—from the measurement of unemployment figures to the classification of civil-service employees—have become reasons for dramatic presidential action.
As they did in Trump’s first presidency, unilateral activities have stood at the center of his second. These activities are both his preferred method of wielding power—aligned with his vision of a “strongman” presidency (Howell and Moe Reference Howell and Moe2025)—and the primary instrument through which he pursues policy change. Rather than bargain and negotiate with Congress through the legislative process, Trump repeatedly prefers to go it alone. As we look to make sense of the emergent meaning and significance of Trump’s second administration, therefore, we would do well to focus squarely on his unilateral powers, which have been the subject of extensive scholarly inquiry during the past two decades (for reviews, see Howell Reference Howell2005; Lowande and Rogowski Reference Lowande and Rogowski2021).
In attempting to explain Trump, the literature on unilateral action continues to have purchase. For all of his personal extravagancies, visceral aversion to rules and procedures, and manifest threats to democratic governance, Trump’s brand of unilateral politics is not entirely new. As he issues directives, Trump draws on his predecessors’ achievements, borrows their practices, and operates within a similar governing framework—defined by familiar incentives and constraints—that has shaped all modern presidencies.
At the same time, we also witness deviations from the usual politics of unilateral action. Two stand out as absolutely fundamental: (1) Trump’s tendency to disregard even the most established and conventional limits on presidential power; and (2) if not an outright reversal, then at least a reconsideration of how power relates to policy. These are not the type of routine adjustments that every president makes when governing the country. Rather, they challenge what the scholarly literature has come to define as core tenets of unilateral politics and the long, historical campaign to increase executive power.
It is still early in Trump’s second presidency. Already, however, evidence of both continuity and disjuncture is evident. To appreciate the significance of Trump’s deviations from standard practice, several points of conformity are first worth recognizing.
ENDURING FEATURES OF UNILATERAL ACTION
The moment that Trump returned to office in 2025, the usual politics of unilateral action were not entirely suspended. The core instruments of unilateral governance were not promptly abandoned, and the typical motivations and incentives governing their use did not immediately disappear. In at least three ways, rather, the basic narrative that political scientists have told about these politics helps to explain Trump’s unilateral activity.
The first continuity concerns the vehicles of unilateralism, which presidents have long used and scholars have long recognized (Cooper Reference Cooper2014). Like all of his modern predecessors, Trump has relied on well-worn instruments of presidential authority: executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, and national-security directives. Every president since Franklin Roosevelt has relied on this toolkit, many have expanded it, and Trump’s lawyers and advisers now draw on the same forms. Throughout his first 12 months in office, he acted through familiar channels—and we have every reason to expect him to do the same in his next 36.
The second continuity involves the propensity of newly elected presidents to overturn their predecessor’s actions. Every modern president has moved quickly to unwind elements of the prior administration’s legacy, particularly in the aftermath of a change in political party. George W. Bush reversed Clinton-era rules on reproductive health; Barack Obama rescinded Bush-era national-security directives; Trump rolled back Obama’s climate, labor, and immigration policies; and Joe Biden rescinded many of Trump’s border, energy, and deregulatory policies. It is no surprise, then, that Trump reinstated many of his previous orders and scrapped many of Biden’s. These policy changes are sudden and dramatic; the pattern, however, is familiar.
Third, the structural conditions that foster unilateral action remain largely intact. As scholars have long recognized (Chiou and Rothenberg Reference Chiou and Rothenberg2017; Howell Reference Howell2003; Mayer Reference Mayer2001), unilateral directives proliferate when Congress is gridlocked—when slight majorities in the House and Senate prove incapable of legislating changes to either a preexisting status quo or a new one created by presidential fiat. Presidents adopt this strategy partly out of necessity, as Congress cannot be counted on to advance their agenda, and partly out of opportunism, as legislators lack the votes to subsequently amend or overturn their unilateral directives. Legislative stalemate simultaneously encourages and acquiesces to presidential unilateralism. So it has during the early days of Trump’s second term: while the president issues orders with abandon, members of Congress—supporters and opponents alike—have proven largely incapable of coordinating a response.
