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After 100 days, Trump’s presidency feels like a vengeful monarchy
The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have been unlike those of any previous president. Many have initiated huge, immediate changes of tone and policy — think of the shift from Carter to Reagan, or from Eisenhower to Kennedy. Many have had ambitious agendas and seized the initiative right away. Change is the lifeblood of democracy; shaking up the government is a healthy thing. A new team can look at things afresh.
But this one is different. It is less a new administration than what appears to be a new regime. And it has some obvious features. “It will be said that we don’t propose to establish kings. I know it,” Benjamin Franklin said when he argued against a one-man presidency in crafting the constitution. “But there is a natural inclination in mankind to kingly government … I am apprehensive therefore, perhaps too apprehensive, that the government of these states may in future times end in a monarchy.”
And that, it seems to me, is where we are. An elected monarchy, to be sure, but a monarchy nonetheless. The trappings of a republic remain, as in ancient Rome, but they are increasingly façades for the truth. One person controls everything and, so far, almost nothing is constraining him.
Look at the Congress. It currently has all the relevance of Putin’s Duma. In three months, it has passed just five laws, and only one of any substance (enabling the government to deport an illegal alien if merely charged with, rather than convicted of, a crime). The Senate waved through all of Trump’s nominees, including Robert Kennedy Jr, the 21st-century version of Caligula’s horse.
Compare that with his 130 executive orders — a rate of 520 a year, if he keeps this up. Since JFK, no president has racked up more than an average of 80 a year. But Trump rules by edict, and has no other way of operating. Executive orders differ from laws in that they are issued by the president and have the binding force of law but don’t need to be approved by Congress. Many of these edicts are, naturally, unconstitutional. Many have been larded up, unlike any previous president’s, with sneering rhetoric more usually seen on X.
He has used these executive orders to target the people and institutions of civil society that represent social restraints on presidential power. He has ordered his Justice Department to launch investigations — with no specific charges — of an honest election official, Chris Krebs, because he reported the 2020 election results truthfully, and a former Trump staffer who wrote an anonymous but critical op-ed of the president during his first term.
Trump has threatened that law firms that have represented his opponents will get no government work if they do not agree to give his administration pro bono legal services — and some of the biggest and most government-dependent have bent the knee. On Friday, his FBI even arrested a sitting judge, accusing her of helping an illegal immigrant defendant temporarily avoid capture in her courtroom, where he was being tried for domestic violence. Her crime was ushering him out of the wrong door, briefly making it harder for the FBI to arrest him. A public arrest of a judge dramatically upped the ante against the judiciary.
Trump has also used executive orders to target media companies, newspapers and any outlet that criticises him. Just last week, the longtime producer of Sixty Minutes, a hugely popular and independent television documentary, quit because Trump pressured his boss to stop hostile coverage.
And the major universities are under siege. Some disciplining is well deserved: making federal funds dependent on ending DEI in admissions hiring is a good thing. But the content of what they teach and who they can hire? The scale of Trump’s demands of Harvard amount to the university submitting to government control, and no self-respecting university can agree to that. So Trump will just cut hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research as punishment.
And alongside the executive orders, he has done what every aspiring autocrat does: he has already announced eight national “emergencies”, which grant presidents exceptional power. Trade policy and tariffs, for example, are assigned to the Senate under the Constitution, with the president acting only as an intermediary with foreign countries. So Trump declared a national emergency — citing the trade deficit, even though it is scarcely different now than in his first term.
To expedite mass deportations, Trump invented another emergency — an alleged invasion by Venezuelans — to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It has been used only three times: during the British invasion in 1812 and the two world wars.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” tweeted Trump a month into this authoritarian spree. Sit down and absorb that for a minute: a sitting US president echoing Mussolini and Franco. And so, just last week, he insisted he did not need to follow due process when it came to illegal immigrants. He refuses to end a collaboration with the dictator of El Salvador in which Trump gets to grab anyone alleged to be a criminal off the street and send them to a foreign jail from which there is no return.
Look, I am an immigration hawk; I support mass deportation of the millions recklessly let into the country by Joe Biden through largely fraudulent claims of asylum. I love what Trump has done with the southern border. If Trump wanted to triple the budget for immigration judges and detention centres, I’d back it. And so would most Democrats. But he’d rather tear up the constitution and grandstand instead.
