Donald Trump does not hide what he plans to do, even if the major idea is to damage or destroy institutions rather than to improve them. He made clear in his campaign that he wanted to politicize the Justice Department and that he wanted to get rid of the permanent civil service and he also wanted to deport ten or so million illegal aliens. He has done the first by firing FBI agents who worked on tnhe cases against him and fired people at the Justice Department and wants to make a deal whereby Mayor Eric Adams of New York will have his corruption charges dropped so as to encourage him to go after ilegal aliens, but that was resisted by attorneys in the Federal District Court of Southern New York who say they could not do that in good faith and as of yesterday one attorney agreed to sign the order so as to protect the jobs of the rest of the staff from resigning or being fired. Stay tuned.
Trump has used Elon Musk to get rid of the permanent bureaucracy, but by slashing programs rather than auditing them first. He shut down USAID which provides children with food and life saving drugs to a number of foreigners without checking out the facts. He claimed a hundred million dollars of condoms were being sent to the Gaza Strip and took it back, saying he would make some mistakes, in that some amounts of money for condoms were being sent to Gaza, Mozambique. So Musk is sloppy checking out his own facts and so he is like Trump, who said Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and did when the Republican governor of Onhio said it never happened and J. D. Vance shrugged that falsehood as a metaphor for how disorganized Springfield life had become. Musk is looking into the Treasury Department payment system and continues to do so even if there are court orders to unfreeze accounts, reopen USAID and stop snooping around Treasury payments. So there is a potential constitutional issue about whether the Administration will flaunt the judiciary.
An even more constitutional test will occur in the attempt to engage in large scale deportations, which have so far been minor. The administration needs a lot of money to carry this out legally and more or less humanely. The House is proposing the money as part of the budget bill to be passed through Congress in March. But there will be a handful of deficit hawk Republicans who will oppose it and so some Democrats will be required to pass the bill. The threat is that failiing to do so will shut down the government. But Democratic congresspeople have said that they will not accept such cuts on entitlements that the Republicans are proposing and get a government shutdown by not providing money to the executive from Congress. But consider this. What if the Administration refuses to shut down the government? What if it continues to spend? SWnat can the Congress do about this constitutional crisis? The legal remedy is impeachment or the 25th Amendment but the Republicans are so intimidated by Trump that they will not exercise their constitutional prerogatives. What could they do? Raise an army of their own or ask the Pentagon to support them? So far, Trump has said he will obey district court federal judges, but he might get peeved about them or about Congress.
Some voters may not be particularly concerned about constitutional processes if as some focus groups have said, Trump is moving the government, though not sure to what purpose. I blame the shortcomings of high school social studies. But people may wake up if they find, as the Republican House proposes, to cut Medicaid and ACA. The people are the final resort. Stay tuned.