The extended federal shutdown is revealing itself to be the Trump administration's power grab to reshape the "American experiment" into an imperial level of unchecked and uncheckable power — if they are allowed to succeed.
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Employees working in the Treasury Building enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of the rubble that, just a week ago, had been the White House’s historic East Wing. The view was so good, in fact, that the Treasury Department quickly banned employees from sharing photos of the unauthorized demolition with reporters or the public.
It’s tempting to look at the destruction of the East Wing as a singular incident, a testament to Trump’s vaulting ego, a desperate grasp for some kind of public immortality. It is so much more. For the hundreds of far-right Claremont Institute, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society Pharisees who authored Project 2025 and now make up the core of the federal government, the rubble of the East Wing represents the foundation upon which they will raise a new temple of “American greatness.”
When we talk about the “American experiment,” it’s easy to forget that our history-defining exercise in free self-government is just that: an experiment. Our extended federal shutdown has given the Trump administration plenty of time to reshape that experiment into a new conception of government in which the President of the United States exerts an imperial level of unchecked and uncheckable power. If they are allowed to succeed, the balance between the governed and their government will change forever.
Just days after the East Wing fell, Treasury staffers in Russell Vought’s Office of Management and Budget received word that an anonymous billionaire — later revealed to be reclusive banking heir Timothy Mellon — had donated $130 million to help pay soldiers during the nearly monthlong federal shutdown. Mellon’s largesse was illegal under the Antideficiency Act, an 1884 law that prevents private donors from usurping the funding role of Congress. That didn’t matter to Vought, who wasn’t about to turn away one of President Donald Trump’s many deep-pocketed friends.
Mellon’s $130 million was a rounding error when compared to the billions of dollars Trump and Vought had been moving around without congressional authorization since the government shuttered on October 1. The White House announced it will refuse to provide SNAP benefits to low-income children and families despite being legally required to do so, and will instead move that money toward paying troops and ICE agents. That announcement followed Trump’s decision to freeze or cancel $28 billion in congressionally approved spending meant to fund critical infrastructure projects in Democratic states. Instead, Trump decreed, he was sending $20 billion of that money to Argentina in an effort to bail out unpopular MAGA-aligned President Javier Milei.
While Vought and the Treasury Department were busy usurping Congress’s power of the purse, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were outlining a new understanding of presidential war powers that eliminated the need for Congress entirely. On October 23, in consultation with his rebranded Department of War, Trump declared that he wouldn’t bother seeking congressional approval for his expansive airstrike campaign against alleged Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats.
“I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” Trump boasted to reporters. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them.”
Trump saying out loud that he no longer feels bound by even the pretense of civil law is a staggering admission for an American president, especially given how easily our Congress can be cajoled into granting blanket authority for near-limitless conflicts. In 2002, President George W. Bush’s effort to maintain the illusion of legitimacy for his looming Iraq War involved little more than asking for and receiving a near-limitless Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The Senate offered no meaningful opposition or serious debate to Bush’s proposal, and today’s MAGA-dominated chamber would grant Trump approval without even cursory investigation into his motives. Yet Trump seems to revel in displaying just how toothless and irrelevant Congress has become, to the degree that lawmakers aren’t even certain if this week’s boat strikes mark Trump’s 10th or 11th targeted killing.
As best we can estimate, Trump’s strikes have killed at least 43 people and resulted in the capture of two survivors, though specifics are hard to come by. The White House stopped giving Congress details about the strikes weeks ago, even though doing so is legally required under the War Power Act. Faced with Trump’s official silence, most Republicans have simply stopped asking questions.
Trump’s rhetoric has now escalated to include threats of possible land strikes against Venezuelan targets, also without any input from Congress. Only one Republican, long-time Trump critic Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, dared to challenge the president’s claim of unlimited war-making authority. Even then, Paul couldn’t bring himself to demand his Senate colleagues defend their co-equal constitutional position by holding hearings into the airstrikes. That would make the White House look bad, and Paul knew from the growing list of indicted former Republicans exactly what happened to those who made the White House look bad.
The House of Representatives gaveled out of session on September 19, over a month ago, and has not met since. Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his willingness to keep lawmakers recessed for as long as Trump prefers, even if that means keeping the House out of session for the remainder of 2025. For all functional purposes, the legislative branch of our government has ceased to exist. Even among House Democratic leaders, such a stunning shift of power seems to be met with a shrug and a “Well, what did you expect?”
Trump can hardly believe his luck. “I’m the speaker and the president!” he has allegedly joked in recent days, according to two people who heard the comment.
Can anyone say he’s wrong?
