Donald Trump has done more than perhaps any other president to seize power and concentrate it in the Executive Branch, and as a new piece from The i Paper, Americans will not be able to trust future presidents to undo this damage.
Jon Sopel is a veteran journalist who previously served as the North America editor for the BBC. Writing for The i Paper on Sunday, he argued that "Trump's scheming" might very well have altered the structure of power in the U.S. government "forever," and outlined his case for why Americans should not bet on even a future Democratic president reversing the damage.
"If the Democrats do well in the midterm elections – as they are forecast to do – that might change things a bit," Sopel wrote. "Some of the more egregious behaviour of Trump and those around him will probably be curtailed because of the investigative powers that congressional committees will now have. There will be more oversight, and an increasing sense that the President is a lame duck with his powers on the wane. Maybe, just maybe that will encourage Republicans to regain some moral backbone – but that is far from certain."
He added: "Yet the president and the presidency has never been more powerful. Academics call it the unitary executive theory. And which new president coming to the Oval Office is going to say, 'I think I ought to have less power?' Sure, a new Democrat president could rule in a much more traditional way, obeying the norms that went before Trump. But he won’t have to. He might just enjoy flexing his muscles in just the same way that the present incumbent has."
A new president, even one ideologically opposed to the MAGA agenda, is far from guaranteed to roll back Trump's excesses, with Sopel highlighting the potential for them to continue running U.S. foreign policy without input from Congress, continue treating the DOJ as their personal law firm and continue to keep Trump's historic tariffs in place.
Even if a Democrat inclined to roll back these things enters the White House in 2029, Sopel argued that "there are structural shifts that are much more long lasting" which Trump has also inflicted on the country.
"The most notable is the Supreme Court," Sopel wrote. "With its six-three conservative majority, it will continue to be a massive influence on all America’s hot-button issues: abortion, guns, voting rights. And a ruling it made in the [tail] end of the Biden administration on presidential immunity and power will be felt long after Trump leaves office. In effect, the Supreme Court ruled that in the conduct of his duties the president can claim widespread immunity from prosecution. And you can be sure there will be pre-emptive pardons issued to his family before he leaves office to shield them from investigation, just as Biden did – disreputably in my opinion – with his son, Hunter, before he left the White House."
He concluded: "America’s democracy has rarely been tested, twisted and warped in the ways it has across Trump’s two terms in office. On January 6, 2021, when the mob ran amok it was one man, the vice president, Mike Pence, refusing to do his boss’s bidding that saved the US from a full-blown constitutional crisis. Would you bet on that happening again?"
