This Is What A War On Democracy Looks Like

This article is part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

To understand the dangers of Donald Trump’s second term, pay attention to the way that it is already different from his first.

The early weeks of Trump’s presidency back in 2017 felt like a jolt, but mainly because his bombastic, unpredictable public appearances were like nothing Washington had seen before. Substantively it unfolded in a relatively typical way, with a combination of executive action and planning for legislation he hoped to pass. On any given day, Trump was as likely to be appearing alongside congressional leaders as he was to be signing an order in the Oval Office.

This time around, congressional action seems to be an afterthought, except insofar as Trump is trying to get the Senate to confirm his nominees. The story of his second administration so far has been the furious flurry of executive orders ― some meaningless but some already transforming what the government does (by freezing large swaths of international aid, for example) or the way the government operates (like wiping out diversity, equity and inclusion efforts).

One reason for the shift is a change in political reality. At the start of 2017, Trump had a 47-seat Republican majority in the House. Now that margin is three measly seats.

Holding that group together on legislation will be difficult when a large, united block of the caucus keeps demanding radical changes like a national abortion ban or repealing parts of Obamacare that would be unacceptable to members from more contested districts. Anything that gets through the process is going to require months of ugly negotiation and tons of compromised policy, all of it leaving deep political scars.

Of course, this is not unusual for a presidency in its second term. On the contrary, focusing on executive action rather than legislative has more or less become the norm when second-term presidents see their majorities shrink or disappear, as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all did.

By giving up on grand designs for legislation, these presidents were giving up on some of their substantive aspirations too. That’s because big, lasting changes in policy have always required changing the actual language of federal statutes and the actual dollars going into programs, two things only Congress can do. Almost by definition, executive action is something the next administration can reverse or at least substantially modify, with the same stroke of the presidential pen.

These past presidents understood that reality, and however reluctantly, they accepted it.

Trump evidently hasn’t.

The Grab For Power

If that wasn’t obvious before this week, it was on Monday evening, when Trump issued his now-infamous order freezing spending on all grant and assistance programs.

The directive sparked a backlash as soon as people realized the freeze would include programs like Medicaid, and eventually provoked not one but two federal judges to block the order. But Trump and his allies have made clear ― among other places, in the private memo HuffPost’s Paul Blumenthal obtained this week ― that Monday’s order was the first move in an attempt to reclaim the president’s ability to stop some kinds of federal spending unilaterally through what is known as “impoundment.”

Among those who have made this point explicitly is Russ Vought, Trump’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, who also served in Trump’s first term and on the last day in office issued a memo laying out what he believed was the legal justification for allowing the president this kind of power. (The American Prospect’s David Dayen and Washington Post’s Jeff Stein have laid out the full history.) As Vought explained it, the Constitution envisioned a president with more control over spending in order to guarantee “faithful stewardship of public funds.”

The Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected this argument before ― in the 1970s, when then-President Richard Nixon tried impoundment. The justices reasoned that the Constitution was clear on the matter, that sweeping, long-lasting policy initiatives should not become reality without validation from the people’s elected representatives in Congress.

That reality is one of the many ways the U.S. system makes change difficult ― maybe even a little too difficult, as any liberal who’s dreamed wistfully of a carbon tax or Medicare-for-all would agree. It’s why serious mainstream thinkers and activists have long talked about loosening the American system’s brakes on action, whether by eliminating the Senate filibuster or cutting back on regulations.

But those sorts of efforts are faithful to the basic principle of democratic accountability, the idea that a single individual cannot change laws without getting Congress to go along ― or without facing political consequences for acting in ways that the public rejects.

It does not appear that Trump and his lieutenants are especially interested in that kind of accountability ― or any kind of accountability, for that matter, which helps explain some of the other executive actions he has undertaken. That includes his dismissals of federal prosecutors and inspectors general, whose jobs include watching for criminal activity and fraud by administration officials.

It also includes his broader effort to purge the federal workforce of its career staff ― by, among other things, taking away civil service protections and then firing large numbers of them. In theory, a future president could reverse that by refilling the jobs and restoring the career protections. In reality, it would take years ― and in some cases decades ― to restore the expertise and institutional knowledge that careerists bring to their jobs.

The ultimate escape from accountability would be Trump holding onto power at the end of his term, as he has “joked” about doing. That would certainly lock in his executive action, since there’d be no successor to undo any of it.

Trump probably isn’t serious about that, and for that matter his efforts to grab legislative power may have as much to do with his impatience as anything else. And if he did try to stay past his second term, he’d have to contend with an unambiguous prohibition on that in the Constitution.

Then again, the constitution’s allocation of spending power to Congress is pretty darn clear too. And yet Trump doesn’t seem to be respecting that.

The Political Backlash

The question now is how many of Trump’s efforts succeed. The two rulings against the spending freeze this week suggest the courts may stand in Trump’s way. But eventually Trump will get his day before the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority, including three of his hand-picked appointees, might decide they agree with his administration’s arguments, however legally preposterous they may be.

The other big check is political — the potential for a backlash. And this week showed it can still be a potent force.

National, state and local officials across the country reacted quickly Tuesday morning, screaming that the spending freeze was disrupting not just popular programs like Medicaid and Head Start, but also research grants to universities and industries that generate lots of jobs. The anger spilled onto social media and into the White House briefing room, where press secretary Karoline Leavitt spent much of her first briefing answering — or attempting to answer — questions of exactly what the order included and why.

Administration officials responded with more guidance narrowing the scope of the order before yanking it back altogether. A day later, reports from The Atlantic, CNN and The New York Times cited administration sources blaming the mixup on officials at OMB who hadn’t cleared their plans with the White House ― a tell-tale sign that close Trump advisers like Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recognized the administration had done something deeply unpopular and wanted to distance themselves from it.

But even after all of that, plenty of Trump’s orders remain in effect. And by all accounts the administration remains intent on securing its power to make big policy changes on its own, perhaps with a more carefully calibrated and legally reasoned effort next time. They’ll succeed if they don’t face more sustained pushback, including from a Democratic Party that has so far been mostly sleepwalking through the Trump restoration.

There were some signs of change this week, especially on Capitol Hill, where Democrats for the first time seemed confident they might have the public on their side. And they probably do, though it’s up to party leaders to make it count politically. Democracy can survive the Trump era, but it will require yet more democratic action ― with a lower case “d” but, probably, an upper case one too.