When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin in 1787 what kind of government the Founding Fathers had drafted for the American people, Franklin famously quipped, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Republican lawmakers are not only failing to keep our republic, they are willingly ceding the explicit powers of Congress to a president who is only too happy to do what Congress will not. Democrats and civil society watchdogs grouse endlessly that Trump’s actions violate bedrock American laws and the Constitution itself, but the idea of law itself seems quaint in the face of Trump’s shutdown excesses.
Enabled by a federal shutdown and a Congress filled with spineless sycophants, Trump has moved our nation at lightning speed from the republic of Franklin to the brutal power politics of the Roman general Pompey: “Cease quoting laws to us who carry swords.”None of Trump’s monarchical excesses will come as a surprise to the people who read Project 2025, the far-right plan for a second MAGA presidency that Trump disavowed as a candidate last year before fully embracing as president. Of the more than 300 contributors to the sprawling 900-page manifesto, dozens now serve Trump as loyal government appointees, including the document’s principal author Russell Vought. Brendan Carr, who wrote a section in which he fantasized about gutting the Federal Communications Commission, now chairs the FCC. Tom Homan, who called for a brutal immigration crackdown that included weaponizing ICE into a federal police force accountable only to Trump, now serves as a “border czar” with a nearly unlimited portfolio.
The authors of America’s new experiment have no love for the democratic process, or for democracy itself. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who has often declared that freedom and democracy are “incompatible,” is now a close Trump administration confidante whose name will soon grace the planned wall of donors on Trump’s palatial new $300 million ballroom. Trump may not read Thiel’s political philosophy — or anything else, for that matter — but many of the Project 2025 technocrats Trump has installed in federal positions see Thiel’s post-democracy ideology as the best chance for reversing what they call “American decline,”, and which others call pluralist representative democracy.
Certain things will need to go in order to build the “Golden Age” Trump referenced in his inaugural address, starting with the idea that all political speech is created equal. In a column for the New York Times, veteran political analyst Thomas B. Edsall described this idea as a willingness to engage in actions up to and including civil war in order to criminalize the speech of Democrats and other political undesirables. No tool is off the table.
“Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten businesses with bankruptcy, the criminalization of free speech and the blackmailing of corporate America into obedience,” Edsall writes.
If that idea is to succeed, Trump and his allies first need to strip away the power of other branches of government to tie the White House’s hands. Johnson provided an incredible assist by simply taking the House out of consideration entirely. In the absence of a functioning Congress, Trump has deployed National Guard troops into left-leaning cities from Los Angeles to Chicago and even Washington, D.C. itself, often supplemented by a battalion’s worth of masked ICE agents and other federal law enforcement. Those agents operate solely at the discretion of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a do-nothing functionary whose main purpose is to relay Trump’s wishes to his brownshirts in the field.
The Supreme Court offered Trump another boost back in July 2024, when the court’s conservative supermajority granted Trump sweeping immunity for a nearly limitless list of “official actions,”, with an action’s official-ness determined by decree of the president himself. Trump’s legal team has also become expert at filing emergency legal challenges before the court, amounting to 19 challenges in just the first 20 weeks of Trump’s term. “The same number of requests made by the Biden administration over four years,” according to Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck.
Because those decisions are filed on the court’s so-called “shadow docket,” most are decided without any public hearings or written legal opinions. As a result, lower courts have no legal record of how or why the Supreme Court came to its decisions. The court, then, has become its own legal black site, with rulings handed down arbitrarily and without explanation and almost always in a way that justifies Trump’s actions. It’s no surprise that the Americans forced to watch this Kafakesque debacle now say they have no trust at all in the Supreme Court’s decisions. Even if the court someday tells Trump he’s overstepped, who would believe them?
The authors of Project 2025 who now lead our government have no use for checks on presidential power in the form of courts. Those simply slow down MAGA’s freight train of “progress.” Judges who don’t comply with Trump’s extreme agenda quickly find themselves in the crosshairs in ways that threaten to shatter America’s justice system. Writing for the New Yorker, E. Tammy Kim detailed how immigration judges seen as critical of Trump have faced a focused campaign of firings and intimidation designed to drive them out of government by one means or another.
“Initially, the Trump administration seemed to be targeting judges who’d been employed for less than two years, or who granted asylum at high rates, or who as lawyers had represented immigrants,” Kim wrote. “Many of the fired judges were women and people of color. Some appeared on a website, funded by the Heritage Foundation, called D.H.S. Watch List, which called for rooting out ‘woke’ bureaucrats.”
