Trump’s illegitimate power grab brings US closer to dictatorship
Trump’s illegitimate power grab brings US closer to dictatorship.
By Robert Tait
in Washington/The Guardian
Experts warn president’s blatant violations of law could upend US government’s system of checks and balances.
The deceptively legalistic camouflage rendered the words almost banal – while still clearly communicating their ominous undercurrent.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” wrote Vice-President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale law school, on X as he waded into an escalating tug-of-war between his boss, Donald Trump, and the US federal courts.
Whatever it lacked in rhetorical flourish or polish, the post represented an unambiguous rejection of long-established constitutional norms while offering no supporting legal basis, some scholars say.
It also amounted to an implied statement of intent to ignore court rulings which, if enacted, would upend the US government’s intricate system of check and balances and lay the ground for dictatorship, they warn.
"The vice-president has absolutely no basis in the constitution and its historical development for making this claim,” said Bruce Ackerman, a law and political science professor at Yale University, Vance’s alma mater. “It repudiates the fundamental principle of checks and balances.”
Vance’s intervention was triggered by a series of court rulings that have slowed Trump’s pell-mell rush to grab the levers of powers across the US government since returning to the presidency on 20 January.
Trump, Ackerman says, has acted outside his legitimate power in arbitrarily shuttering institutions including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Labor Review Board and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, the latter two of which he has rendered inoperable by firing sitting Democratic members while not appointing replacements. He also summarily fired 17 inspectors general – who are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud and abuse – across the executive branch without giving Congress the statutory 30 days’ notice.
“It is not the case that the president can dominate the policy making of all institutions in the executive branch,” he said. “And in particular, the president can’t fire people or members of these commissions. Even less, can he through unilateral action, simply destroy two independent commissions.”
But the courts have issued a series of legal setbacks to Trump’s crusade to remould American government, as several judges have ruled that executive orders from the White House have ignored existing law or – in the case of an attempt to revoke birthright citizenship – violate the constitution.
Other rulings included an order halting and partially reversing the mass firing of thousands of staff at USAid – the now-shuttered foreign assistance agency – and another reversing the sudden freezing of trillions of dollars of government grants and loans.
Sunday’s social media post appeared particularly targeted at a ruling by the US district court judge Paul Engelmayer, who had issued a temporary injunction the previous day stopping Elon Musk’s self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing the treasury department’s payment system – a vast database that contains the personal details of millions of Americans and disburses trillions of dollars via an array of government programmes.
Underlying Vance’s response – though not stated explicitly – was the threat that Trump could simply ignore court rulings he did not like and apply his power as he sees fit.
Vance has made such arguments in the past, even extending the argument to hypothetical negative rulings by the US supreme court, where some of the current disputes are expected to end up – and where Trump has the advantage of six-to-three conservative-liberal majority.
Speaking on a podcast in 2021, when he was a candidate for the US Senate, Vance painted a scenario resembling the one widely thought to be in danger of coming true now in Washington by saying that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.
That was likely to end up in courtroom battles, he said – in which case Trump should defy adverse rulings: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Ackerman, the author of We the People, an acclaimed three-volume history of the constitution, derides that approach as “the advocacy of supreme presidential lawlessness”.
Some analysts have speculated that Trump’s attempts to seize unfettered control of the bureaucracy is based on the unitary executive theory of the presidency, which argues in favour of an expansive interpretation of presidential power.
" It is not the case that the president can dominate the policy making of all institutions in the executive branch."
Bruce Ackerman
The theory asserts that the president has sole authority over the executive branch of government and aims to centralise control in the White House. Based on the constitution’s “vesting clause”, which states that “the executive power shall be vested in [the] president”, it has been favoured by conservative justices on the US supreme court in recent decades and championed by rightwing thinktanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the main architect of the radical Project 2025 blueprint which charted many of Trump’s current attacks on the bureaucracy.
But Ackerman warns that Trump’s power grab – and Vance’s assertion of its unlimited contours – is suggestive of something more sinister.
“[This is] dictatorship,” he said. “This is not unitary executive. This is something very different. It’s a shattering assault … on the foundations of the constitution.”
It appears that Trump has ditched all pretence at respecting constraints in an approach that some warn is provoking a constitutional crisis and risking a descent into autocratic “Caesarism”.
David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, said Trump’s ambitions extended far beyond the imperial presidency that many believe reached its apotheosis under Richard Nixon before being curtailed by congressional legislation in the wake of Watergate.
“What Trump is trying to do is steal all the power to administrate government from Congress, and then use the judiciary to unravel the law,” he said. “Trump is challenging just about every constraint on his power and then hoping the courts will declare all the statutes that constrain him unconstitutional.”
This throws the ball back to the courts. “The question is really whether the courts are willing to stand up to constrain illegitimate power, or instead get rid of statutes and congressional control by saying what the president is doing is legitimate,” said Driesen. “The main thing is that he’s disobeying statutes right and left, usurping congressional power of the purse and that’s illegal. It’s just contrary to law and contrary to the constitution.”
Vance, for his part, is legitimising a dictatorial power grab with his assault on judges.
“[Vance’s post] is propaganda that serves the function of helping establish a dictatorship while avoiding taking responsibility for that,” he said. “Vance says courts should not control legitimate power, but … most of these powers [Trump is seizing] are not legitimate. By suggesting that the court should stay out, he’s suggesting that they should refrain from constraining the illegitimate power grab that’s involved in establishing a dictatorship.
