How Democrats hope to reverse Trump’s changes to the presidency

Democratic House members are writing bills to rein in a president’s emergency powers. Lawyers are strategizing about how to insulate the Justice Department from presidential influence. A House measure would block a president from unilaterally remodeling the White House. Ethicists are writing rules to prevent a future first family from self-dealing.

Throughout Washington and beyond, President Donald Trump’s opponents are scrambling to ensure that after he leaves office, the changes he has imposed on the presidency, and the country, will fade with him.

Whether they succeed could determine whether Trump’s aggressive exercise of executive powers will be limited to a finite stretch of U.S. history or will instead become a model for every president to come.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that Trump’s uses of presidential power can and must be reversed — but doing so will take decades.

“We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us,” Raskin said in an interview. “Fortunately, reconstruction has a great history in our country, and when it’s allowed to work, it has been a lot more successful than either authoritarianism or revolution. … We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create.”

From the beginning of the republic, the three branches have jostled for control over spending, war-making, immigration and virtually every other government function. Trump is hardly the first president to try to sharply elbow the other branches out of the way.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan startled critics by firing more than 11,000 air traffic controllers. George W. Bush, jolted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, secretly approved tactics against prisoners that many considered torture.

Barack Obama, initially critical of such actions, went on to expand presidential authority in his own right. He created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 by executive order, prompting GOP complaints that he was simply making up a law. He used drone strikes to target and kill suspected terrorists far from traditional battlefields. And he put numerous “czars” over areas like energy and healthcare, which Republicans charged was a way to avoid confirmation fights.

Tiffany Justice, executive vice president of the conservative group Heritage Action, pointed to this history to dismiss talk of post-Trump reforms, saying the president is doing nothing Democratic presidents have not done and predicting that Democrats’ plans will go nowhere.

“They are full of baloney — I don’t think Democrats would ever limit the power of a Democratic president,” Justice said. “The idea of Democrats saving democracy, it’s nonsense.”

Administration officials argue that Trump has changed the country forever and followed established procedures for everything he has done. “The Trump administration has abided by all legal decisions and gone through the appellate process with great success,” said a White House spokesperson. “His successes on behalf of the American people will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him,” said White House communications director Steven Cheung.

But Trump’s critics say that in the scale, sweep, and sheer aggressiveness of his actions — from demolishing the East Wing of the White House to pursuing legal actions against political opponents — Trump has pushed executive authority far beyond any previous modern president.

With a possible recapture of Congress just one month away, Democrats’ efforts to limit the staying power of those changes are heating up.

Several lawmakers are crafting bills to curtail a president’s ability to declare emergencies, which Trump has used in novel ways, declaring about a dozen emergencies to justify policies as varied as imposing tariffs, accelerating deportations, and deploying the National Guard. Reps. Suzan DelBene (D., Washington) and Don Beyer (D., Virginia) have introduced a bill forbidding a president from levying tariffs under the guise of a national emergency unless Congress agrees.

Raskin has drafted bills to ban a president from accepting payments from foreign governments without Congress’s consent and require a public review for renovations of the White House. Another measure would block a president from entering monetary settlements with his own government, which a federal judge scolded Trump and the Justice Department for this summer, saying they had attempted to “use” and “manipulate” the court to legitimize a deal that would have shielded Trump from IRS scrutiny and set up a nearly $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of politicized prosecutions.

Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and potential Democratic presidential candidate, recently released an ethics proposal for all three branches of government that would ban trading stocks and betting in prediction markets, require a blind trust for anyone worth more than $1 million, and forbid individuals from accepting foreign gifts. Trump has traded millions of dollars worth of individual stocks since taking office and famously accepted the gift of an aircraft from the Qatari government.

And Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Connecticut) has introduced a No Political Enemies Act, forbidding executive branch officials from prosecuting or punishing individuals or groups for their speech, something Trump has done relatively openly.

Some of these proposals may be partly symbolic, aimed at galvanizing voters and showing resistance to Trump rather than serving as strict blueprints for reform. Democrats themselves do not know when, if ever, they may have the public support to push them through. They have no guarantee of success; Trump survived two impeachments, prosecutions, and investigations before winning the White House a second time.

Still, the Democrats say they see little alternative to trying.

