https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/opinion/russell-vought-trump-second-term.html
Opinion
Who Is Russell Vought? Probably the Most Important Person in Trump 2.0.
Opinion
Who Is Russell Vought? Probably the Most Important Person in Trump 2.0.
Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
Listen to this article · 10:55 min
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by Damon Linker
January 23, 2025
New York Times
[Mr. Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter Notes From the Middleground.]
Among President Trump’s opening barrage of executive orders were directives to undo many of President Joe Biden’s actions and to make a sharp break from the way that administration handled immigration. But it is the bucket of orders related to the federal work force and administrative agencies — and his choice to serve as director of the Office of Management and Budget — that could have the greatest long-term impact on the shape of American democracy.
Whether that prospect inspires delight or dread will depend in large part on whether you view the evolution of the federal government over the past century with approval or disgust.
If Russell Vought is confirmed as Office of Management and Budget director, he will continue to enact and accelerate the radical, sweeping agenda he began to implement in that same position during the final two years of the first Trump administration.
From that record and his testimony before a Senate committee last week, as well as the executive orders released this week, it’s clear that he and the administration plan nothing less than a full-scale assault on the regulatory and spending powers of the executive branch, reversing trends that have been underway since the early 20th century.
A self-described Christian nationalist, Mr. Vought has elaborated on his views over the past four years, including in a contribution to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the new Republican administration and in a recent, lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson.
Conservatives have railed against the growth of the federal government that started in the Progressive Era, and especially the exponential expansion of what’s come to be called the administrative state — the numerous departments and regulatory agencies of the executive branch.
Mr. Vought has harshly criticized this progressive vision of the federal government’s role in American life, which has been driven by numerous developments in political culture. Congress passed laws that sometimes amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staff the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversee and run.
For Mr. Vought and like-minded conservatives, the results of these developments place the country in a “post-constitutional moment” in which we’ve grown accustomed to being ruled by an unelected and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government.
This “fourth branch” stands above and apart from the separation of powers, imposing its own agenda and defending its own distinct interests, and it is this — “the woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” as Mr. Vought has called it — that he has promised to dismantle. As he wrote in his contribution to Project 2025, “nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.”
In Mr. Vought’s view, presidents (aided by recent Supreme Court rulings that curtail administrative independence) have powerful tools at their disposal to accomplish such a revolution. He calls these tools “radical constitutionalism” — and they are articulated in the text of the Constitution but have grown dormant from disuse in recent decades.
Mr. Vought sees the Office of Management and Budget serving as “air-traffic control” for an executive branch in desperate need of oversight that can “ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.”
Mr. Vought sees four distinct areas of reform that would empower the president and tame the administrative state. The first involves an explicit rejection of the notion of bureaucratic independence. It has applied to dozens of agencies across the executive branch, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve banking system, as well as the Justice Department when it is treated as standing apart from and even above the president.
In Mr. Vought’s view, along with other conservatives who embrace the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea of extra-political independence is “not something that the Constitution understands.” The president heads the executive branch; these departments and agencies reside within it; that puts the president in charge of them, empowered by the voters who elected him. In short, he is their boss, and they must do as he wishes. The idea that they can operate independently of such oversight and accountability is incompatible with self-government.
The second area of reform Mr. Vought highlights involves the president reasserting the constitutional power to impound, or claw back, funds appropriated by Congress. Until 1974, presidents enjoyed broad (though not unlimited) impoundment powers based on the presumption that Congress sets a ceiling but not a floor for federal spending. But with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in response to Richard Nixon’s supposed abuse of the impoundment power, Congress acted to remove this power from the presidency.
In his confirmation hearing last week, Mr. Vought said that he considers the 1974 law unconstitutional and blames it for contributing in a decisive way to the ballooning federal deficits and national debt. During his first administration, Mr. Trump followed such reasoning to withhold funds Congress had appropriated for Ukraine, which led directly to his first impeachment. In the second Trump administration, expect similar acts of presidential defiance, and a likely appeal to the Supreme Court, over the impoundment power.
The third area of reform relates to a few of this week’s executive orders that apply to federal employees. They build on something Mr. Vought came close to carrying out in the first Trump term by an executive order commonly known as Schedule F: the elimination of Civil Service protections from potentially tens of thousands of executive branch employees. A new executive order redesignates many of these bureaucrats as “at will” employees who can be fired at the discretion of the president and then replaced by people firmly committed to the administration’s agenda. (That order is likely to be challenged in court). Precisely how many employees will be affected by this attempted redesignation is unclear. Mr. Vought himself attempted in November 2020 to redesignate as fireable employees 88 percent of O.M.B.’s staff of around 500.
