A President Unbound: Trump’s second term and the erosion of constitutional constraint

Quadrant

On 5 February 2026, Donald Trump stood before the National Prayer Breakfast. The room was full of the faithful – pastors, politicians, and conservative leaders who had long believed that America’s renewal required a strong hand. Trump was asked about accusations that he had weaponised the Department of Justice against political opponents. His reply was disarmingly candid. “I don’t,” he said, “but wouldn’t I have a right to?”

The audience laughed. Some applauded.

Trump won more than 77 million votes in 2024. Some of those voters could not stomach another Democratic administration. Some believed Washington needed a genuine shake-up – that the federal bureaucracy had grown beyond democratic control, that activist judges had legislated from the bench, that Congress seemed incapable of restraining either spending or the administrative state it had created. Apart from a core of MAGA ideologues, most wanted reform. Not revolution. Not retribution. Reform.

A year ago, in these pages, I warned that Trump’s methods threatened the very constitutional order that conservatives claim to defend. Critics dismissed the warning as alarmist. American institutions, they insisted, would hold. Last night, in his State of the Union, the president called his first year “a turnaround for the ages.” The ages may yet have their say.

A republic, if you can keep it

Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what form of government the delegates had created. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” One year into Trump’s second term, Franklin’s answer is no longer historical trivia. And the evidence of the past twelve months is not reassuring.

On 7 January 2026, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Seventeen days later, another agent killed Alex Pretti, also 37, an intensive care nurse and also an American citizen. In both cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office claimed exclusive federal jurisdiction and blocked Minnesota state officials from obtaining evidence. Three thousand federal personnel had been deployed to the city. Trump publicly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act.

On 12 February, the administration withdrew. After two citizens’ deaths, $203 million in economic damage in a single month, and protests that grew to number 100,000, border czar Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge would end. But the withdrawal was not compelled by courts – it was compelled by political cost. Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz had found that federal agents violated nearly 100 court orders in Minnesota. Not one of those orders stopped the operation. What stopped it was the weight of civic resistance that no administration could sustain on the evening news. In a functioning constitutional republic, it should not take 100,000 people on the streets to enforce a court order.

The precise facts of the shootings will be litigated. But the institutional response that preceded it reveals a method. Over twelve months, the administration refined three techniques that explain how a constitutional republic arrives at this point. The first is normalisation – the conversion of the extraordinary into the routine. The second is the discovery that constitutional constraints are voluntary. The third is the weaponisation of law itself.

Normalisation

Trump’s crowning achievement has been converting the constitutionally outrageous into the politically routine. The pace is itself the strategy. More than 228 executive orders. Emergencies declared on the border, in the energy sector, in trade – all on his first day. Asylum rights suspended. Tariffs imposed without congressional approval. Courts struck down several of these actions. But the policies remained in effect during appeals, and new orders arrived before the old ones could be adjudicated. When everything is scandalous, nothing shocks. By the end of 2025, emergency governance had become ordinary governance – not because anyone voted for it, but because the sheer volume of executive action had overwhelmed the capacity of courts, Congress, and the press to respond.

The growth of ICE followed the same logic – and offers the most vivid illustration. A decade ago, the agency’s budget was less than $6 billion. By January 2025, it had crept to $10 billion. Then the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on 4 July 2025, handed ICE $75 billion on top of its base funding. Its projected spending for 2026 – roughly $30 billion – would rank it among the top fifteen military budgets on earth, exceeding that of Italy, Israel, and the Netherlands. It is now larger than all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined.

Personnel doubled in a single year – from 10,000 to 22,000, with a target of 30,000 that would exceed the entire FBI. Training was cut from thirteen weeks to eight to speed deployment. Nearly 33,000 employees from other federal agencies – including close to 40 per cent of Drug Enforcement Administration staff – were quietly redeployed to assist. FBI agents were pulled from counterterrorism to help with immigration raids.

No single step looked like the creation of a domestic army. But that is what normalisation produces: outcomes that would have been unthinkable at the outset, arrived at by increments that seemed unremarkable along the way. For a conservative movement that has spent decades warning about federal overreach – from Ruby Ridge to Waco to the militarisation of police – this should be the most alarming development of all. The federal leviathan the right always feared has arrived. It just wears a different badge. And it answers to one man.

The institutional bluff

Over twelve months, the administration discovered that the architecture of checks and balances rests, in the end, on voluntary compliance. The structure looks solid. It is not.