Much of the political logic of unilateral action persists under Trump. This logic centers on what presidents can accomplish unilaterally, not on whom they can persuade. Presidents can act first and shift to Congress and the courts the burden of reevaluating both a new status quo and a refashioned political landscape. When those branches fail to act, the president effectively wins: a unilateral directive carries the force of law until and unless it is amended or overturned. Such have long been the politics of unilateral action—and so they remain today.
TWO BREAKS WITH THE STANDARD ACCOUNT
Enduring features of unilateral politics persist. However, Trump’s second presidency—or at least what we have seen of it thus far—also unsettles accounts that we have grown accustomed to telling about these politics. In particular, it compels us to revisit two prevailing narratives: (1) how presidents press against the limits of their authority; and (2) the relationship between power and policy.
Defying Boundaries
All modern presidents have pushed outward on the boundaries of their power, exploiting constitutional ambiguities and statutory silences to unilaterally shape policy (Waterman Reference Waterman2025). Steadfastly, entrepreneurially, they have devised new instruments of direct action, resisted congressional oversight, and erected institutions to extend their reach through an administrative state that operates as a locus of policy activity outside of the traditional legislative process. Expected to accomplish far more than a narrow reading of Article II would permit, presidents have sought to build, nurture, and guard their authority. Presidents, all presidents, want power (Howell Reference Howell2015).
But presidents do not pursue power heedlessly. Conscious of congressional and judicial checks, and wary of both formal sanction and political backlash, presidents calibrate their efforts. They move incrementally, consolidating one gain before attempting the next. They stretch prevailing understandings of law and the US Constitution, but only so far as other political actors will tolerate. The long arc of modern executive politics is one of building and consolidating power, with individual presidents each doing their part through steady and sober advancement—sensitive to the risks of reversal and careful not to overreach.
As a result, the extraordinary historical changes that presidents have made to their political office—and to their arsenal of unilateral powers—often have gone unappreciated until long after key claims were asserted and actions were taken. Courts rarely reject unilateral directives outright; and members of Congress, in those rare instances when they do intervene, usually accommodate presidential initiatives through funding or statutory authorization (for evidence on both of these scores, see Howell Reference Howell2003). More often, silence follows the unilateral actions of presidents who deftly calibrate their moves according to anticipated responses from the courts, Congress, and the broader public.
Not so with Trump. Rather than inch outward, he has hurled claims far beyond the outer boundaries of previously secured ground. Rather than yield to rival branches, he has openly disparaged them. And all the while, he has asserted powers that plainly defy constitutional and statutory limits.
From this administration, claims about presidential power are at once defiant and without evident limit. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller said, “All executive power is vested in the one man elected by the whole nation. No unelected bureaucrat has any ‘independent’ authority.”Footnote 2 According to his Department of Justice, Trump retains absolute authority over the executive branch and is free to override statutes including the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (Bednar Reference Bednar2025). From Trump himself, there is a steady stream of voluble assertions that he can do whatever he pleases and that no one can stop him. Shortly after his second term began, he posted a quote attributed to Napoleon: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”Footnote 3 Or, as he declared in an August 2025 Cabinet meeting, “Not that I don’t have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”Footnote 4
This is not mere bravado. These claims serve as backdrop to an extraordinary array of presidential actions. After taking office, Trump ordered a freeze of almost all federal grants and loans despite Congress’s appropriations authority. He attempted to redefine birthright citizenship through executive order, directly challenging the 14th Amendment. The administration disbanded the US Agency for International Development without congressional approval and fired thousands of civil servants while circumventing personnel protections. Among other actions, Trump launched airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities without seeking congressional authorization, imposed sweeping tariffs under emergency powers, invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify mass deportations during peacetime, and deployed the National Guard to multiple US cities.
