For generations, presidents have turned to Capitol Hill to press members of Congress to pass their legislative agendas. The reasoning is obvious: In our Madisonian system, there’s a separation of powers. The White House can’t pass its own laws, so administrations have worked diligently to advance their priorities in the House and Senate. It’s American Politics 101.

Or at least it was. In 2025, Donald Trump has effectively given up on such that process, apparently under the impression that he already has everything he wants.

Delivering remarks in Japan, the incumbent president reflected on the GOP domestic policy megabill he signed into law in July. “It really covers everything, the Great Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump said, apparently forgetting the name he insisted on (it was the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” not the “Great Big Beautiful Bill”).

“We got everything done,” he added, “I said, ‘Put it all into one bill and if we get it done, we’re done for four years.’ We don’t need anything more from Congress.”

The president has emphasized this point quite a bit lately. Earlier this month at a White House event with a college baseball team, Trump again said, in reference to his party’s megabill, “We took care of everything. … We didn’t know where we’d stand in a year or two years from now, so we put every single thing that we wanted in that bill for four years. So we don’t need any more votes.”

A month earlier at a press event in England alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Republican boasted that the GOP megabill is “so big that we really don’t have to pass too much anymore.” He added, “We can just do this for four years — implement.”

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In other words, as far as Trump is concerned, his legislative agenda, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Most modern presidents from both parties have a laundry list of bills they’d love to see congressional lawmakers take up, but the current president is apparently under the impression that he signed one large bill into law, and he can now coast until January 2029.

Part of this reflects Trump’s ongoing indifference toward governing and policymaking, but it also reflects something equally nefarious: Part of the reason the president is indifferent toward Congress is that he’s already seized many of the responsibilities that are supposed to rest with lawmakers, including the power of the purse.

Trump’s impression of Congress as an irrelevant institution is an extension of his authoritarian worldview: He’s already acquiring power as GOP leaders on the Hill render themselves irrelevant, voluntarily ceding ground to the executive.

It’s emblematic of a governing crisis that’s likely to get worse before it gets better.