The Partnership for Public Service, which trains government employees and advocates for ways to improve the public workforce, has crafted proposals to strengthen civil service protections, making it harder for future presidents to fire employees en masse as Trump and his ally Elon Musk did. Congress, for example, could strengthen rules requiring that hiring and firing must be based on merit and due process — and then confront an administration that violates those rules.

Would-be reformers argue that periods of excess in U.S. history often prompt waves of reform. The Gilded Age of the late 1800s gave way to the Progressive Era. The corruption of Watergate in the 1970s generated a slew of new ethics laws.

It is not clear whether Americans support a new wave of reform laws. But a Pew poll last year found that 78% of Americans had concerns about expanding presidential power.

“Throughout American history, reform follows scandal,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a liberal-leaning think tank that focuses on law and democracy. “It does not always follow scandal, but that’s when it happens. I think there will be a real hunger, I hope from both parties, to write into law some of the protections that were assumed to be there before.”

Some historians say many of Trump’s actions will be hard to reverse. It is far easier to smash through guardrails, they say, than to rebuild them. Most modern presidents have expanded executive power at the expense of Congress. Whether that trend continues could depend in large part on whether the legislative branch begins to reassert itself as a counterweight to the presidency.

“Once we get through this nightmare, the rest of our careers will have to be devoted to reviving American progress and building institutions that endure and succeed,” Raskin said. “That is going to be the work of the rest of our lives.”

The midterm campaigns have spawned numerous Democratic candidates with sharply combative anti-Trump messages. If they win majorities in Congress, some Democrats could well be tempted to turn the president’s hardball tactics against him and his followers once he leaves the scene.

A post-Trump president could, for example, prod the Justice Department to investigate his own political adversaries, as Trump has.

“It will be very tempting for Democrats to say, ‘Oh, you think we are going to limit our abuse of the Justice Department? We don’t want to be suckers,’” Waldman said. “But I think that would be a big mistake. Everybody benefits when the rule of law is in play across the government.”

More immediately, the next administration will have to decide whether to prosecute Trump officials who may have broken the law by misusing their authority. Some Democrats, for example, say the way Justice Department officials have targeted Trump’s enemies is illegal and could expose those officials to charges.

Trump, in an effort to counteract such moves, has promised that before he leaves office he will preemptively pardon anyone who has come “within 200 feet” of the Oval Office, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Some liberals say Democrats should take a lesson from Trump on how to govern with force and purpose. Trump does not hesitate to take actions that skirt the edges of legality, happy to let the courts sort it out. He pressures private firms to back his policies. He issues sweeping executive orders rather than trying to persuade Congress to act.

“This president litigates the way he bargains: He makes some very far-out claims, not expecting to win them all, but sort of ‘what the hell’ — that’s his theory,” said William A. Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. “If you lose cases no other president would have dreamed of bringing, and you win a few big ones, you’re ahead of the game.”

It may be tempting for future presidents to act the same way. “There has been an overcautiousness in some Democratic and some Republican administrations that will seem quite quaint after this administration,” said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank.

That is especially true of executive orders and actions, which Trump has refashioned as all-purpose policy and communications weapons. He has issued more than 280 so far in his second term, far outpacing his recent predecessors, according to figures compiled by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“A new administration will do a lot of governing through executive order,” said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “They will want to show that they can act decisively.”

Even while they plot a post-Trump future, many Democrats say they cannot simply return to a status quo that voters hated. Yet it is far from clear what their new agenda will be.

Max Stier, president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, said the damage Trump has inflicted on the current system opens up new possibilities. Stier has suggested slashing the roughly 4,000 political appointees in the government, saying they can be unqualified and unaccountable.

“There is opportunity in this madness, the opportunity to reexamine some of the basic expectations around our government,” Stier said. “Because the status quo has been disrupted, the ability to think larger and bigger is there.”

Tiffany Justice, of Heritage Action, challenged that entire narrative. Trump is not wielding the presidency in some new way, she said, but rather using it as Democrats always have — and that is what truly upsets the left.

“President Trump is using his power in a way that Democrats have in the past,” Justice said, citing, for example, President Joe Biden’s order protecting gender transition care. “Republicans always in the past have been uneasy about using power. Democrats are never uneasy about using power.”

