The Guardian's Politics Weekly America features New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan describing a White House where the officials, lawyers, and rivals who once constrained Trump are gone or unwilling to resist. The president is wielding executive authority far more aggressively across immigration, economic policy, and the structure of the presidency itself.
Allies, markets, and adversaries price America through the habits of its presidency. When power concentrates in one office, US policy accelerates, becomes less predictable, and harder for courts, Congress, or cabinet officials to slow. That volatility lands directly on foreign markets, trade partners, and geopolitical rivals.
Courts, federal agencies, and congressional Republicans will face the question of whether to accept a broader theory of presidential power when the next fights hit tariffs, deportations, emergency authorities, or foreign policy moves. Institutional resistance will be the real test.
Trump's biggest second-term win may be procedural, not ideological. He has spent years teaching his party and the executive branch that friction is disloyalty. Once that lesson sticks, every future decision gets easier to impose and harder to reverse. Power, once normalized, doesn't shrink for the next president. The imperial presidency isn't a Trump invention. It's a Trump acceleration.
Filed to the World desk · 4 days ago