In his second term, President Donald Trump has pushed beyond the limits that have constrained previous presidents, suggesting that he should not be bound by norms, statutes, or constitutional language. The logic of the US Constitution is that majorities are required for change but that it also is necessary to protect minority interests. The system of checks and balances forces most majorities to grow and broaden before they are empowered. The Constitution provides an incentive for public officials to negotiate and compromise. Donald Trump has ignored this constitutional imperative. Instead of persuasion, compromise, and negotiation, he has employed unilateral action.

The president needs to legitimate such a mode of governing in a system designed to decentralize power and in a political culture suspicious of it. The primary option available to Trump and his supporters was to claim a broad mandate from the American people for sweeping change, and they did so.

In his contribution to this symposium, George C. Edwards III asks whether Trump received such a mandate. The data show that he did not. His electoral victory was modest by historical standards, and the public neither viewed his election as a mandate for sweeping change nor desired to accord the president additional power. Moreover, Trump did not campaign on many of the issues on which he took action, and the public opposed most of his major changes in policy. These changes included drastically cutting or dismembering congressionally authorized agencies and programs, deporting most undocumented aliens, raising tariffs, and gutting foreign aid. Voters certainly never supported eviscerating the foundations of the contemporary administrative state.

All modern presidents have pushed the boundaries of their power outward. These efforts typically have been incremental and opportunistic actions, usually taken in response to legislative gridlock. Trump is different. He has asserted powers that plainly defy constitutional and statutory limits. In his article, William G. Howell explains how the president and his supporters are interested in more than alterations in public policies. They also seek systematic change, restructuring the relationship of the presidency to others—agencies, courts, private actors, and allied nations. Policies have become instruments for reconstituting presidential authority itself.

Howell makes clear that in both justification and effect, Trump’s unilateral actions matter on policy grounds. Yet, the White House has located policy change within the larger project of demonstrating that long-standing constraints can be bent or broken, that political competitors can be subdued, and that the presidency can assert primacy in domains previously treated as shared or off limits. In these ways, Trump’s unilateralism departs from that of his predecessors. Howell also explains how the president’s approach to governing is consistent with populism.

One hallmark of President Trump’s governing style in his second term has been a barrage of executive actions. Andrew Rudalevige explains in his contribution how the president used executive orders and places them in historical perspective. Many of these actions, in effect, were press releases for public relations purposes or of a purely symbolic nature.

Nevertheless, many of Trump’s executive actions were consequential, often historically so. Rather than to complement newly passed laws—Congress has passed few new laws (Kane Reference Kane2025)—Trump used executive action to reshape the federal government and trade, immigration, energy, and climate policy. He also issued new rules for federal contractors and grant recipients and rescinded many directives of previous presidents. Most distinctive—and potentially dangerous—were executive orders exacting retribution on specific individuals or entities, ordering subordinates to disregard the law, and declaring emergencies.

The constitutional system is one of shared powers. This core feature of the US Constitution enables the checks and balances designed to limit the concentration of power. However, since taking office in January 2025, President Trump has faced a compliant legislative branch. Congress has given him most of what he has sought, passing a wide range of priority legislation in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which included provisions addressing taxes, the debt ceiling, health care, food assistance, energy, pro-natalism, education, defense, and immigration and border security. Other legislation on deportations and cryptocurrency regulation and recissions followed shortly thereafter.

In her article, Frances Lee argues that rather than broader political structural and political factors, Trump’s legislative success in 2025 is best explained by his increased influence inside the Republican party. She highlights three reasons why Trump had more influence with the congressional GOP. First, in 2024, Trump had the strongest electoral performance in Republican constituencies of any Republican president since 2000. Second, Republican leaders in Congress in 2025 owed their positions to Trump to a greater extent than Republican leaders in 2017. Third, Trump always has been more willing than most presidents to publicly criticize and threaten to primary copartisan members of Congress. Given his support among Republicans in the public, such threats were credible.

Trump’s legislative strategy used to enact his OBBB was straightforward: combine all of the party’s priorities in a single package and then force the vote as a test of loyalty to the president. Given the country’s national partisan polarization and the narrow majorities in Congress, congressional parties faced enormous pressure to act before they lost control. We should expect this pattern to continue.

Equally important, as long as the donors and political activists who support members of Congress in their constituencies are responsive to the president and a national media ecosystem that supports him, Republicans will face enormous pressure to align with Trump to survive their primaries.

At the core of Congress’s constitutional powers is the “power of the purse”—that is, the authority to appropriate funds and raise revenue. Although the president is given the power to veto tax and spending bills, the power to authorize the bills belongs to the legislature. Nevertheless, President Trump has refused to spend billions of dollars of funds appropriated by Congress. Such “impoundments,” with narrow exceptions, are prohibited by the Budget Control and Impoundment Act of 1974. Russel Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified that he believes the president has the authority to block any spending and that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional (Price Reference Price2025). President Trump also has unilaterally raised tariffs, imposing substantial new taxes on the American people without the consent of their representatives in Congress.

Article II of the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Almost two centuries ago in Kendall v. United States (1838), the US Supreme Court held that this means the president must obey and enforce the law. Nevertheless, President Trump refused to enforce a congressional act requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or to see it banned in the United States—a law upheld by the US Supreme Court in TikTok v. Garland (2025).

In 1952, during the Korean War, President Harry Truman seized steel mills to maintain war production during a labor strike. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952), the US Supreme Court voided the president’s executive order, and Truman complied. Justice Robert Jackson observed that Congress has tools to resist presidential arrogation of its power. However, he added, “I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems.” The current Congress is proving Jackson right. The Republican majorities in both houses have neither opposed President Trump overruling their decisions nor held hearings on his extraordinary exercise of power.

