He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term. It’s why The Heritage Foundation came up with Project 2025: an organizated and cohesive plan to dismantle the bureaucracy and consolidate power. And it is working.
The first term laid a lot of the groundwork for this term as well - had he not appointed three SC Justices, things would look very different. This court has said basically that all executive actions including pretextual investigations via the DOJ are legal and that there is no such thing as agency independence, even when written into the laws that created the agencies.
Yes, too much emphasis is put on Trump. He's just the President. This crisis has been 80 years in the making.
It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.
By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.
Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
> It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President
Sort of, but Congress also wrote a bunch of pretty broad, vague laws, delegating a significant amount of power to the executive via agency rulemaking, and it turns out the agencies are part of the executive branch and have to do what the head of the executive branch says they have to do (within the limits of those broad, vague laws). If Congress can't get back to smaller, simpler, more specific laws, and they continue to pass the burden of this complexity over to the executive branch to figure out, the executive branch will continue to wield outsize power.
Absolutely! The U.S. is defacto a Russia or China with a lower 'government expenditure/GDP ratio'
But that is not that much of a consolation if the government is allowed to pick winners and losers for kleptocracy or there is strong central planning and oversight on what should independent institutions
> He knew how much power he had back then. The difference was that the government bureaucracy worked hard to counter his agenda throughout his term.
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
well it tried to be organized, "cohesive" is a stretch.
And it's really fumbling as of now. The tarrifs were 100% on Trump and it's clearly thrown a monkey wrench in everything. the federal judges have slowed everything to a crawl, and these spectacles with immigration have activated American eyes in ways we haven't seen in decades. These kinds of plans work in the shadows and as of now it's all out in the open.
It will reverse in November at this rate, but even a few more reisngations or deaths in the house can dramatically shift plans.