Federal judges across the country issued injunctions against administration actions. A Washington Post analysis found that in roughly 35 per cent of cases where courts ruled against the administration, agencies delayed, evaded, or simply failed to comply. In Minnesota, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz found systematic non-compliance – orders issued, acknowledged and ignored. Courts can issue orders, but lack the means to enforce them when the executive branch refuses to cooperate. The U.S. Marshals who would enforce contempt proceedings ultimately answer to the president. The bluff was called. The institution kept its form but lost its force.

The same discovery played out across every oversight mechanism the republic possesses. In January 2025, seventeen Inspectors General were fired in a single night – the “Friday Night Massacre.” A federal judge ruled the dismissals “obviously” violated the Inspector General Reform Act but declined to order reinstatement. The administration then defunded the coordinating body for all federal watchdogs.

Independent regulators met the same fate. A February 2025 executive order required the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to submit draft regulations and strategic plans to the White House for approval. “Liaisons” were installed inside them to ensure compliance. Congress had designed these bodies to operate at arm’s length from presidential politics. That arm was amputated.

Not every institution has capitulated. In perhaps the most significant institutional act of resistance since Trump’s inauguration, on 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping tariffs in a 6-3 ruling. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by two Trump appointees – Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the president to impose tariffs – a power the Constitution reserves to Congress. The decision was unambiguous. It was also the most significant judicial check on this administration to date.

This matters. Six justices, including three conservatives, reasserted a foundational constitutional principle. The separation of powers is not merely decorative.

But the president’s response was revealing. Within hours, Trump called Justices Gorsuch and Barrett “an embarrassment to their families” and “disloyal to our Constitution.” He then signed an executive order imposing new tariffs under a different statute – the Trade Act 1974. The legal pivot was unremarkable; any administration might seek alternative authorities. What was not unremarkable was a president treating a constitutional ruling as an act of betrayal.

This is the pattern that matters more than any single ruling. Courts, inspectors, regulators, congressional oversight – each turns out to depend on the same fragile assumption: that the president will respect its authority. When that assumption holds, as it did in the tariffs case, the system works. When it does not, as in Minneapolis, the architecture is revealed as decorative. And even when the system succeeds, the response is to attack the institution that delivered the check and treat constitutional rulings as provocations rather than constraints. The beams bear weight only when the executive chooses to let them.

The weaponisation of law

On her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi signed a memo telling Department of Justice lawyers that their job was to “zealously advance, protect and defend the policies of the United States as set by the president.” Any attorney who refused to sign a brief or appear in court on grounds of personal judgment would face discipline or termination. That directive is not a description of overreach. It is a theory of governance – one in which the rule of law becomes rule by law, the legal apparatus redirected rather than dismantled.

The consequences were dramatic. Some 9,000 DOJ employees – approximately eight per cent of the workforce – left the department in a single year, according to Justice Connection, a network of department alumni. Many were career prosecutors who had served under administrations of both parties. As Peter Keisler, a senior official in the George W. Bush Justice Department, observed, this was “completely unprecedented in both its scale and scope and underlying motivation.” What remained was not a leaner department. It was a more compliant one.

The department pursued investigations against a growing list of the president’s political opponents: former law-enforcement officials, elected Democrats, sitting members of Congress, even the Federal Reserve Chair. Federal judges threw out cases against James Comey and Letitia James for lack of evidence. Yet the investigations continued. Reuters reported that more than 470 people, organisations, and institutions were targeted for retribution in the administration’s first year – an average of more than one per day.

The system no longer distinguishes between law enforcement and political punishment. When the attorney general defines her role as serving the president rather than the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion becomes presidential discretion. The 470 targets are not a scandal. They are a system.

At the National Prayer Breakfast, he claimed the “right” to use the Justice Department for personal vengeance. The mask, such as it was, had dropped.

Taken individually, each of these actions might be explained, qualified, or defended. Taken together, they form a pattern that no amount of qualification can obscure. The method is not chaos. It is the systematic discovery and exploitation of every weakness in the constitutional order.

This is what I described last as “authoritarianism in all but duration.” The evidence of twelve months does not point in a single direction. The tariffs ruling proves that the constitutional order still has the capacity to say no. Minneapolis proves that when it does not, civic resistance can fill the gap. But the overall trajectory – the volume of constraints tested, the proportion overridden, the systematic response to every check – confirms that the institutions designed to prevent the concentration of power are being weakened faster than they can hold.

The payoff: personal rule for personal gain

Every fired inspector, every subordinated regulator, every ignored court order clears the ground for something. The enrichment record reveals what. When the guardrails fall, self-dealing follows – not as a side effect but as the point.