And this is not a function of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as so many cheaply claim. Here is the Reagan-nominated appellate judge Harvie Wilkinson, a conservative legend, in a ruling begging Trump to step back from the brink:
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order … This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Freedom of speech is also being targeted. Many Gaza protests on American campuses last year were appalling spectacles that went way beyond free-speech rights. If Trump wanted to ensure that those foreign students who had committed crimes such as trespassing or vandalism in those demonstrations were deported, fair enough. But of course he couldn’t restrict himself to that and dredged up a 1952 law from the McCarthy era.
That law allows the secretary of state to deport anyone they deem troublesome for the conduct of foreign policy. It was passed originally to target Holocaust-surviving Jewish immigrants who were suspected of being, but couldn’t be proven to be, communists. Now it applies to all foreign students, or even tourists, whose views are deemed, in a lovely historical irony, to be anti-Israel. So the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has set up an AI program to monitor students’ online writing, social media and academic work, searching for anti-Israel sentiment. If they find it, you may find yourself bundled into a car by masked men, as one young student was, for the crime of writing an op-ed.
This, remember, was supposed to be a conservative administration, ending woke censorship, the administration whose vice-president went to Europe to lecture it about censoring social media. In reality, JD Vance came home and helped set up a whole new social media surveillance system.
In some ways, I think, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally dressed foreign leaders.
The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept Ukraine free from total Russian domination. The second was with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.
So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it?
Just this week, Trump publicly declared that Zelensky “can have peace or he can fight for another three years and lose the whole country”. That was after he was overheard encouraging Bukele to build more gulags so Trump could send “homegrowns” — that is, US citizens — there. It is unimaginable that any other US president would share that moral compass. Or any decent human being, for that matter.
There is a cynicism to this, a very un-American darkness, and it makes this moment a menacing one to live through. The randomness and impulsivity of Trump — at home and abroad — unsettles the expectation of normality in a country and starts communicating fear of what might happen next, and what he might do to you. I just cancelled a trip back to Britain because, even as a naturalised citizen, and a fierce Trump critic, I just don’t know what could happen if I were placed in the hands of Trump’s immigration officers. All bets are now off.
“We are all afraid,” the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, also a Trump sceptic, said this month. “I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” The idea that a president is making a US senator physically afraid is not something we should pretend is not happening. It is.
And here is Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, describing the tactics of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and his own enforcers towards career civil servants: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want them to be put in trauma.” He said this in a public speech.
Doge’s work, we discover, will not mean any net savings — because of a cool new trillion dollars promised to the Pentagon. The goal seems to be to gut consumer and environmental protections, turn the Justice Department into a vehicle for retribution and end all foreign aid as callously and abruptly as possible … before the courts intervene. But by then, the damage will be permanent. It’s so hard to build institutions — and so easy to break things.
And that’s the trouble with one-man rule, as Benjamin Franklin saw up close in his time in London and Paris. It’s prone to inconstancy and incompetence, whims and disasters. Kings are flattered, get no tough love, pursue policies that backfire, and then double down to save face. It’s the kind of thing that can lead to, well, losing the American colonies in the first place. And King Donald makes George III look smart.
Which is now the main hope. Maybe if the constitution can’t stop him, economic and foreign policy disaster will. After all, every ally has been alienated; Nato will never be the same, neither will the bond market. Stagflation has replaced growth in the forecasts. US stocks are on course for their worst April since 1932; inflation is rising again. The dollar is continuing to fall. Commercial shipping has collapsed. Store shelves may start thinning out soon.
And the polls are beginning to reflect this: more than 80 per cent oppose Trump defying the Supreme Court; he is now slightly underwater on his strongest issue, immigration. Approval of his economic policies is at an all-time low, at 37 per cent. A small cadre of Americans — the online fanatics — will back Trump regardless. But many less ideological Trump voters are getting queasy.
Trump is a genuine expression of far-right populism in America, and reflective of one resilient, dark strain in the American psyche. But his contempt for the rule of law, his rank incompetence, his inconstancy and insatiable rage are broadly alien to this country’s generous nature, and if he is suddenly robbed of his aura of economic competence, he may find he has massively overplayed his hand.
