How this is ultimately the fault of Congress
and the Supreme Court
This is because constitutional commentary usually requires there to be a settled body of rules and principles to which one may point when examining various political actions and inactions.
But in the United States such an exercise is futile: there are no settled body of rules and principles to which one can point to when examining various political actions and inactions.
Sometimes President Donald Trump and his cronies get away with something, and sometimes they do not. But there seems little rhyme nor reason, even at an abstract level, as to when and why they get their way and when and why they do not.
From an outside perspective, the United States seems akin to a gangster state at home – and (as emphasised by the overnight news about Venezuela) a rogue state abroad.
But in one sense Trump is not ultimately to blame, for there are always potential Trumps in every age and in every place. Knaves and charlatans are not novelties, nor are illiberals and their cruelty.
What usually happens, however, is that the potential Trumps are either kept out of power or restrained when in power by gatekeepers who, in turn, enforce constitutional arrangements and provide checks and balances.
And so what the real cause of the current horrors is the abdication by the United States Congress and Supreme Court of their proper constitutional functions.
Indeed there is a case for all this – all of it – being mere footnotes to the irresponsible failure of the Senate to convict Trump on indictment after the attempted January 6 insurrection. For once he could get away with that, he knew he could get away with anything – and those around him knew they also could get away with anything while Trump was President.
There is no easy way out of this now for the United States – other than a waiting game for elections to come round, which may nor may not make any difference.
So as a new year begins, the United States polity will remain in its darkest days for some time to come. And those days may even get darker.
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Arguably Mitch McConnell is at major fault for not impeaching Trump when in power last time. This would have excised his political power and would have left the Heritage Foundation with no obvious front man to carry their project into power.
there is no “arguably”
There’s not much fundamental difference, at time of writing at least, between what’s happening in Venezuela and what happened in Panama under Bush 1. Neither were approved in advance by Congress.
Just because we find Trump unprecedented doesn’t mean every single action of his is.
Little is “unprecedented” in human affairs and so that is why I rarely use the word in my commentary, and I didn’t use it in my post.
There are laws in place regarding the limitations of Presidential action, but Trump ignores them and Congress is largely not enforcing them. It has been up to individuals to challenge his actions in court, with limited or temporary effect.
However, the takeover of the Kennedy Memorial Center is a real test for Trump as there are statutes preventing the Memorial’s name being changed and the rule change which enabled Trump to win the vote to change the name was illegal.
Thank you as ever for your insights.
Without tackling demand for narcotics in the USA through social and medical programmes (Trump won’t) we are going to see prices rise if supplies are reduced. Inevitable price rises will drive up drug-related robberies to get the cash needed to feed addictions.
Cue: Trump deploys military to cut crime.
This is how democracy ends.
“the real cause of the current horrors is the abdication by the United States Congress and Supreme Court of their proper constitutional functions.”
While I am no supporter of either Congress or the Supreme Court in their current configurations, I don’t think you can ascribe the ‘real cause’ to anyone but the perpetrator and his direct supporters. While the police could do a better job, in many cases, they are not the ‘cause’ of crime: that has to stay with the criminal. So in politics: individuals and institutions can fail (or not perform in the way we would wish) but they are not the cause of another’s malfeasance.
I am sorry that the point in my post was not clear, sadly leading you to miss the point my post was intended to convey.
Which was? Sorry, but I still don’t get it.
The US system’s weakness is the potentially monarchical power of the presidency. Separation of powers is supposed to prevent that. That means Congress and SCOTUS have to play their role. This happens in normal times as a continual back and forth with little lasting consequence, but the separation of powers really matters when you have a group like Heritage deliberately trying to overturn that balance. In this administration both have rolled over or even supported that abrogation of power by the WH.
So yes, SCOTUS and Congress are threatening democracy and basic rights, not to mention global peace, by abdicating their responsibility
Don’t all systems offer the potential of unrestrained monarchical power if none stands up to it? As true of 17th century England or Weimar Germany as Trump’s America.
After the second impeachment (following Jan 6th insurrection), a decision by the Senate to convict Trump followed by a 14A disqualification vote means that he would have been cut off at the knees
There is a third villain in this from a constitutional point of view: the US Constitution itself.
Berlusconi was also a potential Trump, but was kept in check by a more modern constitution, which didn’t rely on partisan interpretation for its application.
The US’s inability to update its constitution to meet the demands of the current world is the core of the problem, IMO.
Berlusconi was also an idiotic bon-vivant. (Unlike Trump, whose chief enjoyment derives from bullying.) Servicing Berlusconi’s numerous appetites kept him mostly out of harm’s way.
So if Trump had acquired the presidency during his Epstein years he would have been less problematic?
Yes – the famous checks and balances of a mature democracy should be able to deal with such a situation as we find ourselves in at present, and yet these checks and balances we all learned about at school, have spectacularly failed. We must face the fact that democracy sometimes does stupid things, and the voting public as a whole is not always rational or sensible, indeed it can suffer from collective psychosis. The system has its flaws. And yet it is the best we have. We must hope that the basic tenets of the American Republic will soon be remembered, and Americans rediscover their pride in valuing and upholding them. The precedents set by this administration will be hard to counter, but we must all try. We can never go back to the past but must learn from this disaster. Was it caused by hubris – many non-Americans will certainly think so.
