Republicans in Congress have been unwilling or unable to control Donald Trump as he has pushed the use of executive orders and a pliable Supreme Court that lets him assume dictatorial power.
Out of the box in his second term, Trump asserted executive power unconstrained by the checks and balances of the Constitution. He tried by executive order to restrict birthright citizenship of immigrants’ children, disregarding the 14th Amendment. He fired inspectors general in government agencies without providing notice or explanation to Congress and he gave Elon Musk and his unvetted “Department of Government Efficiency” a free hand to take over agency computer systems and fire government workers. And Trump shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development and “paused” grant funding to universities and research institutions.
Lately, Trump has threatened to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell before his term expires in May 2026, for refusing to reduce interest rates, before business leaders warned Trump that would spook the markets. So instead, Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the jobs numbers she reported Aug. 1. That undermines confidence in future jobs reports.
Trump expanded his plan to control immigration by stepping up the seizure and deportation of undocumented immigrants with expansion of the corps of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. But while he promised to go after the “worst of the worst dangerous criminals,” who he says entered the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration, ICE was unable to find enough dangerous criminal immigrants to make their quotas..
As of June 29, ICE statistics show, of 57,861 people detained by ICE, 71.7% had no criminal convictions, and many of the “criminals” were involved in traffic infractions. But Trump had promised to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history, so the activity devolved into raids of Latino markets and neighborhoods, where heavily armed, masked agents swarmed in what appeared to be random stops of Brown-skinned people and arrests of those who lacked proper IDs or appeared to be “suspicious characters,” many of whom were detained and held for days before they could prove their citizenship.
“President Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Associated Press. “There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security also targeted foreign nationals, particularly students, researchers and legal residents who lost their student visas and green cards after they were accused of engaging in pro-Palestinian activism, AP reported.
Total ICE arrests shot up at the end of May after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller gave the agency a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term. ICE arrested nearly 30% more people in May than in April, according to the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, or TRAC. That number rose again in June, by another 28%.
“What you’re seeing is this huge increase in funding to detain people, remove people, enforce immigration laws,” Eisen said. “And what we’re seeing is that a lot of these people back to sort of the original question you asked, these are not people who are dangerous.”
Trump’s preoccupation with tariffs is wreaking havoc on working-class families and small businesses who must absorb the 15% tax Trump arbitrarily placed on European goods, with even higher tax rates on imports from other countries. Trump used tariffs to intimidate foreign nations with minimal consultation with members of Congress, who actually have the authority to set tariffs (but Republicans aren’t sticklers about that). While Trump insists the tariffs are a boon for the Treasury, American businesses, not foreign governments, must pay Trump’s tariffs and pass those higher along to American consumers, in what amounts to a national sales tax on imported goods. That will increase inflation, with no benefit for American consumers and workers.
The Center for American Progress, on the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, reported that during the first six months of the second term Trump waged an all-out war against disabled people.
“From executive orders intended to roll back civil rights protections to legislation that cuts key services and support, the disability community has faced structural violence in the form of federal policy. This all comes as the community continues to suffer severe impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic that have resulted in further disablement, isolation, and death. It has even been alleged that President Donald Trump once told his nephew, Fred C. Trump III, that he should let his son, who has “complex” intellectual and developmental disabilities, “just die” because of the cost of care.
Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a slim 7-seat majority next year, with four vacancies, including three seats remaining to be filled after the deaths of Democratic incumbents this past spring, and Democrats are encouraged by polls that show potential voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by an average of 42.7% to 42.2 in a Real Clear Politics average of 10 national polls as of Aug. 11. But those polls motivated Trump to order Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to redraw Texas congressional lines to eliminate five Democratic districts in a special legislative session. That prompted more than 50 Democratic state representatives to leave the state to break the quorum needed to advance the redistricting bill.
Some Democrats fear Trump plans to declare martial law to stop the elections if it appears he might lose control of Congress. Some saw the deployment of California National Guards and active-duty Marines in Los Angeles in June when protesters disrupted ICE raids was a dry run for such a declaration.
In the next step toward authoritarianism, Trump used an attempted carjacking of a former member of Musk’s DOGE team in Washington, D.C., as a pretext to take over the Metro Police Department and deploy the D.C. National Guard and the FBI to patrol the streets of the nation's capital Aug. 11, despite D.C. crime rates at a 30-year low. Trump said Baltimore, Oakland, New York, and Chicago are potential future targets for National Guard deployments and “other measures.” Facts don’t matter.
People should not be intimidated by Trump’s overreach, nor despair that elections won’t be held. The Constitution makes states responsible for holding elections, not the president. Elections were held during the Civil War, and we’re not likely to be anywhere near that level of emergency next year. Also, if elections are not held next year, there will be no House of Representatives, as incumbents’ terms expire Dec. 31, 2026. In the Senate, terms of 35 senators would expire, leaving a 1-vote Democratic majority in the next Senate.
Republicans can’t risk that. So, in the meantime, progressives need to get organizing, and plan to elect more Democrats. — JMC
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