A Multi-Front War to Remake US & World

In the first 100 days, President Trump has waged an all-out war. It could lead to consolidation of his power or invite deeper resistance against his power

- Prashant Jha

In his quest to remake America and the world, Donald Trump is deliberately sharpening contradictions with forces he sees as obstacles to his ability to exercise power and fulfill ideological goals. The big question is whether he succeeds in shifting the balance of power in his favor or whether his multi-pronged assault results in a multi-pronged backlash or whether he advances in some domains and retreats in others.

President Trump's first domestic battle is against the US judiciary. In his first term, Trump already remade the American judiciary with a plethora of nominations of arch conservatives at different levels. When he was out of power, Trump benefited from the Supreme Court judgment on abortion (the order won him the Christian Right's loyalty) and presidential immunity (by offering a wide definition of what constituted official actions, the order absolved him of January 6-related crimes and gave him unchecked power in this term). However, to counter the work done to hold him to account for his alleged crimes, Trump sowed doubts about the legitimacy of the judiciary throughout the campaign. By effectively declaring himself above law, and now by defying judicial orders on immigration-related cases, Trump is ratcheting up the confrontation with the one pillar of American democracy that can still halt his administration's actions. This is a battle that Trump feels comfortable fighting. He doesn't think the judiciary has much popular legitimacy; the judiciary has no other tool but executive compliance to enforce his decisions; if he fights them on immigration, it is easy to construct a potent, even if false, narrative casting judges as partisan to "illegal aliens." But how this battle shapes up will answer a key question: Will independent judicial authority and individual civil liberties survive in America or be subject to executive arbitrariness?