Trump’s Theory of the Presidency is Failing

This is the system working.

Donald Trump had two paths. He chose the one that looked easier. This is what’s happened since.

Here is a partial list of the most aggressive actions Donald Trump has tried to take since being re-elected president:

• Dismantling an entire Cabinet department

• Redefining the meaning of U.S. citizenship

• Changing the requirements to vote in federal elections

• Upending America’s trade relationships

Those are big, huge projects. Each of them generated massive news coverage, and with good reason. If successful, they would represent an enormous flex of presidential power towards Trump’s desired policy ends. But have they been successful?

It’s important to cover these ambitious actions when they’re announced, but it’s also important to follow up a few weeks later and examine: How many of them are actually happening? I’m glad you asked. Here is the list of the above actions that are currently being implemented:

That wasn’t a typo. By next week, none of those flashy and dramatic policy announcements are slated to be policy accomplishments. In February, I wrote about the two paths Trump could choose from to try to achieve his objectives: the harder, more arduous path of seeking congressional approval or the tantalizing shortcut of going it alone and making policy by executive action. I said then that the gamble that he could get more done through the latter route “represents a flawed theory of the presidency,” built on incorrect assumptions about how presidents make change and achieve success.

Trump did not take my advice. (His loss!) Several months later, his flawed theory is now skating awfully close to becoming a failed theory, one which only looks less successful with each passing day.

Last night, when his beloved tariffs were struck down by a unanimous panel of judges, Trump’s theory of change sustained perhaps its most substantial blow yet.

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Terry Cycling is a company that specializes in women’s cycling apparel, selling everything from biking shorts ($135) to water bottles ($19). It is based in Burlington, Vermont. It is family-owned. It has 16 employees.

According to its president Nikolaus Holm, the company — which imports goods from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Italy, and the Philippines — stands to lose an estimated $1.2 million if the tariff regime announced by Trump remains in effect next year.

“Tariffs will become the single largest line item operating expense on Terry Cycling’s Profit & Loss Statement,” Holm said. “It would be larger than payroll.”

In many countries, that financial reality notwithstanding, if the head of state decided that Terry Cycling would have to pay those tariffs, the company would have very little recourse. No more explanation would be needed besides the leader’s whims.

But here, Terry Cycling — along with 12 states and three other companies — filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, an obscure tribunal that handles trade disputes. They alleged that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which Trump used to impose his sweeping tariffs, does not give a president the power to set tariff rates at all. The 1977 law allows presidents to “regulate…importation or exportation” in the case of a national emergency; Trump was the first president to read this provision as a grant of tariff powers.

A three-judge panel of the court considered arguments from both the administration and its challengers. Last night, they issued their decision. In a 49-page opinion, the judges said that they did not agree with the challengers that IEEPA could never be used by a president to impose tariffs. However, they did rule that the law does not “delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the president.” (Emphasis mine.) There are limits on the tariffs a president can impose unilaterally, the court said, and Trump did not respect them.

In the case of the so-called “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump announced on April 2, aka “Liberation Day” — the rates that swung wildly by country, depending on our trade deficit with them, and are currently paused (except for China) until July — the court found that Trump was entirely setting his own tariff rates without any congressional input, going beyond the narrow, temporary changes that would be allowed under IEEPA.

Further, if the 1977 law was intended to allow the president to “impose whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” — and the judges said they did not see evidence that was the intention — that would have been unconstitutional anyway, they added. The Constitution gives Congress power over tariffs; one branch of government can delegate some of their powers to another, but to completely fork over tariff authority to the president “would constitute an improper abdication of legislative power” to the executive.

Under the Constitution, a president cannot declare war without Congress. Per this ruling, they can’t singlehandedly declare a trade war, either.

The judges also took up the 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico, and 20% tariffs against China, that Trump imposed earlier in his presidency, which also used IEEPA but in response to a national emergency Trump declared around drug trafficking from those countries. (The national emergency in the “Liberation Day” tariffs was trade deficits.)

The exact wording of IEEPA states that the authorities granted by the law “may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared.” The judges found that this second round of tariffs was not permissible because they do not “deal with” drug trafficking in any discernible way.

They wrote:

“Deal with” connotes a direct link between an act and the problem it purports to address. A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the “unusual and extraordinary threat[s]” that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat.

