Conservatives sound alarm as Trump realizes no one can stop him

President Donald Trump has realized in his second term that no one can stop him — and this demonstrates why we need to rein in the executive branch, at least according to one conservative think tank.

“On day 1 of his first term, Trump issued only a single executive order,” wrote Gene Healy, senior editor at the right-wing think tank the Cato Institute, in a Sunday editorial for Reason Magazine. “The Beltway freak-out over the new administration was largely about presidential style rather than policy substance. An NPR item—’Yes, All This Happened. Trump's First 2 Weeks As President’—captured the reigning zeitgeist. ‘All This’ included some pro forma hand-wringing about actual policies, like the travel ban, but the real focus was Trump's lack of decorum: Look at this guy with his ‘alternative facts’ about the crowd size at his inauguration! He made a travesty out of the National Prayer Breakfast!”

By contrast, Healy pointed out that in the second Trump administration “Trump came out of the gate with 26 executive orders. By the 100-day mark he'd issued 143—more than triple Biden's near-record-setting pace—while signing fewer bills into law than any first-year president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

He added, “Everything everywhere all at once—or ‘flood the zone with shit,’ as Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon once put it. All told, it was an unmistakable inflection point: the moment our long slide toward pen-and-phone governance took a dizzying lurch downward.”

The Cato alumnus drew special attention to Trump’s misuse of his presidential power to levy illegal tariffs.

“Trump recovered the presidential pen and issued a series of directives using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to hike duties on Mexico, Canada, and China, purportedly for failure to stem fentanyl trafficking, and then to impose new tariffs worldwide—declaring the longstanding U.S. trade deficit a ‘national emergency,’” Healy wrote. “In so doing, he converted the 50-year-old foreign-policy sanctions statute into his personal Oval Office ‘tariff button’—allowing him to launch trade wars from his desk as easily as ordering a Diet Coke.”

He also described how Trump “has forged new frontiers in presidential warmaking. With a September 2025 airstrike against a suspected cartel boat off the coast of Venezuela, he took the war on drugs from metaphor to reality. In January, Trump followed up by sending Delta Force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Then, in the early morning hours of February 28, Trump unleashed Operation Epic Fury—a huge, coordinated U.S.–Israeli air bombardment that hit more than 1,000 Iranian sites and killed key regime figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”

Ultimately Healy concluded that no president should “have this much power.” He is far from the first Cato Institute scholar to reach that conclusion.

Trump’s administration has collected “the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system,” the Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute reported in March, saying this occurred because of his various travel bans and other anti-immigrant policies.

“The State Department is actively instructing consular officers NOT to tell applicants they're banned, even as those applicants pay fees and attend interviews,” Kocher wrote. “The government is cashing those checks and then doing nothing. That's fraud not delay.”

Similarly Cato Institute vice president Scott Lincicome drew from a Financial Times report on Trump's gradual walking back of some of his economic policies to indicate that the president even knows he is failing.

"The people said trade officials in the Commerce Department and U.S. trade representatives believed the tariffs were hurting consumers by raising prices for goods such as pie tins and food and drink cans," the report argued, to which Lincicome added it was “good” Trump finally recognized this.