For President Donald Trump and his allies, the 2024 election was less a vote for a new administration than it was an enabling act for a new sovereign. The public had done more than give Trump the White House the way it might bless any candidate with presidential power. In their view, the vote was akin to regime change, the start of a new Constitution, a new covenant and a new commandment: Thou shalt have no other laws before Trump.
What followed, in the first year of the president’s second term, was an effort to subordinate the entire society to the whims of one man. He did not do this alone. Rather than defend its prerogatives as the first branch among equals, the Republican-led Congress neutralized itself as a constitutional force, deferring to Trump as he destroyed the federal bureaucracy, subverted the rule of law, targeted opponents and rivals with threats and blackmail and governed by executive decree. And, eager to implement its baroque theories of unlimited presidential power, the Republican-led Supreme Court gave sanction to Trump’s effort to remake the executive branch in his image, even when history, tradition, law and the will of the people through Congress said otherwise.
Worse, in the months before Trump won his second election, this same court freed him from fear of criminal prosecution in an extraordinary declaration of presidential immunity. The court opened the door to rampant corruption and abuse of power, and Trump walked right through it.
But as confident as the president and his boyars appeared to be in those first months, they were also in a race against the clock. The reality of the situation was that the American people — or at least, a little less than half of the people who cast ballots in November 2024 — did not vote for Trump to be an outer-borough Viktor Orban. They voted for lower prices and greater prosperity. And each moment the president spent on his ideological obsessions — from his attacks on racial integration in government to his effort to punish pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses — was one he did not spend on the promises that put him into office.
The most self-destructive of the president’s obsessions was his single-minded devotion to tariffs, which promised to undermine the economy and raise the cost of everyday life for millions of Americans. In fact, according to a recent report from the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the president’s tariffs cost the average household $1,000 over the course of last year.