Mr. Vought’s fourth, and vaguest, agenda item is to “take on the system” — by which he means the most secretive (or “deep state”) aspects of the executive branch. His comments to Mr. Carlson imply this could include ending F.B.I. background checks for senior government jobs, eliminating the “overclassification” of documents and ceasing to conceal from public scrutiny the size of intelligence agency budgets.
The idea is to dismantle power and the obscurity of its deployment, including the criminal investigation of people who challenge the system. That’s how Mr. Vought prefers to think of the legal troubles Mr. Trump and other members of his first administration have faced over the past four years — as retaliation on the part of the fourth branch of government for Mr. Trump’s efforts at curtailing or defying their power.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Vought’s approach to this supposed abuse of bureaucratic power is diametrically opposed to what Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., prefers. Whereas Mr. Patel promises to turn the powers of the deep state against Mr. Trump’s enemies on the grounds that turnabout is fair play, Mr. Vought hopes to eliminate such powers altogether.
This stance on the administrative state — to destroy it or to weaponize it — seems contradictory. In his contribution to Project 2025, Mr. Vought resolves this by suggesting that the answer might be both: The “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” by the president, he wrote, “will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial” to return power to the American people. Mr. Trump will need boldness “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and self-denial “to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments and states.”
The track record of Republican administrations stretching back to the well-publicized frustrations of the Reagan administration gives us ample reason to doubt the new administration’s ability to land in that sweet spot between boldness and self-denial. This history shows us that it’s much easier to enhance executive power and spending than to curtail them.
That’s unfortunate, because our federal government could use reform and updating, and the conservative critique of the administrative state isn’t entirely without merit. The sprawling bureaucracies of the executive branch are disliked by many and have, in recent years, stumbled (the pandemic offers the most obvious example), contributing to declining trust and confidence in our public institutions.
But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to tear down much of what we’ve built since the early 20th century.
Every modern nation — and certainly a superpower of nearly 350 million people — requires institutions of public administration that regulate aspects of our lives with intelligence and consistency over time. There is no reality in which we could get along without them. Pretending otherwise — or imagining government would work better if its powers were placed in the hands of those who are more narrowly partisan and less broadly knowledgeable than the civil servants we have today — is folly.
What we need are not plans to burn down the federal bureaucracy — or to transform the presidency into a quasi-authoritarian office empowered to micromanage regulatory policy across the entirety of the executive branch. We need smart ideas for incremental reforms that make the bureaucracy at once more nimble and more humble.
Mr. Vought’s alternative — implementing a sophisticated version of what Steve Bannon has called a battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state” — is liable to be far more destructive.
The act of demolition might be easier and more satisfying than the careful but often tedious work of repair. But the latter is the only way to enact lasting change for the better.
More on President Trump’s second term:
Opinion | Ezra Klein
The New Rules of the Trump Era
Jan. 22, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt
Jan. 20, 2025
Whether that prospect inspires delight or dread will depend in large part on whether you view the evolution of the federal government over the past century with approval or disgust.
If Russell Vought is confirmed as Office of Management and Budget director, he will continue to enact and accelerate the radical, sweeping agenda he began to implement in that same position during the final two years of the first Trump administration.
From that record and his testimony before a Senate committee last week, as well as the executive orders released this week, it’s clear that he and the administration plan nothing less than a full-scale assault on the regulatory and spending powers of the executive branch, reversing trends that have been underway since the early 20th century.
A self-described Christian nationalist, Mr. Vought has elaborated on his views over the past four years, including in a contribution to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the new Republican administration and in a recent, lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson.
Conservatives have railed against the growth of the federal government that started in the Progressive Era, and especially the exponential expansion of what’s come to be called the administrative state — the numerous departments and regulatory agencies of the executive branch.
Mr. Vought has harshly criticized this progressive vision of the federal government’s role in American life, which has been driven by numerous developments in political culture. Congress passed laws that sometimes amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staff the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversee and run.
For Mr. Vought and like-minded conservatives, the results of these developments place the country in a “post-constitutional moment” in which we’ve grown accustomed to being ruled by an unelected and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government.
This “fourth branch” stands above and apart from the separation of powers, imposing its own agenda and defending its own distinct interests, and it is this — “the woke and weaponized bureaucracy,” as Mr. Vought has called it — that he has promised to dismantle. As he wrote in his contribution to Project 2025, “nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.”
In Mr. Vought’s view, presidents (aided by recent Supreme Court rulings that curtail administrative independence) have powerful tools at their disposal to accomplish such a revolution. He calls these tools “radical constitutionalism” — and they are articulated in the text of the Constitution but have grown dormant from disuse in recent decades.