Trump’s war on the immigration courts had the desired effect. Immigration hearings have now ground to a standstill, with delays stretching into 2029 for those unlucky enough to be caught up in his ICE dragnets. As more judges leave or are fired, Trump has a free hand to skim the murky waters of far-right legal think tanks for replacement judges willing to bend to his ideological whims. Federal judges now say they view the Department of Justice not as an ally, but as a threat to their personal safety.
Our new national experiment also means reshaping the international alliances that once formed the backbone of America’s global diplomatic might. Trump’s weapon of choice in this fight is the tariff, a tool designed for trade purposes that the White House has turned into a vehicle for delivering punishment and extracting political favors from foreign powers.
Trump has repeatedly invoked the Emergency Economic Powers Act as a means of legitimizing his tariff powers, but the federal courts aren’t convinced. In August, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Trump broke the law by snatching tariff power away from Congress. That ruling was stayed pending appeal, giving Trump a free hand to continue piling on global tariffs at a record-setting pace.
Trump’s use of the Emergency Economic Powers Act is just one of the 50 simultaneous national emergencies he’s declared in his quest to collect as many sweeping legislative powers as possible. It’s also the most powerful one yet, allowing Trump to levy tariffs on nearly every nation in the world, not because the tariffs themselves make sound economic sense, but because the leaders of those nations refused to bend a knee to Trump’s wishes.
Just last week Trump suspended ongoing trade talks with Canada after a Canadian broadcaster aired an ad in which former President Ronald Reagan denounced tariffs. The ad was plainly a swipe at Trump’s tendency to threaten economic punishments on nations who upset him. On Saturday, Trump responded by increasing tariffs on Canadian goods by another 10% and threatening even more economic pain if Canadians continued to mock him.
The staggering revenues generated by those tariffs, paid by American citizens in the form of higher prices on goods, are a key part of Trump’s plan to seize spending power from Congress. Trump’s tariffs have already generated at least $360 billion this year, and every dollar is stored in an opaque federal slush fund managed by Vought and directed by Trump. In a move that turns the Constitution on its head, Trump has used tariff money to fund pet projects that Congress refused to authorize, effectively turning the White House into a parallel Appropriations Committee with no legislative checks or balances.
Trump has weighed using $10 billion in tariff revenue to send $2,000 rebate checks to American consumers hurt by those same tariffs. He wants to send $50 billion in direct financial support to farmers struggling under the reciprocal tariffs slapped on American agricultural products by other countries. It’s no mistake that Trump’s planned cash giveaways are pure populism instead of, say, putting that money toward his Mexican border wall. Struggling American families are less likely to worry about the legality of a program that offers them temporary relief from their financial pain. Their gratitude for an unexpected payday helps the institutional poison go down easier.
The scheme is so transparently illegal and dangerously unaccountable that even the conservative Washington Examiner published an October 23 editorial decrying the slush fund as a threat to democracy itself. What the Examiner failed to mention was that Vought and others laid out their tariff slush fund plan in Project 2025, a document they chose to ignore during last year’s presidential campaign. The writing has been on the wall all along, for those with the willingness to read it.
With Congress voluntarily neutered and the Supreme Court willingly compliant, Trump faces no serious threat of accountability for any of his overreaches or excesses. In an extreme scenario, even a Democratic sweep of the 2026 midterm elections wouldn’t change much: Trump could simply decide to shut down the government again, effectively blunting any Democratic efforts to launch investigations or hold hearings. In this dark new iteration of the American experiment, the ideal government isn’t the one that governs least. It’s the one that can’t govern at all.
The MAGA movement is perilously close to realizing its dream of a new American experiment in which representative democracy and the separation of powers are mere afterthoughts in the face of unchallenged (and ultimately unchallengeable) executive power. The constitutional pillars that long supported the American republic are weak and crumbling, chipped away by Republican lawmakers who are either actively supportive of their own destruction or too timid to speak out. It hardly matters; complicity and cowardice are distinctions without a difference.
When Treasury Department staffers look out their windows now, they see only a leveled bit of turf where the East Wing once stood. Like people standing nearest to a bomb blast, they are the first to see and feel the shockwave that is already radiating out to the entire body politic. That shockwave is now spreading through every part of the American government, gnarling and upending 250 years of established democratic order as it mushrooms outward.
We don’t yet know how far Trumpism’s blast will spread or how long authoritarianism’s toxic fallout will linger over our republic. We know only that things are very different now than they were before. The great test of America’s democratic experiment has arrived. We are the people who must bear the terrible weight of deciding whether to keep or destroy our republic. We always have been.