When leaving Independence Hall in 1787, after drafting the US constitution, Franklin was approached by an old lady, who asked, the story goes: “Well, doctor, what is it? Do we have a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we’ll soon find out if we can.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/after-100-days-trumps-presidency-feels-like-a-vengeful-monarchy-69r5hqj89
The first 100 days of the second Trump administration have been unlike those of any previous president. Many have initiated huge, immediate changes of tone and policy — think of the shift from Carter to Reagan, or from Eisenhower to Kennedy. Many have had ambitious agendas and seized the initiative right away. Change is the lifeblood of democracy; shaking up the government is a healthy thing. A new team can look at things afresh.
And that, it seems to me, is where we are. An elected monarchy, to be sure, but a monarchy nonetheless. The trappings of a republic remain, as in ancient Rome, but they are increasingly façades for the truth. One person controls everything and, so far, almost nothing is constraining him.
Look at the Congress. It currently has all the relevance of Putin’s Duma. In three months, it has passed just five laws, and only one of any substance (enabling the government to deport an illegal alien if merely charged with, rather than convicted of, a crime). The Senate waved through all of Trump’s nominees, including Robert Kennedy Jr, the 21st-century version of Caligula’s horse.
Compare that with his 130 executive orders — a rate of 520 a year, if he keeps this up. Since JFK, no president has racked up more than an average of 80 a year. But Trump rules by edict, and has no other way of operating. Executive orders differ from laws in that they are issued by the president and have the binding force of law but don’t need to be approved by Congress. Many of these edicts are, naturally, unconstitutional. Many have been larded up, unlike any previous president’s, with sneering rhetoric more usually seen on X.
He has used these executive orders to target the people and institutions of civil society that represent social restraints on presidential power. He has ordered his Justice Department to launch investigations — with no specific charges — of an honest election official, Chris Krebs, because he reported the 2020 election results truthfully, and a former Trump staffer who wrote an anonymous but critical op-ed of the president during his first term.
Trump has threatened that law firms that have represented his opponents will get no government work if they do not agree to give his administration pro bono legal services — and some of the biggest and most government-dependent have bent the knee. On Friday, his FBI even arrested a sitting judge, accusing her of helping an illegal immigrant defendant temporarily avoid capture in her courtroom, where he was being tried for domestic violence. Her crime was ushering him out of the wrong door, briefly making it harder for the FBI to arrest him. A public arrest of a judge dramatically upped the ante against the judiciary.
Trump has also used executive orders to target media companies, newspapers and any outlet that criticises him. Just last week, the longtime producer of Sixty Minutes, a hugely popular and independent television documentary, quit because Trump pressured his boss to stop hostile coverage.
And the major universities are under siege. Some disciplining is well deserved: making federal funds dependent on ending DEI in admissions hiring is a good thing. But the content of what they teach and who they can hire? The scale of Trump’s demands of Harvard amount to the university submitting to government control, and no self-respecting university can agree to that. So Trump will just cut hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research as punishment.
And alongside the executive orders, he has done what every aspiring autocrat does: he has already announced eight national “emergencies”, which grant presidents exceptional power. Trade policy and tariffs, for example, are assigned to the Senate under the Constitution, with the president acting only as an intermediary with foreign countries. So Trump declared a national emergency — citing the trade deficit, even though it is scarcely different now than in his first term.
To expedite mass deportations, Trump invented another emergency — an alleged invasion by Venezuelans — to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It has been used only three times: during the British invasion in 1812 and the two world wars.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” tweeted Trump a month into this authoritarian spree. Sit down and absorb that for a minute: a sitting US president echoing Mussolini and Franco. And so, just last week, he insisted he did not need to follow due process when it came to illegal immigrants. He refuses to end a collaboration with the dictator of El Salvador in which Trump gets to grab anyone alleged to be a criminal off the street and send them to a foreign jail from which there is no return.
Look, I am an immigration hawk; I support mass deportation of the millions recklessly let into the country by Joe Biden through largely fraudulent claims of asylum. I love what Trump has done with the southern border. If Trump wanted to triple the budget for immigration judges and detention centres, I’d back it. And so would most Democrats. But he’d rather tear up the constitution and grandstand instead.
And this is not a function of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as so many cheaply claim. Here is the Reagan-nominated appellate judge Harvie Wilkinson, a conservative legend, in a ruling begging Trump to step back from the brink:
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order … This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Freedom of speech is also being targeted. Many Gaza protests on American campuses last year were appalling spectacles that went way beyond free-speech rights. If Trump wanted to ensure that those foreign students who had committed crimes such as trespassing or vandalism in those demonstrations were deported, fair enough. But of course he couldn’t restrict himself to that and dredged up a 1952 law from the McCarthy era.