If there is anything that gives would-be reformers hope, it is the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon, like Trump, stretched presidential authority in ways that challenged the law and the Constitution. After his 1974 resignation, a previously quiescent Congress roared back to action, as lawmakers rushed to make sure Watergate could not happen again. Congress passed bills restricting a president’s ability to misuse private data, spy on Americans, misspend campaign cash, declare emergencies, control spending and more.

Some critics envision a post-Trump America swept up in a similar reform fever, with lawmakers scrambling to score political points amid widespread public revulsion over Trump’s self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.

For example, Congress could make it illegal to do what Trump’s firebrand housing official Bill Pulte has done — accuse the president’s critics of mortgage fraud with little evidence. Or it could restrict the ability of a Federal Communications Commission chairman, like Trump’s Brendan Carr, to target outlets disliked by the president.

The Justice Department is a particular focus of the would-be reformers, many of them former department lawyers frustrated by the way Trump has used DOJ to pursue his adversaries. Under Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, and his predecessor Pam Bondi, many experienced attorneys have fled the department or been forced out.

Vanita Gupta, who served as associate attorney general under Biden, said Justice Department veterans of both parties are discussing how to restore the department to its former ethos of independence.

“Rebuilding will be challenging, no doubt, but former DOJ officials from Republican and Democratic administrations are already thinking about how to get it done,” Gupta said. “Seasoned career leaders have told me that they would return to rebuild the department, even knowing lifetime tenure may be a thing of the past.”

Historians concede the Watergate analogy has its limits. The 1974 scandal propelled Democrats to overwhelming majorities of 61-39 in the Senate and 291-144 in the House; those margins are unthinkable today. Americans have become more polarized in the past 50 years, a trend that works against any broad-based reform crusade.

A powerful executive has gained additional theoretical backing in recent decades, as conservative legal scholars have advanced a “unitary executive” theory, arguing the U.S. Constitution gives the president nearly unfettered, unreviewable control over the executive branch.

Ultimately, the shape of the post-Trump future will be determined by how Americans feel when he exits the stage: Will they applaud his exercise of power and attacks on long-standing structures? Or will they recoil?

“The president and the courts are staring at one another over the mostly supine body of the Congress of the United States, and it’s very dangerous for constitutional government,” Galston said.

The Supreme Court’s path is unclear as well. Some Democrats privately echo a sentiment voiced by Clinton — that the justices may not give future presidents the same leeway they have accorded Trump. The court has already been far more deferential to Trump than it was to Biden, these Democrats say.

“I have a sinking suspicion if our party wins the White House in the next election, there will be a hallelujah moment and the Supreme Court will rediscover the Constitution,” Clinton said on ABC’s The View last year.

Even if some curbs on presidential power are reestablished, Trump’s demonstration that they can be dismantled is likely to have long-term effects.

Young people might be less willing to work for a government whose policies vacillate wildly from one president to another, and where long tenure is not guaranteed. Foreign allies have made it clear they are far less trusting of Washington’s commitments. Businesses and nonprofits could be less interested in accepting funding they fear could be abruptly withdrawn.

“It’s not like a toggle switch that you can just turn it on and off,” Waldman said. “Much of the federal government took a century to build.”

Some historians note Trump’s unique qualities, saying his combination of celebrity, aggressiveness, and disregard for tradition is unlikely ever to be replicated. That suggests future presidents cannot simply repeat his performance, they say.

“Any thought that [Vice President] JD Vance or [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio gets to be president and do the same thing with the same abandon — I don’t see that happening,” said John Lawrence, a historian and former top aide to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., California). “He has created his own unitary executive theory, and I don’t know how it works outside the size and force of the personality of Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean a Republican successor wouldn’t try.”

In the Progressive Era, Americans took to the streets by the thousands to demand reform, Stier said, and if Trump’s changes are ultimately reversed, it will be because of a similar groundswell.

“The most important question we face is whether we can return to a consensus that we had among Republicans, Democrats, and independents for 140 years that an operating government of our values requires leaders committed to the public good, not the private interests of the officeholder of the day,” Stier said. “Can we get back to that? I think the answer is yes. But we need a public that demands it.”