Customs’s collection of tariffs on lawful imports does not evidently relate to foreign governments’ efforts “to arrest, seize, detain, or otherwise intercept” bad actors within their respective jurisdictions.

Under the Trump administration’s logic, the judges said, a president could impose tariffs as a way to exert leverage on another country to produce any concession they desired, no matter if it was connected to the national emergency he declared. “Surely this is not what Congress meant when it clarified that IEEPA powers ‘may not be exercised for any other purpose’ than to ‘deal with’ a threat,” they wrote.

The panel — composed of judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Trump himself (though it’s worth noting that the Trump appointee is a Democrat) — skipped over the step of temporarily pausing the tariffs and unanimously issued a summary judgement instead, which means this is the final word from that court. Any relief for Trump will have to come from a higher court; the administration has already appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

In the meantime, unless the circuit court says otherwise, the Court of International Trade has ordered the administration to stop enforcement of both the trafficking and “reciprocal” tariffs within 10 days.

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Trump’s tariffs were probably the most audacious realization of his vision of an all-powerful presidency — one that could unilaterally set the terms of America’s trade relationships across the world, as stock markets and consumer prices rose and fell in response to his commands — but many of his other, far-reaching actions have also been killed in the cradle by federal judges.

In March, Trump announced that he was fulfilling the long-held conservative dream of dismantling the Department of Education. The announcement was widely covered by the media, including me. In fact, I went to the White House to cover Trump signing the executive order in-person.

“Inside the room as the Education Department was abolished,” read the subtitle of my piece. “Or was it?”

It wasn’t, it turned out. Similar to the judges on the Court of International Trade, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun didn’t rule that a president could never fire his own employees or restructure the agencies within his control — in fact, that’s one of the areas in which Trump is finding the most legal success — but he did rule last week that there are very clearly limits on these powers.

And a big one is that, if Congress mandates that an agency it created must carry out certain functions, the agency needs to at least have enough employees to carry out those functions. Judge Joun wrote that those challenging the changes at the Education Department have “demonstrated that the Department will not be able to carry out its statutory functions—and in some cases, is already unable to do so” without the staff the administration has laid off.

The administration’s lawyers, Joun added, have “proffered no evidence to the contrary.”

And so it has gone for many of Trump’s most attention-grabbing moves. His attempt to strip birthright citizenship from the U.S.-born children of unauthorized migrants? Blocked by four federal judges. His effort to change the voter registration process? Blocked. His order to halt federal support for gender-affirming care for minors? Blocked. The U.S. Institute of Peace? Reopened. The detention of Rümeysa Öztürk? Ended. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil? Ruled likely unconstitutional.

In each case, Trump could have gone through Congress to achieve a certain policy objective. He chose not to. As a result, many of his policy objectives are simply not in the process of happening.

Of course, some of them are. And some of the policies I’ve mentioned above could very well be sanctioned by higher courts as they continue through the legal process. And that, too, would be the system working. The president is trying to expand his powers; judges appointed by both parties are thoughtfully examining whether he can do so. Sometimes, they are ruling in his favor. Very often, they are not, dooming his agenda — or, rather, confirming that he has doomed his agenda by trying to implement it himself, rather than following the process set out by the Constitution.

In some cases, the Trump administration is being dealt setbacks even in disputes that leaders of civil society appeared to have viewed as a lost cause. Three of Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms have been struck down, including one in a Tuesday ruling calling the directive “unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers.” (Other law firms had preemptively signed agreements with Trump in order to avoid such orders.) A judge has also paused Trump’s efforts to block Harvard from enrolling international students. (Other schools had preemptively agreed to various concessions to avoid such punitive action.)

In other cases, the administration appears to now be realizing that Congress is their best (only?) bet for effecting long-term change. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) generated all sorts of headlines at the beginning of the administration, but it has been largely ineffective in its goal: unilaterally reducing government spending (something even Musk has acknowledged in his farewell tour).

Despite all the bluster, the U.S. government spent more money in April 2025 ($591 billion) than it did in April 2024 ($566 billion). Perhaps that is why, only now, the administration is preparing to ask Congress to codify $9.4 billion in DOGE cuts, a belated recognition that the spending can’t really be cut until lawmakers sign off.

