This is an adapted excerpt from the July 10 episode of “The Beat with Ari Melber.”
As we approach the six-month benchmark of President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s becoming clear just how different his stint in the White House is this time around. Over the last few months, Trump has repeatedly pushed to undercut independence and checks in government and secure more power for himself.
He has taken actions that have long been opposed by people across the political spectrum, sending federal troops into American streets and allowing masked federal agents to raid homes and workplaces. Trump has claimed executive powers to retaliate against educators, colleges and law firms — simply because he disagrees with how they exercise their First Amendment rights.
Trump has been able to take these actions partly because there has been a shift inside the government. In his first term, Trump oversaw an array of public servants who viewed him as an aberration — a first-time politician with a narrow mandate who got fewer total votes — and were often committed to holding the line when Trump pushed to defy the law, the Constitution and checks and balances — baselines that are not supposed to be a matter of politics.
The United States’ system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that no politician can take too much power.
That included military and security officials, people in the bureaucracy, or even his own appointees who stopped or revised Trump’s plans. The president’s worst instincts were stemmed. Some referred to this as “adults in the room” or an internal “resistance inside the Trump administration.”
But without those guardrails, the American rule of law itself is under siege.
In Congress, Republicans have long been partisan and unified, but that’s hit a new level in Trump’s second term. Unlike in the first term, the Republican Party’s congressional leaders, Sen. John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, are both from the Trump era, and they oversee a caucus that bends to the president’s will. If there are supposed holdouts, they are arranged to allow Trump a winning vote on big-ticket items.
That’s a contrast to the first term when Trump had to contend with some independent-thinking Republicans, including the late Sen. John McCain, who risked a lot when he gave his memorable thumbs down on the Senate floor to stop Trump’s bid to gut the Affordable Care Act.
After Trump realized how hard it was to legislate, he turned away and has never really come back. He waited until this summer to get very involved in any major domestic legislation, partly because the budget is a congressional requirement that is not something the government can skip.
When it comes to his other assorted priorities, from immigration to political retribution to ending diversity recruitment, Trump is not sending bills to Congress on any of those topics in this second term. That takes work, collaboration and the acknowledgment of the power of the other branches of government.
Instead, Trump is pursuing most of those goals first through power grabs, in the form of executive orders, some of which are so lawless they keep getting smacked down in court. On Thursday, Trump was dealt another loss when a federal court shot down his bid to claim he can rewrite the Constitution’s definition of citizenship — something no president has ever had the power to do.
But it’s clear that Trump’s current aides are not editing or limiting his orders, even when it’s obvious they’ll lose in court. The wider effort here is to consolidate power in the White House and to increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government, a goal that was laid out very clearly in Project 2025.
The U.S. system of checks and balances is supposed to ensure that no politician can take too much power. While Trump never showed much interest in constitutional law during most of his career, he did take an interest in one particular part of the Constitution: Article II, which lists and limits the president’s powers.
Trump has used Article II to argue that, instead of a government that divides up powers between three co-equal branches, the president has total autocratic power. He has claimed Article II gives him “the right to do whatever” he wants as president. That’s false. But during his second term, Trump has pushed to turn that legally false claim into some kind of test.
In front pages and television programs, the headlines focus on what Trump is doing, like his efforts to crack down on free speech or end diversity programs. People need those facts, but they also need to know how Trump is doing all of this. The president is accomplishing a vast majority of his policy goals through temporary and sometimes illegal orders, flooding the courts and country with whatever he signs, often failing to get any other review, often without consulting government experts or Congress. Trump is doing this at unprecedented levels. He’s trying to seize power with White House orders far more often than former presidents, like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, and he’s issuing executive orders at triple the rate he did in his first term. The president is accomplishing a vast majority of his policy goals through temporary and sometimes illegal orders. Trump is attempting a huge shift in how power works in the federal government by undercutting Congress, shutting out other views and expertise, and gutting the checks that are fundamental to our democracy. While other presidents viewed legislation as key to their legacies, like Obama with the Affordable Care Act, Trump has the worst ratio of legislation-to-orders at this point in his term, compared with any president in modern history during their first 100 days in office. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed about 80 laws to about 90 executive orders. Obama, facing a resistant Republican-controlled Congress, leaned more on executive orders, signing those at about triple the rate of any laws. But Trump has blown both of them out of the water. He has already signed more than 35 times as many orders as new laws. This is a total shift in how power is used in the United States. It’s an autocratic effort. Obviously, past presidents might have been interested in cutting out Congress, but most followed limits on White House orders. Trump is finding more losses than any recent president, in part because he has issued a flood of hasty, broad and sometimes legally embarrassing orders that get paused, trimmed or cancelled forever in court. What we’re seeing is a methodical effort not only to cut out Congress and to browbeat the courts, but to change how presidents govern this country: less like a democracy, and more like an order-wielding king.
Ari Melber
Ari Melber, an Emmy Award-winning journalist, writer and attorney, is the host of “The Beat with Ari Melber” airing nightly at 6 p.m. ET on MSNBC. He also serves as MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent and an NBC News legal analyst. Before joining MSNBC, Melber practiced First Amendment law and served as a legislative aide in the U.S. Senate. He received a J.D. from Cornell Law School and is a member of the New York Bar.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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