Column: Donald Trump and our disappearing checks and balances
If ever a U.S. president needed the checks and balances that the founders established, it’s law-breaking, oath-violating Donald Trump.
Yet those checks by Congress and the Supreme Court will hardly be a check at all once Trump is back in power. The former and future president has shaped each of those institutions in his image.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
He’s already benefited. The Supreme Court, where Trump’s first-term appointees are half of its six-member far-right supermajority, ruled in July that presidents are virtually immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. The court’s dilatory deliberations and then its stunning decision had the effect of delaying past the 2024 election any federal trial for Trump’s alleged first-term crimes: plotting to overthrow Joe Biden’s election and then high-tailing it to Mar-a-Lago with government secrets.
Now that he’s headed back to the White House, those cases will be dropped. It remains to be seen whether Trump, as president, will exploit the license for wrongdoing that the court gave him. If past is prologue, the odds are good. Even better are the chances that the receptive court will rule in Trump’s favor when opponents’ challenges to his future presidential acts inevitably reach it.
But it’s Congress where Trump will have real pull — at least for the two years until the 2026 midterm elections.
The Justice Department has been largely separated from White House influence since Watergate. The president-elect has made it clear that it won’t be anymore.
Just as at the start of his earlier term, both the Senate and House likely will be under Republicans’ control, if only narrowly, thanks to Trump’s coattails. (The House majority won’t be officially determined until perhaps later this week, but Republicans are favored.) Their tie to Trump is stronger than it was in 2017-18. Republicans then were deferential; come January, they’ll be obsequious. The founders will spin in their graves at the bowing and scraping we’re about to see from the supposedly independent Congress.
Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, House speaker in 2017 and 2018, broke with Trump in 2016 over the “grab ’em by the pussy†tape, but became accommodating enough once Trump was president. But contrast Ryan’s ambivalence with the zealotry of current Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who’s sure to be chosen as the Republicans’ leader again when they meet this week. Dubbed MAGA Mike by approving right-wingers when he got the speakership last year, Johnson has since made repeated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, campaigned with Trump and at every chance stood like a bespectacled bobblehead beside him.
As Punchbowl News reported: “Now Trump gets a congressional leader who will back his agenda — for better or worse.†Worse, I’ll wager.
We are not ‘better than this.’ ‘This’ — the racism, the sexism — has always been a major part of who we are.
In Ryan’s time, a novice President Trump didn’t have much of an agenda or even “concepts of a plan†beyond talk of building a wall, banning Muslims and repealing Obamacare; he didn’t fully realize any of those goals. Credit Ryan and other Republicans for the 2017 tax cuts law that’s counted as first-term Trump’s singular legislative achievement — if you can count a budget-busting giveaway to the richest Americans and corporations as an achievement.
Next year they’ll do it again. The House will extend the Trump tax cuts at a cost of about $1 trillion annually in debt, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and add to those breaks, including with the promises Trump made on the campaign trail: “Just plow it through,†as a Republican lobbyist said.
But this time Trump has a sprawling agenda beyond tax cuts: Project 2025, compiled by scores of his most far-right first-term advisors with his public blessing, but so unpopular that he disavowed it during the campaign. No surprise: That disavowal was just one lie among many.
Voters in seven of 10 states affirmed the right to abortion. Two Black women will serve in the Senate. And Ron DeSantis got slapped.
“Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,†conservative podcaster Matt Walsh cynically tweeted last week. To which Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, fresh out of prison for contempt of Congress, responded on his podcast: “Fabulous!â€
Look for Trump to issue executive orders and seek legislation from Congress to do much that’s in Project 2025: Blow up the civil service and reestablish a 19th-century-style spoils system. Make the Justice Department his vengeful law firm. End the federal role in education and mount culture wars. Abandon clean energy efforts, though that Trump promise could run up against the reality that Biden’s historic climate investments have brought good jobs, mostly to Republican districts.) Support for Ukraine is all but doomed, just as Trump desires.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is stepping aside after a record run as party leader, leaving either Sen. John Thune of South Dakota or Sen. John Cornyn of Texas to become leader of the new majority. Each has had differences with Trump, but neither will likely defy him going forward, especially now that the Senate will include more Trump toadies.
After Joe Biden won in 2020 with less Latino support than Clinton, I warned liberals that the Democratic Party was losing blue-collar Latino men. Few listened.
Don’t look for much Senate resistance to Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet, other high posts and federal judgeships, as there was on occasion in his first term.
With Republicans likely to have a slightly larger Senate majority than in 2017-18, relatively moderate Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska won’t be the decisive naysayers they sometimes were before. Apparently, even anti-vax conspiracist and brain-worm carrier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t off-limits as a Cabinet possibility: “I think the Senate is going to give great deference to a president that just won a stunning … landslide,†Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said when asked about the likes of Kennedy getting a role in the administration.
Here’s a silver lining: Trump, a dictator wannabe with a pliant Congress, will all but certainly overreach. We know that much of his agenda is unpopular. But with Republicans controlling all the levers in Washington, they can nonetheless impose it — and own the result.
The reckoning will come in two years. Midterm elections for almost a century have nearly always gone against the party holding the presidency. May 2026 be no different.
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