In response, the federal district and appellate courts have handed Trump a litany of defeats—far more than any recent president has experienced. By the fall of 2025, Trump had faced more than 328 lawsuits challenging his executive orders, with courts issuing more than 200 rulings against the president. Courts struck down Trump’s attempts to withhold appropriations, blocked mass firings of civil servants, ruled his tariffs unconstitutional, and found that immigration policies have repeatedly violated due process. These cases remain ongoing, and the US Supreme Court often has come to his defense. The sheer number of court challenges during Trump’s first year in office, however, is unlike anything we have ever witnessed.
These are not the typical features of unilateral politics that scholars of the presidency have come to know. Past presidents, of course, have taken numerous controversial actions, and the courts, on occasion, have had to step in and provide a corrective. What is happening now, however, is of an entirely different volume and intensity. Beyond their policy significance, Trump’s actions intend to upend all types of conventional understanding about the limits of unilateral powers. These include the long-understood hierarchy of constitutional provisions, statutes, and unilateral directives; the exceptional nature of emergencies that justify expansions of presidential power; the ability—indeed, the obligation—of Congress and the courts to check the presidency and intervene in the federal bureaucracy; and our basic understanding of the rule of law. Because of its transparently extreme defiance of legal understandings, governing conventions, and democratic norms, Trump’s approach to increasing power is new.
Reorienting Power and Policy
Trump is not merely issuing unilateral directives that defy mainstream understandings of presidential power and that draw unprecedented judicial pushback. He also is upsetting our basic understanding of the relationship between power and policy.
The standard account of this relationship treats power instrumentally: presidents seek power not for its own sake, but in order to advance policy objectives and thereby attend to a public’s appetite for change. Some presidents, of course, have a taste for power. Others derive pleasure from exercising it. But the primary value modern presidents derive from power comes from what it delivers: policy accomplishments that accord with ideological objectives, the fulfillment of campaign promises, and relief from the crush of expectations that the public places on them.
Trump’s approach is different. Under his watch, policy domains have become staging grounds for thinly veiled efforts to claim new power or to disrupt existing power relations. His tariff wars, for instance, were only partly about correcting trade imbalances. They also were vehicles for shifting negotiations to bilateral channels that strengthened the president’s ability to not only dictate trade terms but also to level any number of ancillary political demands. Whenever foreign states contravened his wishes or fell out of favor, he could simply levy new tariffs on them. Trump’s assaults on media outlets, law firms, and professional associations were framed as fights against political corruption, but they also degraded the autonomy of institutions that check and challenge presidential power. Even ostensibly technocratic reforms—for example, reclassifying civil servants into a new “policy/career” category (previously “Schedule F”) to ease their removal—served to reorder relationships between the presidency and the administrative state.
This is not to say that Trump’s actions were entirely devoid of policy content. In both justification and effect, his unilateral actions obviously matter on policy grounds.Footnote 5 These actions, however, were located within a larger project: restructuring how others—agencies, courts, media outlets, law firms, foreign states—sit in relation to the president. Policies have become instruments for reconstituting presidential authority itself, and success is measured less by the durability or impact of any particular policy than by the demonstration that long-standing constraints could be bent or broken, that political competitors could be subdued, and that the presidency could assert primacy in domains previously treated as shared or off limits. This is the sense in which Trump’s unilateralism departs from the standard account: the pursuit of policy becomes, at least in part, a means to refashion presidential power rather than the other way around.
To see these dynamics in fuller view, consider Trump’s ongoing campaign against universities. Since resuming the presidency, his administration has launched investigations of numerous institutions under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It has targeted diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) programs as grounds for investigation, directing the Departments of Justice and Education to intensify compliance reviews. This campaign led to a panoply of funding freezes, including $2.2 billion at Harvard, $400 million at Columbia, $790 million at Northwestern, and more than $1 billion at Cornell. The administration revoked international student visas; threatened universities’ nonprofit status; targeted student protesters for deportation; demanded sweeping changes to curricula, hiring, and admissions; and tied any promised relief to the payment of fees that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Footnote 6
The impetus for these actions, ostensibly, was to fix a set of endemic failures within higher education: rising antisemitism, liberal indoctrination, administrative bloat, viewpoint discrimination, and more. Vital and important debates persist about the merits of these claims, of course. However, in the hurried rollout of these measures, in the targeting of grant recissions in unrelated research endeavors, in the tendency to run roughshod over previous administrative and statutory commitments, and in the distortion of basic facts on the ground, we could be forgiven in thinking that something else also was in play: Trump was not merely attending to persistent failures within higher education; he also was bringing long-standing sources of oppositional power to heal. Christopher Rufo, the conservative political activist and champion of Trump’s assault on higher education, stated it this way: “The universities seem all powerful and they have acted as if they were all powerful, and we’re finally revealing that we can hit them where it hurts.”Footnote 7 Policy change, in this sense, was not the only—or even necessarily the ultimate—prize that Trump sought. Policy change, instead, functioned as pretext for a reevaluation of power relations.
