If an American president ever… checks and balances that the founders have established is that it is law-breaking, oath-violating Donald Trump.
Yet those checks by Congress and the Supreme Court will hardly be a check once Trump is back in power. The former and future president shaped each of these institutions in his image.
He has already benefited. The Supreme Court, where Trump’s first-term appointees make up half of the six-member far-right supermajority, ruled in July that presidents are virtually immune from criminal prosecution for official actions. The court’s slow deliberations and then stunning decision resulted in the postponement of any federal trial for Trump’s alleged crimes in the first term after the 2024 election: a plot to overturn Joe Biden’s election and then with government secrets to Mar-a-Lago. .
Now that he’s going back to the White House, those things will be deleted. It remains to be seen whether Trump, as president, will use the license to commit misconduct that the court has given him. If the past is prologue, the odds are good. Even greater are the odds that the admissible court will rule in Trump’s favor when opponents’ challenges to his future presidential actions inevitably reach power.
But it is Congress where Trump will have real appeal — at least for the two years until the 2026 midterm elections.
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As at the start of his previous term, both the Senate and the House of Representatives are likely to fall under Republican control, albeit only to a limited extent, thanks to Trump’s assets. (The majority in the House of Representatives won’t be officially determined until later this week, but Republicans are favored.) Their bond with Trump is stronger than in 2017-2018. Republicans were deferential then; From January they will be submissive. The founders will be rolling in their graves at the bowing and scraping we’re about to see from the supposedly independent Congress.
Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2017 and 2018, broke with Trump in 2016 over the “grab them by the pussy” tapebut became accommodating enough when Trump was president. But contrast Ryan’s ambivalence with the fanaticism of current Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who will surely be re-elected leader of the Republicans when they meet this week. Dubbed MAGA Mike By endorsing right-wingers when he won the speakership last year, Johnson has since made repeated pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, campaigned with Trump and stood by his side like a bespectacled bobblehead at every opportunity.
Like Punchbowl news reported: “Now Trump gets a congressional leader who will support his agenda – for better or for worse.” Worse, I bet.
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During Ryan’s time, the upstart President Trump didn’t really have an agenda, or even one “concepts of a plan” aside from talking about building a wall, banning Muslims, and repealing Obamacare; he did not fully realize any of these goals. Give Ryan and other Republicans credit for the 2017 tax cut law, which counts as Trump’s unique first-term legislative achievement — if you can count a budget-busting giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and corporations as an achievement.
They’ll do it again next year. The House of Representatives will extend Trump’s tax cuts at a cost about $1 trillion per year with debt, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and add those breaks, including with the promises Trump made during his campaign: “Just plow through it,” as one Republican lobbyist said.
But this time, Trump has an extensive agenda that goes beyond just tax cuts: Project 2025put together by dozens of his most far-right first-term advisers his public blessingbut so unpopular that he disavowed it during the campaign. No surprise: that rejection was just one of many lies.
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“Now that the elections are over, I think we can finally say that Project 2025 is actually the agenda. Lol,” conservative podcaster Matt Walsh cynically tweeted last week. Whereupon Trump whisperer Steve Bannon, fresh out of prison for contempt of Congress, responded on his podcast: “Fantastic!”
Expect Trump to issue executive orders and seek legislation from Congress to do much of what Project 2025 says: blow up the civil service and restore a 19th-century loot system. Make the Department of Justice his vengeful law firm. End the federal role in education and waging culture wars. Give up on clean energy efforts, even though Trump’s promise could clash with the reality that Biden’s historic climate investments have brought good jobs, especially in Republican districts.) Support for Ukraine is all but doomed, just as Trump wishes.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky steps aside after a record career as party leader, leaving Senator John Thune of South Dakota or Senator John Cornyn of Texas as the leader of the new majority. They’ve all had disagreements with Trump, but neither is likely to challenge him in the future, especially now that the Senate will be counting more Trump toadies.
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Don’t expect much resistance in the Senate to Trump’s Cabinet nominees, other top posts and federal judges, as happened at times during his first term.
With Republicans likely to have a slightly larger majority in the Senate than in 2017-2018, relatively moderate Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska will not be the decisive naysayers they sometimes were before. Apparently even anti-vax conspirators and… brainworm airline Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not off limits as a Cabinet option: “I think the Senate will show great deference to a president who just won a stunning … landslide,” said Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. said when asked if Kennedy would have a role in the government.
Here’s a silver lining: Trump, a dictator wannabe with a pliant Congress, will almost certainly go too far. We know that’s a big part of his agenda unpopular. But now that Republicans in Washington have all the power, they can still impose this – and take the outcome into their own hands.
The settlement will come in two years. For nearly a century, midterm elections have almost always been against the party that holds the presidency. May 2026 be no different.
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
