Trump takes 'Imperial Presidency' to new level

WASHINGTON -- When President Donald Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month, he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.For surprised White House veterans who were paying attention, the unusual flourishes looked a little familiar. Just two months earlier, King Charles III of Britain welcomed Trump for a state visit that included, yes, a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and a long, regal table for the lavish dinner in St. George's Hall at Windsor Palace.In his first year back in office, Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform U.S. government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks -- it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops onto American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his chief of staff calls "score settling" against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies, and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.Trump's reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him."His second term in many respects represents not simply a break from presidential norms and expectations," said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. "It's also a culmination of 75 years in which presidents have reached for more and more power."It is also a culmination of four years of planning between Trump's first term and his second. The last time around, he was a political novice who did not understand how government worked and surrounded himself with advisers who tried to restrain his most extreme instincts. This time, he arrived in office with a plan to accomplish what he did not in his first term, and a team of like-minded loyalists intent on remaking the country."The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time," said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. "Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn't work." Strong and Weak The presidency is a living organism, shaped by the person inhabiting it, whether it be self-styled men of action like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, father figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, legislative wizards like Lyndon B. Johnson or captivating communicators like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. More than the sum of the clauses of the Constitution's Article II, it is an evolving construct, one that has adapted to the ever-changing challenges of a complex and fast-moving world.Trump wears it like a cloak. Power is the leitmotif of his second term. For the record, he disclaims royal aspirations. "I'm not a king," he said after millions of Americans took to the streets in "No Kings" demonstrations in October. But at the same time, he embraces the comparison, at least in part to troll his critics but also, it seems, because he enjoys the notion.He and his staff have posted images of him in monarchical regalia, including an AI-generated illustration of him wearing a crown and flying a fighter jet labeled "KING TRUMP" that dumps excrement on protesters. He delighted when the South Koreans gave him a replica of an ancient golden crown. "LONG LIVE THE KING!" he wrote about himself on social media.To his supporters, Trump's assertion of vast power is invigorating, not disturbing. In a country they see in decline, a strong hand is the only way to dislodge a liberal, "woke" deep state that in their view has suffocated everyday Americans to the advantage of unwelcome immigrants, street criminals, globalist tycoons, underqualified minorities and out-of-touch elites. Voters struggling to maintain their standards of living or make sense of a society changing rapidly around them have twice given Trump a chance to make good on his promise to blow up politics as usual and address their concerns.To his critics, Trump is narcissistic, uncouth, corrupt and a danger to American democracy. He has used the office to enrich himself and his family, sullied the image of the United States around the world, sought to erase the true history of Black Americans and pursued policies that harm the very people he purports to represent.What everyone agrees on is that Trump dominates the political landscape like none of his predecessors going back generations, single-handedly setting the agenda and forcing his will on the rest of the system. At the same time, he is the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of polling. He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, not in any of his three presidential elections and not for a single day of either term in Gallup surveys.His current 36% approval rating in Gallup is lower than that of every elected modern president at the end of a first year, lower even than it was in his first term (39%) and 7 percentage points below the next-lowest (Joe Biden at 43%). If compared against presidents who served two terms consecutively, Trump is still below each of them at the end of their fifth year, except Nixon, who had plummeted to 29% in the throes of Watergate.Some critics predict that Trump's unpopularity will begin to erode his power. "It's been striking that Republicans in Congress have stuck behind him," said former Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who broke with Trump in the first term. "But I do think that is changing. Some of it's not exactly a profile in courage, but it's looking at the electoral wins and realizing the midterms are going to be very difficult."Trump's allies dismiss that as wishful thinking by the president's critics. Miller called current polling a "temporary blip" that will reverse as tax cuts passed this year take effect in the first couple of quarters of 2026. "Once the economy rockets to where everyone's predicting it to be for Q1 and Q2," he said, "that will all snap back." Bypassing Limits Presidents have been pushing the boundaries of power going back to the early days of the republic, most aggressively during wartime. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus even beyond the battlefield and emancipated enslaved people in rebel areas. Woodrow Wilson prosecuted critics of World War I and effectively censored some newspapers. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. In most cases, the pendulum swung back to a degree after the wars were over and security restored.In the modern era, the notion of an imperial presidency was made prominent by the book of that name published in 1973 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had worked in John F. Kennedy's White House. Schlesinger argued that under Nixon, who refused to spend certain money appropriated by Congress, secretly bombed Cambodia, wiretapped opponents and used government to pursue his enemies, the presidency "has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint."The system of checks and balances eventually did reassert itself during Watergate. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to release incriminating tapes and a bipartisan coalition in Congress moved to impeach the president, prompting him to resign. Starting late in Nixon's tenure, Congress passed new laws meant to restrain the executive on war powers, impoundment, eavesdropping and government ethics.Some argued that the post-Watergate reforms went too far in emasculating the presidency after the voter-abbreviated tenures of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. Reagan and George W. Bush in different ways worked to empower the office again, particularly in foreign policy and national security. Obama pushed further by exempting from deportation many immigrants who had arrived illegally as children, and Biden unilaterally tried to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt. But all four encountered pushback from the courts and Congress, and none went as far as Trump has."Some of the stuff that people were upset at Nixon for doing was kind of quaint compared to just the totally out-of-control stuff" that Trump has been doing, said Robert Schlesinger, a son of Arthur Schlesinger and himself a longtime journalist and historian of the White House."Even Nixon was a guy who got that there were limits that he had to tread carefully around even as he was trying to push them," Schlesinger added. "Whereas Trump, he's not interested in limits. And whether it's through a conscious strategy or just unconscious cunning, by being so open about it, it normalizes it to some extent."Working off a Project 2025 blueprint devised by allies during his four years out of power, Trump came back to office with a raft of executive orders that have allowed the instant-gratification president to dispense with the slow grind of congressional negotiations. So far this year, Trump has issued 221 executive orders, nearly three times as many as any other first-year president in three-quarters of a century.Miller credits a more cohesive team. "There are a lot less hangers-on or superfluous characters floating around," he said. "That White House is about getting things done."But some Republicans said the lack of contrary voices in the West Wing has a cost. While Trump has successfully sealed the border as he promised and brokered a fragile ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, he looks out of touch on affordability and was rolled by the bipartisan coalition demanding the release of files related to sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein."You live in a bubble if that's the situation and sometimes you get blindsided by reality," said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the few incumbent Republicans who has been critical at times. "I don't know that he's hearing that kind of feedback. His first administration he had people who would say, 'Mr. President, I know what you're saying, this is what I'm thinking.'" By contrast, Bacon said, "This time, you've got pretty much yes men." Imperial or Imperiled? As the year ends, there have been signs of resistance to unchecked power. A judge threw out the Trump administration's indictments against two of the president's adversaries, Letitia James and James Comey, and two grand juries refused to reindict James. In addition to legislating release of the Epstein files, Congress passed a measure slashing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's travel budget by 25% if he does not turn over video of a second strike on a boat of supposed drug traffickers.If Democrats win the midterm elections next year, they will surely use their newfound power to push back further against Trump. Some, like Flake, predict that even some Republicans will begin to speak out after filing deadlines for possible primary challengers have passed. And legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to clip Trump's wings on tariffs, and possibly on birthright citizenship.Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, acknowledged the nation's long history of expanding presidential authority. But, he added, "we have an equally robust history of cramming the presidency back into its constitutional box once war or economic crisis has passed."That history "strongly suggests that what we are seeing today will not, in fact, endure." Is that a guarantee? "I'm not smart enough to know the answer to that."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.