“It’s a framing that serves to legitimise things that are not legitimate.”
By Robert Tait
in Washington/The Guardian
Experts warn president’s blatant violations of law could upend US government’s system of checks and balances.
The deceptively legalistic camouflage rendered the words almost banal – while still clearly communicating their ominous undercurrent.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” wrote Vice-President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale law school, on X as he waded into an escalating tug-of-war between his boss, Donald Trump, and the US federal courts.
Whatever it lacked in rhetorical flourish or polish, the post represented an unambiguous rejection of long-established constitutional norms while offering no supporting legal basis, some scholars say.
It also amounted to an implied statement of intent to ignore court rulings which, if enacted, would upend the US government’s intricate system of check and balances and lay the ground for dictatorship, they warn.
"The vice-president has absolutely no basis in the constitution and its historical development for making this claim,” said Bruce Ackerman, a law and political science professor at Yale University, Vance’s alma mater. “It repudiates the fundamental principle of checks and balances.”
Vance’s intervention was triggered by a series of court rulings that have slowed Trump’s pell-mell rush to grab the levers of powers across the US government since returning to the presidency on 20 January.
Trump, Ackerman says, has acted outside his legitimate power in arbitrarily shuttering institutions including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Labor Review Board and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, the latter two of which he has rendered inoperable by firing sitting Democratic members while not appointing replacements. He also summarily fired 17 inspectors general – who are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud and abuse – across the executive branch without giving Congress the statutory 30 days’ notice.
“It is not the case that the president can dominate the policy making of all institutions in the executive branch,” he said. “And in particular, the president can’t fire people or members of these commissions. Even less, can he through unilateral action, simply destroy two independent commissions.”
But the courts have issued a series of legal setbacks to Trump’s crusade to remould American government, as several judges have ruled that executive orders from the White House have ignored existing law or – in the case of an attempt to revoke birthright citizenship – violate the constitution.
Other rulings included an order halting and partially reversing the mass firing of thousands of staff at USAid – the now-shuttered foreign assistance agency – and another reversing the sudden freezing of trillions of dollars of government grants and loans.
Sunday’s social media post appeared particularly targeted at a ruling by the US district court judge Paul Engelmayer, who had issued a temporary injunction the previous day stopping Elon Musk’s self-styled “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing the treasury department’s payment system – a vast database that contains the personal details of millions of Americans and disburses trillions of dollars via an array of government programmes.
Underlying Vance’s response – though not stated explicitly – was the threat that Trump could simply ignore court rulings he did not like and apply his power as he sees fit.
Vance has made such arguments in the past, even extending the argument to hypothetical negative rulings by the US supreme court, where some of the current disputes are expected to end up – and where Trump has the advantage of six-to-three conservative-liberal majority.
Speaking on a podcast in 2021, when he was a candidate for the US Senate, Vance painted a scenario resembling the one widely thought to be in danger of coming true now in Washington by saying that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.
That was likely to end up in courtroom battles, he said – in which case Trump should defy adverse rulings: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Ackerman, the author of We the People, an acclaimed three-volume history of the constitution, derides that approach as “the advocacy of supreme presidential lawlessness”.
Some analysts have speculated that Trump’s attempts to seize unfettered control of the bureaucracy is based on the unitary executive theory of the presidency, which argues in favour of an expansive interpretation of presidential power.
" It is not the case that the president can dominate the policy making of all institutions in the executive branch."
Bruce Ackerman
The theory asserts that the president has sole authority over the executive branch of government and aims to centralise control in the White House. Based on the constitution’s “vesting clause”, which states that “the executive power shall be vested in [the] president”, it has been favoured by conservative justices on the US supreme court in recent decades and championed by rightwing thinktanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the main architect of the radical Project 2025 blueprint which charted many of Trump’s current attacks on the bureaucracy.
But Ackerman warns that Trump’s power grab – and Vance’s assertion of its unlimited contours – is suggestive of something more sinister.
“[This is] dictatorship,” he said. “This is not unitary executive. This is something very different. It’s a shattering assault … on the foundations of the constitution.”
It appears that Trump has ditched all pretence at respecting constraints in an approach that some warn is provoking a constitutional crisis and risking a descent into autocratic “Caesarism”.
David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, said Trump’s ambitions extended far beyond the imperial presidency that many believe reached its apotheosis under Richard Nixon before being curtailed by congressional legislation in the wake of Watergate.
“What Trump is trying to do is steal all the power to administrate government from Congress, and then use the judiciary to unravel the law,” he said. “Trump is challenging just about every constraint on his power and then hoping the courts will declare all the statutes that constrain him unconstitutional.”
This throws the ball back to the courts. “The question is really whether the courts are willing to stand up to constrain illegitimate power, or instead get rid of statutes and congressional control by saying what the president is doing is legitimate,” said Driesen. “The main thing is that he’s disobeying statutes right and left, usurping congressional power of the purse and that’s illegal. It’s just contrary to law and contrary to the constitution.”
Vance, for his part, is legitimising a dictatorial power grab with his assault on judges.
“[Vance’s post] is propaganda that serves the function of helping establish a dictatorship while avoiding taking responsibility for that,” he said. “Vance says courts should not control legitimate power, but … most of these powers [Trump is seizing] are not legitimate. By suggesting that the court should stay out, he’s suggesting that they should refrain from constraining the illegitimate power grab that’s involved in establishing a dictatorship.
“It’s a framing that serves to legitimise things that are not legitimate.”