That law allows the secretary of state to deport anyone they deem troublesome for the conduct of foreign policy. It was passed originally to target Holocaust-surviving Jewish immigrants who were suspected of being, but couldn’t be proven to be, communists. Now it applies to all foreign students, or even tourists, whose views are deemed, in a lovely historical irony, to be anti-Israel. So the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has set up an AI program to monitor students’ online writing, social media and academic work, searching for anti-Israel sentiment. If they find it, you may find yourself bundled into a car by masked men, as one young student was, for the crime of writing an op-ed.
This, remember, was supposed to be a conservative administration, ending woke censorship, the administration whose vice-president went to Europe to lecture it about censoring social media. In reality, JD Vance came home and helped set up a whole new social media surveillance system.
In some ways, I think, the core character of the Trump administration can be seen in two Oval Office press conferences with two young, informally dressed foreign leaders.
The first was with Volodymyr Zelensky, president of a country invaded and now partly occupied by Russia, who has courageously kept Ukraine free from total Russian domination. The second was with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, a man who governs in a permanent emergency, has seized 83,000 people with no due process and put them in brutal gulags, strong-armed his Supreme Court to gain an unconstitutional second term, and is one of the worst human rights violators in Latin America.
So it’s obvious which one Trump and Vance prefer, isn’t it?
Just this week, Trump publicly declared that Zelensky “can have peace or he can fight for another three years and lose the whole country”. That was after he was overheard encouraging Bukele to build more gulags so Trump could send “homegrowns” — that is, US citizens — there. It is unimaginable that any other US president would share that moral compass. Or any decent human being, for that matter.
There is a cynicism to this, a very un-American darkness, and it makes this moment a menacing one to live through. The randomness and impulsivity of Trump — at home and abroad — unsettles the expectation of normality in a country and starts communicating fear of what might happen next, and what he might do to you. I just cancelled a trip back to Britain because, even as a naturalised citizen, and a fierce Trump critic, I just don’t know what could happen if I were placed in the hands of Trump’s immigration officers. All bets are now off.
“We are all afraid,” the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, also a Trump sceptic, said this month. “I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” The idea that a president is making a US senator physically afraid is not something we should pretend is not happening. It is.
And here is Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, describing the tactics of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and his own enforcers towards career civil servants: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want them to be put in trauma.” He said this in a public speech.
Doge’s work, we discover, will not mean any net savings — because of a cool new trillion dollars promised to the Pentagon. The goal seems to be to gut consumer and environmental protections, turn the Justice Department into a vehicle for retribution and end all foreign aid as callously and abruptly as possible … before the courts intervene. But by then, the damage will be permanent. It’s so hard to build institutions — and so easy to break things.
And that’s the trouble with one-man rule, as Benjamin Franklin saw up close in his time in London and Paris. It’s prone to inconstancy and incompetence, whims and disasters. Kings are flattered, get no tough love, pursue policies that backfire, and then double down to save face. It’s the kind of thing that can lead to, well, losing the American colonies in the first place. And King Donald makes George III look smart.
Which is now the main hope. Maybe if the constitution can’t stop him, economic and foreign policy disaster will. After all, every ally has been alienated; Nato will never be the same, neither will the bond market. Stagflation has replaced growth in the forecasts. US stocks are on course for their worst April since 1932; inflation is rising again. The dollar is continuing to fall. Commercial shipping has collapsed. Store shelves may start thinning out soon.
And the polls are beginning to reflect this: more than 80 per cent oppose Trump defying the Supreme Court; he is now slightly underwater on his strongest issue, immigration. Approval of his economic policies is at an all-time low, at 37 per cent. A small cadre of Americans — the online fanatics — will back Trump regardless. But many less ideological Trump voters are getting queasy.
Trump is a genuine expression of far-right populism in America, and reflective of one resilient, dark strain in the American psyche. But his contempt for the rule of law, his rank incompetence, his inconstancy and insatiable rage are broadly alien to this country’s generous nature, and if he is suddenly robbed of his aura of economic competence, he may find he has massively overplayed his hand.
When leaving Independence Hall in 1787, after drafting the US constitution, Franklin was approached by an old lady, who asked, the story goes: “Well, doctor, what is it? Do we have a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we’ll soon find out if we can.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/after-100-days-trumps-presidency-feels-like-a-vengeful-monarchy-69r5hqj89