Some Republican lawmakers have started to get antsy, urging their leaders to put more of Trump’s executive orders up for votes as legislation, in order to ensure they actually happen. “Codify President Trump’s EOs now,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote on X. “If we just knew somebody who could codify all this good stuff,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) wrote in response to a post about one executive order recently. “Hmmmm.”

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I wrote above that Trump’s theory of action is “failing.” How will we know if it’s failed?

That will depend on two variables: how higher courts, especially the Supreme Court, handle Trump’s uses of executive power; and whether Trump complies with court orders.

We don’t have a huge sample size of decisions (yet — many more will come this month) to predict how the Supremes will tackle many of the Trump orders, but there are indications that at least some will be treated skeptically. At least, that was my takeaway when I covered the administration’s first in-person foray before the court this month, where even his own appointees seemed dubious about his birthright citizenship order (in addition to the fact that, in other cases, the court majority has appeared to treat the administration as though it is not acting in good faith).

As for compliance, we do have a large sample size, considering the sheer number of Trump orders that have been blocked. Importantly, there are two pending cases — concerning the Alien Enemies Act flights to El Salvador and the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — where judges are currently examining whether the administration complied with its orders. We will see if those judges issue contempt findings, and then how higher courts respond, and then how the administration responds to those responses.

But outside of those two pending deportation cases, both with unique circumstances, I would describe the Trump administration’s response to unfavorable court orders as “grudging compliance.” Even in cases where the administration tried to find loopholes and was initially accused of flouting court orders, like with FEMA grants and foreign aid, the administration is now reporting its compliance after being reprimanded by judges.

Notably, in one of the cases I highlighted Tuesday — in which the administration was ordered to “facilitate” the return of a man wrongfully deported to Mexico (who is now in Guatemala) — Trump officials reported last night that they are working on chartering a flight to bring him back to the U.S.

This doesn’t make it any less important to follow up on cases where the administration has been accused of non-compliance. Nor does the fact that so many of Trump’s orders are being struck down as unconstitutional making it any less important that he is issuing such legally questionable orders in the first place.

But two things can be true at once. It’s important to cover Trump’s aggressive actions when they are unveiled and important to note how few of them are materializing into reality.

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Does Trump care? Maybe not. Outside the realm of hard policy, several of Trump’s more personal objectives — rewarding allies, lining his own pockets — appear to be moving along apace. While there are limits (according to Wednesday’s ruling) to the tariff powers given to the president by Congress, there are no limits to the pardon powers given to the president by the Constitution. Just yesterday, Trump continued his pattern of granting pardons almost exclusively to allies (including the son of a top donor). Those are certainly successes (in the sense that Trump set out to do something, and then it happened), but not the kind with which a lasting legacy is built.

To be fair, it’s not clear that Trump’s lack of substantial accomplishments is hurting him politically. In fact, it’s possible that the less Trump accomplishes, the more popular he would be.

His approval rating started dipping after his most dramatic policy move (the tariffs), reaching a nadir of -9.7% last month, but has now stabilized near pre-“Liberation Day” levels, at -4.9%. (In this way, Trump can thank the Court of International Trade for confiscating the knife he was using to stab his own approval rating in the back.)

Trump’s ratings on the issues tell a similar story: opinions of his handling of immigration fell as his immigration agenda became more publicized (even going briefly underwater at the height of the Abrego Garcia focus); opinions of his handling of inflation dipped post-tariffs but are now recovering as well.

From a political lens, judges trampling on his agenda might help Trump, not hurt him.

But, strictly from a policy standpoint, you’re either accomplishing things or you’re not. When Trump exits office on January 20, 2029, he will either leave with the sort of substantive policy record that tends to place presidents in the honored pantheon — think Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan — or with the sort of easily reversible orders that leave a president bereft of any long-lasting, signature achievements.

Trump staked his presidency on a theory that he could achieve the former status all by himself, and that neither a Republican-controlled Congress nor a judiciary packed with his own appointees would get in his way. The calculation that Congress wouldn’t challenge him has mostly proven right. But judges, in many cases, are almost propping up the legislature against its will: asserting Congress’ role as the lawmaking branch even when lawmakers themselves don’t seem to want the mantle. Trump’s gamble isn’t working.

After returning to office, Trump embarked on a historic run of executive orders, which were met (depending on the audience) with extreme panic and celebration. But four months in, after judges have thrown many of those orders in the garbage, he doesn’t have much to show for it.