Mr. Vought sees the Office of Management and Budget serving as “air-traffic control” for an executive branch in desperate need of oversight that can “ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course.”
Mr. Vought sees four distinct areas of reform that would empower the president and tame the administrative state. The first involves an explicit rejection of the notion of bureaucratic independence. It has applied to dozens of agencies across the executive branch, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve banking system, as well as the Justice Department when it is treated as standing apart from and even above the president.
In Mr. Vought’s view, along with other conservatives who embrace the theory of the “unitary executive,” the idea of extra-political independence is “not something that the Constitution understands.” The president heads the executive branch; these departments and agencies reside within it; that puts the president in charge of them, empowered by the voters who elected him. In short, he is their boss, and they must do as he wishes. The idea that they can operate independently of such oversight and accountability is incompatible with self-government.
The second area of reform Mr. Vought highlights involves the president reasserting the constitutional power to impound, or claw back, funds appropriated by Congress. Until 1974, presidents enjoyed broad (though not unlimited) impoundment powers based on the presumption that Congress sets a ceiling but not a floor for federal spending. But with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, passed in response to Richard Nixon’s supposed abuse of the impoundment power, Congress acted to remove this power from the presidency.
In his confirmation hearing last week, Mr. Vought said that he considers the 1974 law unconstitutional and blames it for contributing in a decisive way to the ballooning federal deficits and national debt. During his first administration, Mr. Trump followed such reasoning to withhold funds Congress had appropriated for Ukraine, which led directly to his first impeachment. In the second Trump administration, expect similar acts of presidential defiance, and a likely appeal to the Supreme Court, over the impoundment power.
The third area of reform relates to a few of this week’s executive orders that apply to federal employees. They build on something Mr. Vought came close to carrying out in the first Trump term by an executive order commonly known as Schedule F: the elimination of Civil Service protections from potentially tens of thousands of executive branch employees. A new executive order redesignates many of these bureaucrats as “at will” employees who can be fired at the discretion of the president and then replaced by people firmly committed to the administration’s agenda. (That order is likely to be challenged in court). Precisely how many employees will be affected by this attempted redesignation is unclear. Mr. Vought himself attempted in November 2020 to redesignate as fireable employees 88 percent of O.M.B.’s staff of around 500.
Mr. Vought’s fourth, and vaguest, agenda item is to “take on the system” — by which he means the most secretive (or “deep state”) aspects of the executive branch. His comments to Mr. Carlson imply this could include ending F.B.I. background checks for senior government jobs, eliminating the “overclassification” of documents and ceasing to conceal from public scrutiny the size of intelligence agency budgets.
The idea is to dismantle power and the obscurity of its deployment, including the criminal investigation of people who challenge the system. That’s how Mr. Vought prefers to think of the legal troubles Mr. Trump and other members of his first administration have faced over the past four years — as retaliation on the part of the fourth branch of government for Mr. Trump’s efforts at curtailing or defying their power.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Vought’s approach to this supposed abuse of bureaucratic power is diametrically opposed to what Kash Patel, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the F.B.I., prefers. Whereas Mr. Patel promises to turn the powers of the deep state against Mr. Trump’s enemies on the grounds that turnabout is fair play, Mr. Vought hopes to eliminate such powers altogether.
This stance on the administrative state — to destroy it or to weaponize it — seems contradictory. In his contribution to Project 2025, Mr. Vought resolves this by suggesting that the answer might be both: The “aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch” by the president, he wrote, “will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial” to return power to the American people. Mr. Trump will need boldness “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and self-denial “to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments and states.”
The track record of Republican administrations stretching back to the well-publicized frustrations of the Reagan administration gives us ample reason to doubt the new administration’s ability to land in that sweet spot between boldness and self-denial. This history shows us that it’s much easier to enhance executive power and spending than to curtail them.
That’s unfortunate, because our federal government could use reform and updating, and the conservative critique of the administrative state isn’t entirely without merit. The sprawling bureaucracies of the executive branch are disliked by many and have, in recent years, stumbled (the pandemic offers the most obvious example), contributing to declining trust and confidence in our public institutions.
But that doesn’t mean it makes sense to tear down much of what we’ve built since the early 20th century.
Every modern nation — and certainly a superpower of nearly 350 million people — requires institutions of public administration that regulate aspects of our lives with intelligence and consistency over time. There is no reality in which we could get along without them. Pretending otherwise — or imagining government would work better if its powers were placed in the hands of those who are more narrowly partisan and less broadly knowledgeable than the civil servants we have today — is folly.
