President Trump’s Aggressive Week

Briefing|President Trump’s Aggressive Week

On his first full day back in the White House, President Trump 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 Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest.

Not so much because of the ideological swings that come with a party change in the White House, but because of the norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.

Trump 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 app TikTok to operate despite national security concerns.

Not satisfied just to eliminate diversity initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitored departments for corruption and abuse, ignoring the law that requires him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.

Right out of the gate, Trump challenged the expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed were meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.

Presidential maximalism

It is broadly within a president’s power, say, to reverse the government’s approach to diversity programs, to pull out of an international climate agreement or to fire holdover political appointees. But as so often happens with Trump, he takes even those decisions one step further.