The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Robert Ballingall is an associate professor of political science at the University of Maine. He teaches courses in the history of political thought and American constitutional law. His current book project is “Children of Pride: Lawlessness and Humiliation in Modern Political Thought.”
Donald Trump was reelected on a stated mandate of disruption. To put America first, he promised to upend — more aggressively than ever before — longstanding relationships with “freeloading” allies and to stand up to rivals on whom previous administrations had been far too soft. To restore American greatness, he vowed to take a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy — to drain the swamp, as he likes to say — and to save the country from the “deep state” traitors who have brought it low.
Amid flurries of executive orders, the full audacity of this agenda is coming into focus. As is a disturbing question: Does Trump’s mandate overturn constitutional government in America? Is his purpose a revolution in the face of which the rule of law is cast aside?
Obviously, the man’s disrespect for legal and institutional constraints was well known long before his reelection. In many ways, that seems to have been part of his appeal with a large and cynical swath of the public.
But Trump’s maximalist rhetoric has often inspired doubts of his sincerity. He doesn’t always mean what he says. He changes his mind depending on who he’s last spoken to or who has lately done him a favor. His intentions are at best unclear.
What is clear enough is what Trump does. And what he and his administration are doing is not encouraging. In Elon Musk, he has invested extraordinary powers to restructure executive branch departments and transform federal spending without any of the accountability that our constitutional system would require of such an office.
Musk is an obscenely wealthy private citizen, who was neither elected nor confirmed by the Senate, nor subject to the oversight and administrative rules that normally govern the federal agencies. Nevertheless, he and a cadre of personal employees seem to be assuming control of these institutions, including the Treasury Department, whose payment systems are responsible for trillions of dollars in disbursements and whose whose acting secretary was pushed out last week for daring to object, despite a long career at Treasury under administrations of both parties.
Also dismissed were 17 inspectors general, whose statutory purpose is to prevent and detect fraud and abuse in the bureaucracy, independent of presidential control. Their dismissal was unlawful; it was without cause and without the 30-days notice required by statute, though in fairness to Trump the law in question may be unconstitutional.
When considered in the context of Trump’s other initiatives — to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending without congressional authorization; to unilaterally dismantle the U.S.Agency for International Development and possibly the Department of Education; to promise recess appointments for nominees rejected by the Senate; to declare an end to birthright citizenship, in defiance of the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment — these actions betray a pattern. The Trump White House plainly believes that, as the executive of the executive branch, the president has unlimited authority over the federal agencies and an equal authority over the very meaning of the Constitution.
The agencies may have been created by Congress. Their budgets may have been appropriated by Congress. Their heads and directors may have been approved by Congress. But they work within the executive branch and therefore at the pleasure of the president, under this logic. Judicial precedent might say otherwise, but the judiciary should not have the final word on what is and isn’t constitutional. Each branch has the right to interpret the founding instrument for itself — a view not unprecedented in American politics.
In this light, Trump’s agenda might appear less sinister. After all, the crusade in whose name his administration disregards the law is presented as a renaissance of constitutionalism. The framers never anticipated the creation of vast agencies staffed by unelected bureaucrats on whom Congress has delegated much of its lawmaking and spending powers, and to whom it has arrogated much of the judicial power too. Unless this so-called fourth branch of government is brought to heel, Americans can never resume the self-government for which the republic was intended.
But what of the primacy of Congress in the original constitutional scheme? Trump’s actions obviously worsen the long decline of legislative authority relative to the presidency. And how about the founders’ wariness of power allowed to go unchecked? To make good its mandate, the new administration is removing the means by which its power can be held accountable.
These points suggest that the greatness Trump would restore is not some good-faith vision of the founding but something else entirely. Indeed, there are voices in the MAGA coalition who see the Constitution as having been misguided from the first or as having become of late an obstacle to American needs.
Trump’s own nominee to head the Office of Budget and Management — the nerve center of the executive branch — views the ethos of professional independence in the bureaucracy as insidious window-dressing. It is in any case “not something that the Constitution understands.” It is rather politics all the way down.
In fact, the Constitution’s framers repudiated such a vision. They were especially troubled by the specter of “faction,” what we would call polarization. They believed republican government would work only if it could rise above winner-take-all partisanship.
The question, then, is whether Trumpian governance betrays these core constitutional values. In pursuit of control over anathemized opposition, is politics being reduced to a clientelism in which critics are enemies to be crushed and supporters friends to be rewarded? On this score, blame cannot be placed entirely at MAGA’s feet. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that Trump’s restoration is doing anything to reverse it. The means that his administration is adopting to pursue its ends say otherwise.