What we need are not plans to burn down the federal bureaucracy — or to transform the presidency into a quasi-authoritarian office empowered to micromanage regulatory policy across the entirety of the executive branch. We need smart ideas for incremental reforms that make the bureaucracy at once more nimble and more humble.
Mr. Vought’s alternative — implementing a sophisticated version of what Steve Bannon has called a battle for “deconstruction of the administrative state” — is liable to be far more destructive.
The act of demolition might be easier and more satisfying than the careful but often tedious work of repair. But the latter is the only way to enact lasting change for the better.
More on President Trump’s second term:
Opinion | Ezra Klein
The New Rules of the Trump Era
Jan. 22, 2025
Opinion | The Editorial Board
Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt
Jan. 20, 2025
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
‘People Will Be Shocked’: Trump Tests the Boundaries of the Presidency
Even more than in his first term, President Trump has mounted a fundamental challenge to the norms and expectations of what a president can and should do.
Listen to this article · 12:02 min
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by Peter Baker
January 26, 2025
New York Times
[Peter Baker is covering his sixth presidency and wrote a book with his wife about President Trump’s first term.]
Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
On his first full day back in the White House, President Trump reveled in his return to power and vowed to do what no president had ever done before. “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at,” he declared.
Of all the thousands of words that Mr. Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest. No matter that much of what he was doing he had promised on the campaign trail. He succeeded in shocking nonetheless.
Not so much by the ferocity of the policy shifts or ideological swings that invariably come with a party change in the White House, but through norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.
He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.
Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.
In doing so, Mr. Trump in effect declared that he was willing and even eager to push the boundaries of his authority, the resilience of American institutions, the strength of the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old system and the tolerance of some of his own allies. Even more than in his first term, he has mounted a fundamental challenge to expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed are meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.
“He’s using the tools of government to challenge the limits on the post-Watergate presidency,” said Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College. “Some of these efforts will be turned back by the courts, but the level of anticipatory obedience we’re seeing from business, universities and the media is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Not everything that shocked people in Mr. Trump’s first week necessarily violated presidential standards. Any time a president from one party takes over from one of the other, the shifts in policies can be head-snapping, and Mr. Trump has been particularly aggressive in reversing the country’s direction ideologically and politically.
It is broadly within a president’s power, for instance, to order mass deportations, to pull out of an international climate agreement or to fire holdover political appointees, however debatable the decisions might be. But as so often happens with Mr. Trump, he takes even those decisions one step further.
“The theme of this week was vengeance and retribution when all other presidents have used their inaugurations to heal wounds, bring people together and focus on the future,” said Lindsay M. Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of several books on the presidency. “That sounds like a norm, but it’s actually fundamental to the survival of the republic.”
Mr. Trump has never been too impressed with the argument that he should or should not do something because that is the way it has previously been done. As a government novice during his first term, he found himself flummoxed at times by how Washington worked and unable to exert his will to achieve major priorities.
He returns for this second term more prepared and more determined to crash through obstacles and any supposed “deep state” that gets in his way. Ideas that establishment advisers talked him out of the last time around, he is pursuing this time around with a new cast of more like-minded aides who share his willingness to disrupt the system.
He decided to rewrite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as it has been understood for more than a century to declare that it does not guarantee automatic citizenship to all children born in the United States. It took just three days for a federal judge to step in and temporarily block the move, which he called “a blatantly unconstitutional order,” but the issue will surely go to the Supreme Court.
While other presidents put their assets in a blind trust or otherwise distanced themselves from their personal business interests upon taking office to avoid even the whiff of a conflict of interest, Mr. Trump exploited his political celebrity to make enormous amounts of money in a scheme that could potentially be fueled by investors with a stake in federal government policies.
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Just three days before his inauguration, he released a crypto token called $Trump that together with other family tokens rose to around $10 billion in value on paper. The tokens create new opportunities for companies and other financial players inside and outside the United States to curry favor with the new administration.
Moreover, while other presidents had wealthy patrons who enjoyed access to the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has gone so far as to surround himself with billionaires on the inaugural platform and give Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a mandate to revamp the federal government that puts billions of dollars in his pocket through various contracts.
Elon Musk and other billionaires were invited to join the inaugural platform on Monday. Credit: Pool photo by Kenny Holston
And unlike any president in modern times, Mr. Trump has taken it upon himself to redraw the map of the world, both symbolically and otherwise. He has unilaterally declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, sought to pressure Canada into becoming the 51st state and held out the possible use of force to take over Greenland and seize the Panama Canal. Unlike mass deportation or new tariffs, none of these were major topics on the campaign trail.
