With Insufficient Resistance, Trump Overtaking Checks and Balances at Rapid Pace
October 1, 2025
President Donald Trump’s authoritarian assault on America’s constitutional democracy, as unbearable to the naked eye as watching an eclipse, has proceeded at a pace that has shocked academic experts who have spent their careers chronicling the rise of autocratic leaders in foreign nations across the years. By comparison, the entrenchment of authoritarianism in Russia under Putin, Hungary under Orban, and Turkey under Erdogan makes those autocrats look like the proverbial tortoise to Trump’s hare.
The pace of Trump’s trampling of the Constitution, a reflection of insufficient political and institutional resistance, is largely attributable to the demise of checks and balances, seen by the founders of our nation as the backbone of the Constitution, designed to maintain the health, safety and integrity of the republic by pinning the three branches of the government to the terms of the Constitution. Trump’s raw usurpation of congressional power, facilitated by abject acquiescence of the GOP majority in Congress, has crumpled the working premise and promise of checks and balances as a critical mechanism for maintaining constitutional accountability. As James Madison explained it in Federalist No. 51, members of Congress would have both the personal and political ambition to defend their powers against executive acts of usurpation. The interest of the man in preserving power, Madison explained, would fit the interest of the place—the institution of Congress—in preserving its power.
GOP congressional leaders, as well as the rank and file, however, have abandoned all semblance of the Madisonian commitment to institutional independence, as manifested in their betrayal of a constitutional duty to defend, for example, the legislative power to tax and spend. Their obeisance to President Trump undermines nearly everything that the framers understood about the capacity, efficacy and resiliency of checks and balances. For traditional conservatives—unlike MAGA loyalists—who have sported champions, however imperfect, of checks and balances over the years—Robert Taft, William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker, John McCain, and Alan Simpson— we ask, where have all the statesmen and leaders gone? Those leaders distinguished themselves by their belief in constitutional government and the rule of law.
The doctrine of checks and balances, while not on its death bed, is failing for lack of GOP stewardship in Congress. Federal courts, on the other hand, have rallied to the defense of the Constitution—enumeration of powers, checks and balances, and Article II limitations—and thus done their part to check Trump’s usurpations, ruling against him in some 200 cases. These rulings, attentive readers will note, have been rendered by judges appointed by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, who have cast aside politics and partisanship in upholding the rule of law—precisely what the framers expected of a judiciary clothed with independence. The Trump Administration, however, has ignored and flouted many of these rulings, in a flagrant act of contempt for judicial authority and the rule of law. Trump officials’ unprecedented public, personal and political attacks on judges, moreover, are true to the authoritarian’s creed: the ends justify the means.
Trump’s acts of usurpation have been aided by an activist Supreme Court, in thrall to the president. This Court has sucked the bone marrow from historic precedents, sapping their strength and value as a means of restraining the executive in a manner that can only be described as an effort to assist Trump’s derangement of separation of powers and checks and balances. Last week, for example, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court ignored a 100-year-old precedent and permitted Trump to fire without cause—in violation of the governing statute—a member of the Federal Trade Commission, thus gutting the independence of the agency.
Authoritarian presidents—Putin, Orban, and Erdogan, for example—are impervious to constitutional principles. Like those autocrats, for whom Trump has expressed admiration and envy, there are only the ends. The means to the ends are irrelevant. This anti-constitutional perspective, which Trump shares, stands in stark contrast to Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which he explained the sanctity in a constitutional system of legal means to legal ends. Without such prescription, there is no law, but only the will of an authoritarian. McCulloch stands for the proposition that government is obligated to adhere to the law of land. For an authoritarian, however, constitutional limitations and restraints are but trifling inconveniences.
-David Adler