President Trump called for one federal judge seeking basic information about his deportation efforts to be impeached amid mounting concern about a constitutional showdown.
Another judge found that Mr. Trump’s efforts to shut down a federal agency probably violated the Constitution and stripped Congress of its authority.
The president was accused of overstepping his executive authority yet again in firing two Democratic commissioners from an independent trade commission.
And that was just Tuesday.
Nearly two months into his second term, Mr. Trump is trying to consolidate control over the courts, Congress and even, in some ways, American society and culture.
His expansive interpretation of presidential power has become the defining characteristic of his second term, an aggressive effort across multiple fronts to assert executive authority to reshape the government, drive policy in new directions and root out what he and his supporters see as a deeply embedded liberal bias.
“We’ve never seen a president so comprehensively attempt to arrogate and consolidate so much of the other branches’ power, let alone to do so in the first two months of his presidency,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, has ceded some of its core duties to Mr. Trump, handing off elements of the legislative branch’s spending authority to the White House and standing aside as congressionally chartered agencies are shuttered. The president has threatened to “lead the charge” against the re-election of the rare Republican who dares challenge his agenda, and the party has bent to his will at every turn.
Mr. Trump has dismantled independent measures of checks and balances, fired inspectors general and installed loyalists at the Justice Department willing to carry out his campaign of retribution. He has targeted private law firms with connections to those he views as political enemies and cowed previously skeptical or hostile business leaders into pledging public support, even as he has imprinted his “MAGA” stamp on the private sector by trying to dictate hiring practices.
His efforts to reshape institutions in his image have not been limited to the government and policy. Mr. Trump has tried to spread his influence through the arts, as well, by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
But Mr. Trump’s latest target — the judiciary — has been described by constitutional scholars and historians as perhaps the most alarming power play to date.
The Trump administration brushed off an order by James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, who sought to pause the deportation of a group of migrants, many of whom received little to no due process. Administration officials said that most of the migrants were from Venezuela and that all of them were affiliated with gangs. But officials did not release the migrants’ names or evidence of their alleged crimes.
Mr. Trump has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, arguing on social media that “if a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”
The White House did not respond late Wednesday to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has never been consistent in his attacks on the judicial system generally and on judges in particular. Last week during a speech at the Department of Justice, he suggested that criticism of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida jurist who dismissed the classified documents case against him last summer, may not be legal.
But he has applied the same logic of fairness to court cases that he has to presidential elections: They’re fair if he wins but not if he loses.
In one way or another, Mr. Trump has been a party to lawsuits going back to the 1970s, as a private developer and later as a candidate and president. When he has lost cases, he has tended to attack the judges in question as partisan activists or worse.
When he wins, he praises the judge in question.
Mr. Trump’s allies say he is using his power to enact an agenda that he promised during the campaign, and that he is executing Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the powers of the president.
“President Trump’s doing the unthinkable in Washington — he’s doing what he told Americans he was going to do, and he’s doing it fast,” said Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.
Still, a few traditionally right-leaning voices have expressed concern.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example, said Mr. Trump had campaigned on deporting gang members, “but it’s still troubling to see U.S. officials appear to disdain the law in the name of upholding it.” The New York Post ran a headline on its opinion page that said: “Trump, don’t heed the dangerous urge to attack the rule of law.”
Both papers are part of the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again ally.
The judiciary, created to provide checks and balances to both the executive and legislative branches, has only rarely faced such open defiance, experts say. Some of Mr. Trump’s top lieutenants have suggested he has a right to defy court orders.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President JD Vance declared last month.
“I don’t care what the judges think — I don’t care what the left thinks,” Mr. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said this week during an appearance on “Fox & Friends.”
Mr. Trump’s allies often point out that he is doing what he said he would do during his campaign, when his policy platform, Agenda 47, laid out an agenda of maximalist presidential power. He and his advisers believe he was stymied in his first term through investigations and a resistant federal bureaucracy.
Some of his closest allies, including Russell T. Vought, Mr. Trump’s current and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, spent years preparing for the possibility of a second Trump presidency, searching for pockets of independence in the executive branch that could be seized.
Mr. Vought and other Trump allies have advocated a doctrine called the unitary executive, a legal theory that all power in the executive branch flows from the president.
“The great challenge confronting a conservative president is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” Mr. Vought wrote in the conservative blueprint for a Republican presidential transition, Project 2025. He added that it would take “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
One of the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed since taking office, which called for taking over “independent regulatory agencies,” asserted similar goals. “For the federal government to be truly accountable to the American people, officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people’s elected president,” the executive order states.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, a former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the first Trump administration and a contributor to Project 2025, said those who criticize Mr. Trump’s use of executive power “are doing so primarily to weaken the presidency and this president in particular under the guise of ‘conventional wisdom’ that has no constitutional foundation.”
Critics of how Mr. Trump is approaching his executive authority say the unitary executive theory does not mean that everything the president does is legal.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who studies fascism and authoritarianism, singled out what she said were some of Mr. Trump’s most troubling behaviors: the expansion of executive power, the politicization of the other branches of government, the dismantling of an oversight and accountability structure, and the targeting of those who seek to hold the president and his allies accountable.
“The ultimate beneficiary of the acts that we’re seeing happen, whether it’s with the judiciary or other agencies, is Trump himself, because it’s an expansion of his personal power,” she said. “The scale and the speed of what’s going on is terrifying.”
