In his first few weeks back in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has undertaken a blistering shake-up of the federal bureaucracy in violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers and therefore the law. Among other things, Trump has empowered billionaire Elon Musk to essentially take over the Office of Personnel Management, canceled funding for scientific research and frozen U.S. funding for important domestic and global public goods—such as health care, education and development aid—all without authorization from Congress.
In the foreign policy realm, too, many of Trump’s actions and stated intentions violate important international treaties the Constitution requires him to uphold: Trump has threatened the territorial integrity of U.S. neighbors and allies, begun relocating undocumented immigrants to a new detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and proposed the forced displacement of the entire population of Gaza to allow the U.S. to take control of the territory and develop it as a real estate venture.
The question on many observers’ minds has been whether the U.S. system of government’s checks and balances would hold in the face of a seeming assault on the Constitution, democratic norms and the international rules-based order. Much depends on the response of the political opposition, as represented by the Democratic Party’s leadership. According to many commentators and members of the public, that response has so far seemed too tepid. As political scientist Seth Masket noted, Democrats were slow to use certain tools at their disposal, including publicity stunts to draw attention to illegal behavior, procedural stonewalling to slow down policy change and the courts.