In his article, Douglas L. Kriner shows that there has been widespread public opposition to the president’s gambits. Nevertheless, he finds that Congress has offered little resistance to Trump’s unilateral actions, marking a stark departure from historical precedent. His analysis situates the president’s actions within broader debates over the scope of executive authority and the weakening of institutional checks and balances. Kriner highlights how partisan incentives and Trump’s dominance of the GOP have muted congressional resistance, raising questions about the future of the separation of powers.

President Trump also has asserted authority to completely control all executive branch activities, thereby overriding statutory provisions through which Congress has set agency goals, missions, budgets, and job protections for agency personnel, and contesting the ability of the judiciary to set limits. It is an aggressive expression of the “unitary presidency” theory, which claims that the president alone exercises all executive authority and that Congress may not create agencies that are insulated against direct presidential control through restrictions on the removal power. In its stronger form, the theory claims that no other institution—not Congress, not the courts—can restrict what presidents may do while overseeing the executive branch, particular in foreign affairs (US Department of Justice 2001).

Consistent with the unitary executive theory, Trump has dismantled entire executive branch agencies or rendered them unable to carry out their functions, including the US Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Voice of America, and the US Department of Education. He has dismissed federal employees despite statutory protections against their dismissal. These officials included Inspectors General in 17 agencies—offices that were created to monitor agency activities for compliance with the law and to investigate whistleblower complaints—and heads of independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, and members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board. Trump also fired tens of thousands of federal employees in multiple agencies, and he claimed that independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission—which traditionally have been insulated from direct presidential control—answer directly to the president (Executive Order 14215, 2025). Below the level of Senate-confirmed appointees, the president has taken steps to expand his control over key personnel. He created two new categories of senior civil-service employees that lack removal protection and that diminish the importance of the Senior Executive Service.

As David E. Lewis states in his contribution, these “actions to assert control of the executive branch have been breathtaking in their speed, volume, and diversity.” He describes how Trump has coupled his expansive view of the president’s powers under the US Constitution with a willingness to flout existing laws that he believes are unconstitutional and an aggressive use of existing legal authorities. This strategy has allowed Trump to begin a process that is fundamentally reshaping the administrative state, starting with its personnel system. Lewis provides a distillation of the theory behind Trump’s actions and describes how the president has asserted control over federal personnel. He concludes with the implications of these actions for governance and for our understanding of the Trump presidency in history more generally.

President Trump prides himself on taking radical action to accomplish his goals. It is not surprising that there has been resistance from opponents, and much of this opposition has occurred in the courts. Judges have found that the president’s actions violated federal law or the US Constitution in cases ranging from freezing federal grants and loans, firing federal workers, ending birthright citizenship, limiting transgender rights, sanctioning law firms, to deporting certain immigrants without legal review. In addition, judges have complained about shoddy legal work on behalf of the government (Berman and Roebuck Reference Berman and Roebuck2025), and some have suggested that officials are defying court orders.

In a broader development, on May 4, 2025, when President Trump was asked whether he had an obligation to uphold the US Constitution, he replied, “I don’t know.” When asked whether all people deserved due process, the president again answered, “I don’t know” (NBC News 2025). Slightly more than 100 days earlier, he had taken an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Following the logic of Trump’s expansive view of his power, he issued an executive order denying American citizenship to children born in the United States if their parents were either undocumented noncitizens or temporary US residents (Executive Order 14260, 2025). This action constituted an attempt to reverse explicit language in the 14th Amendment, disregarding 160 years of constitutional interpretation, two US Supreme Court decisions, and multiple federal statutes. It is an effort to amend the US Constitution through presidential fiat.

President Trump also invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law that had never been used before during peacetime—to summarily remove noncitizens without due process or court hearings, even some people who were in the country legally (Feuer Reference Feuer2025; Proclamation 10903, 2025). The Alien Enemies Act was last used in 1941 for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Because his administration knew that the proclamation invoking the act would be challenged in court, Trump signed it in secret, “hoping to jump-start deportations before a court could respond” (Arnsdorf and Allison Reference Arnsdorf and Allison2025). When a federal judge blocked the deportations, Trump called for his impeachment, and the president’s top border advisor declared, “We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think” (Berman Reference Berman2025). The administration admitted that it had sent one legal immigrant to a foreign prison in error, but it refused to take any steps to correct the mistake and return the man to the United States—even after a federal court order to do so was upheld by the US Supreme Court (Turkewitz et al. Reference Turkewitz, Ulloa, Herrera, Aleaziz and Kanno-Youngs2025).

Such actions seem to threaten the rule of law, the bedrock of a free society. In her article, Jasmine Farrier asks whether the US Supreme Court can or will attempt to halt President Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential powers. She concludes that the answer is “no.” First, the Roberts Court’s emergency docket decisions thus far comport with recent trends in supporting ideologically aligned chief executives in presidential-power cases. Second, the US Supreme Court lacks the institutional capacity and consistent jurisprudence to challenge each area of alleged presidential overreach. Third, the administration’s use of broad authorities previously delegated by Congress serves as a reminder that constitutional interpretation and interbranch dynamics ultimately are rooted in the broader political system. Congress cannot easily retract authority granted to the president, but it is its responsibility to do so. Curtailing presidential unilateralism requires more than litigation.

No reading of the US Constitution supports a presidential assertion that a political mandate or a political promise made obviates or supersedes the role of Congress. The system of checks and balances is fragile and under threat. Whether Congress will reclaim its proper role in national decision making and check the president and whether the US Supreme Court will challenge President Trump’s interpretation of Article II powers remain open questions. In the meantime, it is important that the American people understand the sweeping changes under the second Trump administration and their broader significance for government in America.