Consider the Qatar jet. In early 2025, the Qatari government offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 valued at $400 million – a “gift” to the United States, to be used as Air Force One during his term and then transferred to his presidential library foundation. The Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. No consent was sought. Attorney General Bondi declared the arrangement legal under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority. Some Republicans objected – Senator Rand Paul said he “wouldn’t take it”; even Ben Shapiro called it “skeezy” – but the gift proceeded. As I observed in a satirical column in these pages last May, the Qatar jet is less a diplomatic gesture than a masterclass in applied emolument theory.

Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures tell the same story. Days before the inauguration, the Trump family launched a meme coin, $TRUMP, which soared from $6.50 to $73 before crashing – netting the family a reported $148 million. Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial, a Trump-linked crypto venture, attracted half a billion dollars from an Emirati-backed firm linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the UAE’s national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund. The Wall Street Journal reported that $187 million went directly to Trump family entities. The same Tahnoon was simultaneously lobbying Washington for access to advanced AI chips.

This is not reform. This is the monetisation of captured institutions. And it is enabled by every constraint that has been removed – every Inspector General fired, every regulator subordinated, every congressional check bypassed.

Why this is authoritarian, not merely aggressive

The instinctive defence is that Trump is simply a more forceful president – that he is doing what others lacked the courage to do. This misses a fundamental distinction.

Reform strengthens institutions for successors. What Trump has done is the opposite. He has weakened every constraint that would bind a future president – of any party. A progressive president who wished to weaponise the DOJ, deploy troops to red states, or rule by executive decree would now find the path cleared and the precedents set.

The post-Watergate generation understood this. After Nixon’s abuses, both parties rebuilt the guardrails: independent counsels, Inspector General offices, strengthened congressional oversight, norms of prosecutorial independence. These reforms were not progressive or conservative. They were constitutional. They existed to ensure that no president – of any ideology – could place himself above the law.

Trump has dismantled them in a single year. Not completely. The tariffs ruling demonstrates that the demolition is not yet total. But the direction is unmistakable, and the pace is accelerating.

Conservatism without constitutional restraint ceases to be conservative. It becomes something else entirely: the exercise of power for its own sake, legitimised by popular mandate, unmoored from the principles it claims to serve.

The pattern, not the personality

It is tempting to make this about Trump – his character, his impulses, his evident enjoyment of dominance.

But what matters is not the personality but the structure. Trump has created a system of incentives that rewards loyalty over competence, punishes dissent, and concentrates authority in the executive. That system will outlast him. Precedents, once set, outlive their authors. The officials who learned to ignore court orders will not forget how. The prosecutors who brought political cases will carry that precedent forward. The agencies stripped of independence will not rebuild themselves overnight.

The pattern is familiar from other democracies that have travelled this path. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán captured the judiciary, packed regulatory bodies, and subordinated media – all while holding regular elections and maintaining the formal architecture of democracy. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used emergency powers to purge the civil service and politicise law enforcement – then made the emergency permanent. Neither leader abolished democracy. Both hollowed it out.

Trump is not Orbán or Erdoğan. America is not Hungary or Turkey. But the methods rhyme. Modern authoritarianism does not abolish constitutional forms. It preserves their shape while draining their force. Elections continue. Courts sit. Congress meets. Sometimes those institutions push back – and when they do, the response is to delegitimise the institution and find another route. That is not the system working. That is the system being trained to stop trying.

What is lost

Return to the National Prayer Breakfast. Return to the 77 million who voted for reform.

What did they get? Not a smaller federal state, but a larger and more aggressive one, answerable to one man. Not judges faithful to the Constitution, but a Justice Department that prosecutes the president’s enemies and drops investigations into his friends. Not the end of government overreach, but its perfection – executive power freed from every constraint that once made it tolerable. Not reform, but the monetisation of public office on a scale that would have embarrassed a Gilded Age machine boss.

And at the Prayer Breakfast, something uglier still. An audience of the faithful laughing as the president claimed his “right” to wield the Justice Department as an instrument of personal vengeance. When faith becomes a licence for power rather than a check upon it, both faith and freedom are diminished.

The conservative who voted for Trump wanted the house repaired. What they got was a president who stripped it for parts and sold the fixtures.

Franklin’s republic was designed to prevent exactly this: the concentration of power in a single pair of hands, unbound by law, unrestrained by institutions, answerable to no one. The question is no longer whether American institutions can survive Trump’s presidency. It is whether they can recover the force being drained from them – ruling by ruling, norm by norm, institution by institution – before the damage becomes permanent.

First published in Quadrant, 26 February 2026, as "Taking Liberties."