Over his first 100 days back in office, Donald Trump has presided over an America teetering on the brink of losing its liberal democratic form of government and standing in the world.
The past 14 weeks have demonstrated that we are effectively down to two branches of government. The White House seems keen on having a showdown with the federal judiciary on the hopes that it can get that down to one by defying judicial orders and daring the courts to stop them, all while the absent Republican Congress sits on the sidelines and twiddles its thumbs while Trump takes away its power of the purse, tramples on statutory directives and generally makes clear that he has no intention of abiding by our foundational separation of powers.
The president has taken to referring to his executive orders as “legislation,” appearing to at best misunderstand and at worst disregard the distinction between the exercise of his raw executive power and the laws set forth by Congress.
If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the American electorate voted for change, and change they’ve gotten. Trump and his cabal of ideologues, opportunists and oligarchs have gotten to work at dizzying speed dismantling the rule of law and the administrative state, neatly proving the axiom that it is much easier to destroy something than it is to build it.
A postwar global economic and political order in which the U.S. enjoyed broad influence and served as the default locale for global talent and capital, built carefully over eight decades of relative stability, diplomacy and prosperity, is coming crashing down that may not be recoverable as our allies come to distrust us and the dollar no longer seems so safe.
All of this has also demonstrated another unfortunate reality, which is that people don’t tend to really appreciate or acknowledge something until it’s gone. That will be the case with the federal government’s functions of all stripes — health research and monitoring, regulation of hazards in our air and water, operations of our public parks, even Social Security. There are many things that the general public has come to rely on behind the scenes, and which will only become more readily apparent as the population finds itself sicker, poorer, and with diminished rights.
Most Americans have a pretty knee-jerk reaction to the notion of a government snatching someone off the street for the offense of having engaged in politically disfavored speech, or sending people to a foreign gulag on secret evidence and without due process. These circumstances have quite literally now taken place in the United States, not as exaggeration or speculation but as real, publicly acknowledged and reported-on actions of the federal government.
That they’ve happened largely to immigrants first is only because immigrants are a more legally disfavored class than citizens, but you can be sure that the crackdown won’t stop here. Trump and his officials have already mused openly about sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador, and a Trump-appointed judge just this week declared that the administration improperly deported an infant U.S. citizen.
So, at this milestone mark in every presidency, Trump has ensured that his is a memorable one indeed, if largely because he’s trashing what generations of Americans built before him. For shame.