“The imperialist policy was not on the ballot, and so it represents a challenge to democratic norms,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University. “Under no definition of the term could President Trump be said to have a mandate to take the Panama Canal treaty away from Panama or Greenland from Denmark.”
Mr. Naftali, who was founding director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and is currently writing a biography of John F. Kennedy, said Mr. Trump had single-handedly altered the terms of the national conversation in less than a week in office in a way that none of his predecessors did.
“Some of this is evanescent, but the vibe has changed,” Mr. Naftali said. “Our political and cultural vibe, to the extent that we have a national one, has changed in a matter of days. Yes, F.D.R. made people feel better about banks reasonably fast, but he didn’t alter the political culture in the first four days, and even after the first 100 days it took a while.”
Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to push the limits of presidential power, of course. Mr. Nixon comes to mind, among others. Indeed, some of Mr. Trump’s allies see a more immediate precedent for violating the conventions of the office in his own predecessor: President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who spoke strongly in favor of traditional standards even as he stretched his authority.
In his final days in office, Mr. Biden issued pre-emptive pardons to a half-dozen members of his own family and other targets of Mr. Trump’s wrath, a first-of-its-kind move he described as a means to prevent political prosecutions against them. Mr. Trump has in fact made such threats, but even some Democrats objected to the pardons, describing them as self-serving and a terrible precedent.
Mr. Biden also declared in his final days as president that the Equal Rights Amendment had met the requirements of ratification and therefore was, in his view, now the 28th Amendment of the Constitution. In doing so, he disregarded time limits established by Congress that were exceeded. Some analysts asked how it was different for Mr. Biden to declare his interpretation of the Constitution in this way than for Mr. Trump to try to impose his own interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
“Joe Biden vastly expanded the presidential parameters of everything from executive orders to border nonenforcement to Biden family pardons, all to implement policies and agendas that for the most part did not enjoy popular support,” said Victor Davis Hanson, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “The Case for Trump.” He added that Mr. Biden “thereby ironically empowered Trump to follow that latitude, but to enact agendas that did earn public approval.”
Not all of Mr. Trump’s assertions are popular. A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found widespread disapproval of the Jan. 6 pardons and not much support for eliminating birthright citizenship.
But Jonathan Madison, who studies democracy and governance at the R Street Institute, a free-market research organization in Washington, said that Mr. Biden “used executive power in unprecedented ways” after the election and that “Trump’s first week in office has reinforced this shift” in power.
“Notably,” Mr. Madison added, “members of Congress from both parties have shown little inclination to challenge executive overreach when it comes from their own side.”
Mr. Trump’s supporters near the Capitol on Inauguration Day. Credit: Graham Dickie/The New York Times
But Mr. Trump, so far, has proved far more effective at squelching opposition than Mr. Biden ever was. He dominates his own party as no president in generations. Through force of will and fear of reprisals, Mr. Trump has compelled Republicans to bend to his wishes repeatedly since his re-election, and even give support to cabinet nominees who would not have passed muster in the past, like Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.
Beyond his own party, Mr. Trump has forced technology billionaires, Wall Street tycoons, corporate executives and media owners who previously opposed him to show newfound deference and, in many cases, flood his political accounts with millions of dollars. The resistance that sprang up when he was first inaugurated eight years ago has faded, with many progressives and anti-Trump conservatives deflated or afraid of being targeted.
That leaves Mr. Trump as the single most important player in any decision he cares to involve himself in, whether it be who is the speaker of the House or what the fact-checking policies should be at Meta’s Facebook. Even the bureaucracy is to be tamed if he has his way, as he moves to convert nonpartisan civil servants into political appointees answerable to him.
“We’re not talking about drilling for oil, where obviously he’s going to pursue different policies; we’re not talking about supporting Ukraine,” said Michael J. Klarman, a professor of legal history at Harvard Law School. “These are all signs that he’s not going to have opposition from the Republican Party, he’s not going to have opposition from the civil service, he’s not going to have opposition from the media. Those are all part of the authoritarian playbook.”
Mr. Trump’s allies reject the notion that he has authoritarian aspirations. After all, he is still subject to the 22nd Amendment, which bars him from running again in four years. Yet just last week, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee, introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Mr. Trump to run for a third term.
It has no realistic chance of passing, but as it happens, the congressman’s campaign finances are under investigation by the F.B.I., a bureau overseen by the new president. “It would be my greatest honor to serve not once but twice,” Mr. Trump told an audience on Saturday. “Maybe three times.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
More about Peter Baker
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 26, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shattering the Bounds Of the Oval Office. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Republican Party, U.S. Supreme Court, Donald Trump, President Joe Biden
