Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
On his first full day back in the White House, President Trump reveled in his return to power and vowed to do what no president had ever done before. “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at,” he declared.
Of all the thousands of words that Mr. Trump uttered during his fact-challenged, talkathon-style opening days as the nation’s 47th president, those may have been the truest. No matter that much of what he was doing he had promised on the campaign trail. He succeeded in shocking nonetheless.
Not so much by the ferocity of the policy shifts or ideological swings that invariably come with a party change in the White House, but through norm-shattering, democracy-testing assertions of personal power that defy the courts, the Congress and the ethical lines that constrained past presidents.
He freed even the most violent of the rioters who assaulted the Capitol in his name four years ago. Out of pique over questions of loyalty, he stripped former advisers facing credible death threats of their security details. Disregarding a law passed with bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court, he allowed the Chinese-owned TikTok app to remain in use in the United States despite serious national security concerns.
Not satisfied to simply eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, he ordered government workers to snitch on anyone suspected of not going along or face “adverse consequences,” a practice familiar to anyone of a certain age who lived in Russia. He fired at least a dozen inspectors general who monitor departments for corruption and abuse in a late-night purge on Friday, ignoring a law requiring him to give Congress 30 days’ notice and provide specific reasons.
In doing so, Mr. Trump in effect declared that he was willing and even eager to push the boundaries of his authority, the resilience of American institutions, the strength of the nearly two-and-a-half-century-old system and the tolerance of some of his own allies. Even more than in his first term, he has mounted a fundamental challenge to expectations of what a president can and should do, demonstrating a belief that the rules his predecessors largely followed are meant to be bent, bypassed or broken.