UNILATERALISM IN AN AGE OF POPULISM
What explains these two disjunctures? How have they taken hold? Many factors—both personal and institutional—surely contribute. At the source, though, is a populism that is plainly rising in our national politics, that sits at the center of Trump’s politics, and that has fundamentally reoriented the Republican Party.
As numerous scholars have shown (Galston Reference Galston2018; Judis Reference Judis2016; Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2019), populism is best understood not as a governing ideology but as a mode of political engagement—thin on programmatic commitments, thick on disruption, and overtly oppositional to established institutions, centers of power, and democratic norms. In the United States, it elevates a single leader who claims to speak for “the people” and channels voters’ disaffection with an entrenched order. What follows is not a well-ordered program of policy solutions but rather a frantic assault on governing institutions and democratic checks on power. Personal loyalty is demanded; constraints are ignored or dismantled; and opponents—individual and institutional alike—become targets of retribution. Under populist rule, the promise of democratic renewal quickly gives way to democratic erosion.
Thus understood, it is not difficult to observe how populism disrupts the politics of unilateral action. Consider the first break in how Trump asserts authority. In classic populist manner, the legitimacy of checks on his power is not merely questioned—it is denied outright. Trump brazenly claims vast new forms of authority and elevates unilateral directives over well-established constitutional and statutory limits, behaving as if rival governmental branches have no rightful standing to assert their prerogatives. When the US Supreme Court vindicates him, as it often has, victories are touted as proof that his reading of executive power was correct all along. When lower courts rule against him, he seizes the opportunity to rail against a discredited order—one that, in his telling, privileges the supposed due-process rights of illegal gang bangers over the welfare of true Patriotic Americans or attends to Marxist radicals over honest, hard-working citizens. Judicial rebukes and congressional investigations become useful political fodder rather than legitimate checks on authority.
Populism also explains the second break: the inversion of the power–policy relationship. A populist with autocratic ambitions does not simply advance policies within an existing system of governance. Rather, he seeks to remake the system itself. By portraying the presidency as the sole authentic representative of the people, Trump claims license to upend institutional relationships so that all other actors—agencies, courts, legislatures, and allied nations—are rendered subordinate. The traditional narrative of presidential unilateralism—that is, bounded and opportunistic actions taken in response to legislative gridlock—misconstrues this dynamic.
The reasons why different actors play along in these populist politics surely vary. For some Republican members of Congress, acquiescence promises electoral protection or personal favor. For movement conservatives, a vastly empowered presidency offers an instrument for dismantling the liberal administrative state they have long opposed. For Trump himself, the motives are more difficult to discern. He well may relish power for its own sake—the thrill of bringing enemies to heel, the recognition afforded to kings, the affirmation that comes with sitting at the center of things. We need not delve deeply into Trump’s character, psyche, or appetites, however, to recognize the effects of his actions.
These effects are clear: a campaign to reconstitute presidential power, to remake the constitutional order and the president’s place within it, and to leave other actors—Congress, courts, agencies, and allies—in various states of servitude and dependence. This is not unilateralism as we have known it. It is unilateralism deployed as a vehicle for political upheaval and transformation in an age of populism.
These effects are clear: a campaign to reconstitute presidential power, to remake the constitutional order and the president’s place within it, and to leave other actors—Congress, courts, agencies, and allies—in various states of servitude and dependence.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The author declares that there are no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
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