President Trump in just two weeks back in office has moved with astonishing speed and boundless ambition to overturn the existing political, economic, cultural and international order in an even more far-reaching way than many of his supporters or critics had imagined possible.
Mr. Trump has thrown the nation’s capital into turmoil by purging enemies at home, attacking allies abroad, shuttering one agency while targeting others, handing the tools of government to an unelected billionaire, ignoring multiple laws, trying to rewrite the Constitution and even flirting with staying in power beyond his two-term limit.
— Peter Baker, February 4, 2025
No living American has seen anything like this from a President of the United States. Nor has anyone in our lifetimes witnessed a Congress willingly abdicate its authority so completely — across the board — to a President. The Republican Party has swept away constitutional checks and balances.
In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second go-round in the White House, Republicans in Congress are willing to play the parts that Trump assigns them while rejecting the role that the authors of the Constitution prescribed.
The First Branch
Article I of the Constitution of the United States creates the Congress, one of three co-equal branches of government with shared powers. The founders sought to establish an effective government while preserving personal liberty. Understanding human nature, they recognized that ambitious men within any of the branches could overstep their authority and threaten our liberty — but that these encroachments could be kept in check by equally ambitious men within the other branches. This would guarantee that the constitutional framework created, with authority shared by the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, would remain in balance. Corruption and attempts to seize power at the expense of the other branches would be constrained.
As James Madison explained (referring to branches as ‘departments’) in the Federalist Papers, No. 51:
In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own…
. . .
It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices…. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others…. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The founding fathers’ ingenious design, inspired by a clear-eyed understanding of human nature, has worked well enough that the Constitution is still in place, with three functioning branches, after more than 235 years.
Skewed incentives
But this framework of checks and balances is falling short in 2025. Although the framers did not foresee the influence of political parties, for much of American history party politics did not unravel the effectiveness of the framers’ design. Presidents acquired extraordinary power over time, but Congress still retained enough independence to serve as a check on the executive. (Mostly, though not comprehensively.) But not now: 2025 is an outlier.
Today the Republican majority that controls both chambers of Congress is shrugging its shoulders as the executive branch encroaches on the legislative branch, while trampling on the Constitution and the rule of law along the way. In deference to their leader in the White House, Republicans have chosen to relinquish the authority and responsibility the Constitution has vested in Congress.
Advice and consent has become auto-consent. Congressional oversight of the executive branch is gone. Exacting retribution at home, threatening our allies, giving a billionaire the keys and codes to federal departments — every senseless whim or wish of our impulsive president gets a pass, along with the lawless pursuit of goals that have eluded the traditional GOP for decades.
The incentives have become skewed by a dominating chief executive who — with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down — can control the fortunes of the legislators in his party. Donald Trump is capable of crushing the personal ambitions of Republicans in the House and the Senate. He (with the assistance of primary voters) has purged the party of dissenters unwilling to accept lies and lawless conduct. Republicans understand their peril if they dare oppose him. Their obeisance to the chief executive prevails over their fidelity to the Constitution. To wit:
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., did acknowledge that an executive branch move to turn off a federal agency “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But he argued that former President Joe Biden took similar steps.
“It’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending,” Tillis said. “Nobody should bellyache about that.”
For ambitious members of the legislative branch, fear and a rational assessment of their vulnerability has changed the calculations that Madison counted on. Instead of preserving the constitutional framework and with it Americans’ liberty, the incentives in play push in the opposite direction.
Grasping for the win
As if Trump’s domination of the GOP weren’t incentive enough, a lawless Elon Musk unleashed by Trump is furiously shuttering federal agencies, shedding employees, and denying funding for the administrative state. In short, he is shrinking government, a longstanding goal of Republicans. That’s an additional incentive and another reason why there’s no bellyaching.
Moreover, as Jonathan Chait observes, this conflict features “an inherent partisan asymmetry” that makes things even sweeter for Republicans:
If Trump and Musk succeed in taking the power of the purse from Congress, they will effectively reset the rules of the game in favor of the right. Congress’s spending powers would be redefined as setting a ceiling on spending, but not a floor. A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.
Rigging the rules
Republicans have chafed at their failure to win elections with an unpopular agenda. So the GOP, powered by the anti-democratic and anti-Democratic animus of the Roberts’ Court, has resorted to voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering, and an unprecedented deluge of special interest money to win elections.
But even when they win, Republicans haven’t succeeded in shrinking the federal government, since cutting popular programs is unpopular. That’s even more aggravating, which is why fanatics on the right have demonized the Democratic Party, as in “The Flight 93 Election,” — a screed that seemed out of the conservative mainstream in 2016, but isn’t any longer.
Finally, rejecting democracy outright
David Frum warned a year into the first Trump term, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” The events of January 6 confirmed Frum’s view. A majority of House Republicans refused to accept Joe Biden’s victory, as did the rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier that day. An increasing number of Republicans have come to justify even violence.
By now the whole of the GOP has fallen in line with Trump. He can, unchecked by the legislative branch: act lawlessly and empower others to act lawlessly; incite violence and pardon those who employ violence in his name; surround himself with men and women unqualified for public service who are, however, loyal to him. (Partial list.)
What Madison and the framers did and didn’t foresee
Madison recognized that men were not angels. He didn’t expect that officials would inevitably act courageously, place principle before personal advantage, or put country over party partisan interest. On the contrary, he anticipated that ambitious men (and let’s add women, though he didn’t foresee this) — if left unchecked — would likely engage in corruption, greed, power grabs, and other self-serving schemes.
His solution, “Ambition must be made to counter ambition,” relied on ambitious individuals within one branch of government, jealously guarding the authority of that branch and fending off incursions from the ambitious individuals within the other two branches.
This constitutional design, however, is failing us. Donald Trump dominates his party more completely than any president in modern history. Republicans in the Senate and the House fear him and follow him because, if he chooses to do so, he can end their careers. So they dare not challenge him. Every incentive is in his favor and opposed to the constitutional authority of the legislative branch.
The framers were right to focus on personal ambition. The framework they established gave Congress “the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments,” but in 2025 the incentive structure has uncoupled personal ambition from a jealous defense of the legislative branch.
President Donald Trump’s allies, beginning with Elon Musk, are waging a campaign to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do its job on behalf of Americans. No Republican will stand in the way of this campaign of destruction. No Republican will push back against the erosion of congressional authority.
This authoritarian campaign and disregard of the Constitution will stop when the incentives change for Republicans or when Republicans lose their majority. Pushing for those changes is the task of the Democratic Party, its allies, and other opponents of the MAGA agenda.