America’s system of checks and balances will be severely tested by Trump’s presidency

Late last summer, as Washington DC sweltered in the heat, conservatives from across the US gathered for training sessions hosted by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). For some time, the little-known but well-funded think tank had been preparing potential staffers for their roles in a future Donald Trump administration. Over the course of the Washington event, veterans of the last Trump presidency described their experiences of being thwarted by the “Deep State” and discussed strategies to ensure the same thing didn’t happen again.
At the time, Democrats were focusing their fire on Project 2025, the 900-page strategy drawn up by another conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. That document’s extreme positions on abortion, LGBTQ rights and other issues became a political embarrassment for the Trump campaign, which effectively disowned its authors. But the more low-key AFPI, with its broadly similar roadmap for a total reworking of American government, has become central to the campaign’s plans for a return to power. Its chief executive, Brooke Rollins, is tipped for a White House job. Another AFPI figure, Linda McMahon, is co-chair of the Trump transition team.
With a huge amount of money and intellectual firepower already expended on ensuring that the 47th president (Donald Trump) is more effective than the 45th (also Donald Trump), the question remains: was it just the institutional guardrails (or, if you prefer, the Swamp) that held him back the first time? Or was he just a grifter who, despite his inflammatory anti-establishment rhetoric, ended up governing as a conventional low-tax, low-regulation Republican?
Eight years ago, Trump was laughably unprepared for power. This time will be different. The AFPI alone has drawn up 300 executive orders for the new president to sign. It proposes ending employment protections for federal staff, so they can be fired at will. Rooting out insufficiently loyal staff would not just make it easier to implement new policies on a range of issues from abortion to immigration and gun control. It could also mark the start of a Viktor Orban-style project of ending what the right sees as progressive control of the administrative state.
The US is not Hungary. Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, America’s founding fathers drafted a constitution for their small and imperfect union. That four-page document was informed by their own interpretation of the Roman republic’s collapse into tyranny. They devised a system of checks and balances between the federal executive, legislature and judiciary, with considerable power devolved to the states, to guard against that fate.
For almost a century now, the system they built has been running the greatest superpower the world has ever seen. That system is now in the hands of the demagogic leader of a movement imbued with partisan zeal, propelled by grievance and aware that its time in power may be short.
The American presidency has wide-ranging executive powers. Legislative deadlock in Congress has led successive incumbents to resort to governing by executive order. The problem is that such orders can be easily revoked by the next president. If an administration is intent on permanent change, it needs to pass laws.
That is why the trifecta of single-party power in the White House and in both houses of Congress matters. The three-seat Republican buffer in the Senate could also prove vital if one of the (increasingly rare) anti-Trump Republicans, such as Mitt Romney, decides to oppose a particular measure, as John McCain did when he scuppered Trump’s attempt to kill Obamacare during his last presidency.
With a supreme court majority sympathetic both to Republican policies and to a more expansive definition of presidential power, the new administration will have nearly all the tools it needs. It can still expect some pushback from economically powerful Democratic-controlled states such as New York and California. But, as Calvin Coolidge observed, the business of America is business, and it has been clear for some time that Wall Street and Silicon Valley have accommodated themselves to the prospect of a second Trump term.
Trump’s victory in 2016, despite losing the popular vote, helped fuel the so-called Resistance against his legitimacy. This week’s result was no landslide, but was still the first Republican popular majority in 20 years. That mandate will drive the new administration’s sense of mission and purpose. It is worth remembering that the Harris campaign enlisted a coalition that ran from Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney to argue that Trump was a threat to American foundational institutions. The electorate rejected that establishment consensus. The ideologues of the AFPI and the Heritage Foundation will take that as a charter to push forward with a suite of reactionary policies.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” the president-elect told ecstatic supporters on election night. “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”
Perhaps. As any contractor who has worked for the Trump Organisation will know, such promises should be taken with a generous pinch of salt. The unresolved contradictions of the Maga movement are bound to surface over the next four years. As a candidate, Trump has been adept at shape-shifting for different audiences. Many voters regarded him as a moderate during the 2016 election. He openly scoffed at Florida governor Ron De Santis’s anti-woke crusades during this year’s primaries and successfully distanced himself from hardline anti-abortion policies in the general election. The objectives of the right-wing think tanks include gutting social programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid that Trump has shown little appetite for touching. Such policies would be deeply unpopular with many of those who just voted for him.
Thursday’s appointment of Trump’s campaign manager Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff offered a first indication of what is to come. Wiles, a wily veteran believed to hold relatively moderate views, is hardly a tribune of the radical right. But each job announcement that follows will be parsed for what it means. Particular attention should be paid to who becomes attorney general and what that might mean for the justice department and the FBI. Those centuries-old checks and balances look set to be tested as they rarely have been before.