The checks and balances are there but they’ve not been applied.
Even if Democrats win enough seats in 2028 to undo Trump’s changes, should we expect restraint and reversal, or has Pandora’s box been opened such that Democrats are more likely to govern as Trump did than return to a now-mythical past?
Good question. Unfortunately, I suspect the latter. In his first term, Trump was largely kept reined in by residual democratic bureaucracy. This time, he’s carried the machinery of public governance so that it resembles that swiss-cheese hatchback I bought as a student (the one so badly rusted that you could see the road through the floor, etc). And once any polity realises it can get away with functioning without regard to democratic checks and balances, they tend, like faeces in a logical sewage system, to remain on the downward glide path of least resistance. I suspect it will require a global calamity of some sort to shock the American public out of their febrile and self-pitying fascist spiral.
You are assuming that the Mid-Term elections will actually take place, which from my perspective looks increasingly unlikely. I suspect Trump plans to invoke some force majeure initiative.
Thank you for the article — it was timely.
I read it with a deep sense of sadness. During the recent tariff shock there was, briefly, a clear window in which coordinated action among partners could have delivered broader utility and reinforced a rules-based balance, rather than letting events default to the preferences of the strongest player. Sadly, we did not take that window.
From a UK perspective, I’m struck by how little moral clarity our leadership has shown when it comes to events and calling out irregularity plainly. That hesitation does not just look like good judgement or prudence; it is rather enabling.
“ In the space of several days, we have lost all certainty. We are in a terrible and irrisistable slope. Nothing that we could fear is impossible; we can fear and imagine absolutely anything” – Paul Valery, 18 June 1940.*
Today, Americans – indeed, all of us – are undergoing a similar, slow-motion, descent into an unimagined future.
——
* Quoted in Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France – Old Guard and New Order- 1940-1944, Prologue, page 3.
I suppose the latest antics get me out of going to Disneyland and handing over my socials. What with the chance of never getting out again. A good excuse to choose a different cultural experience – Hades perhaps.
Seems to me the psychologists’ notion ‘you become the thing you hate’ may apply here. A look at how Venezuela was governed under Maduro and how the US is governed under Trump brings about many parallels. Game show hosts and gangsters. If we look deeper we may find Trump and his gang admired Maduro.
If all you have is a legal pad everything looks like a misdemeanour. A few liberties have been taken with the jots and tittles and the US constitution looks a very nice solid thing that can safely be ignored. The next US election may or may not improve matters. The snag is the K shaped US economy. We shall see if Trump et al take a leaf out of the Chavez/Maduro playbook.
What now? I don’t suppose the drug barons are all that bothered, ‘Frisco will still be stoned. How the more dubious oil transporters will get along with the US running the oil terminals will be interesting. Perhaps the important objective here. The on/off tap is a powerful tool.
The USA is very good at ‘shock and awe’, but pretty useless at running the aftermath, we shall see how it all peters out – along with Venezuelan euphoria.
Excellent point : “We shall see how it all peters out” !
Where is Congress? Have they all been silenced?
No official details of casualties have been provided, though anonymous reports speak of circa 40 Venezuelan people killed by the Americans:
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-operation-in-venezuela-left-people-dead-1767525154.html
Just to recap, Trump and his military have just invaded a foreign
country, and Congress wasn’t even told about it:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/04/trump-congress-venezuela-attack
Where is Congress? Anyone care to explain the point of Congressional elections lol? Potholes and waste collections maybe?
Why are there no headlines such as:
“Furious Congress demands answers from Trump” etc.
But nothing. Isolated bleatings from individual Democrats, but no
formal, unified reaction.
Bang goes domestic US democracy.
This is now officially a one-man dictatorship folks, and US domestic
democracy is a sick facade.
And now, just to rub it in, Trump reckons that he should just remove broadcasting licences from any news outlet that he personally doesn’t like, because, you know, well, just because he personally feels like it:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-broadcast-licenses-terminated-100-negative/
Typically, when the US does something, a few years later, Britain
copies it.
Watch this space.
The UK already ‘happened’: May triggered A50, Johnson prorogued Parliament, and we left our trading bloc.\Ends.
Do you think the US judiciary believe they have jurisdiction over a sitting Head of State?
Does US polity mean that Maduro is to get a trial which is speedy just and fair ?
Will we be allowed to watch the trial live on our smartphones ? Remember Woodward.
Should he be found not guilty will the US transport him back to Caracas as a free man ?
Why has Maduro been filmed in handcuffs in America yet there has been no film of his co accused wife ?
In a Congress where most on either side of the aisle seem to have given up on the idea of bipartisan action, and with a Republican majority in both houses, and given the cost of individual Republicans standing up to Trump, I don’t think it’s a surprise that Congress has failed. Maybe after the midterms.
What I find harder to come to terms with is SCOTUS giving Trump so much freedom or impunity. In the short run, you can point to the recent Republican appointees. There’s a naive voice in the back of my mind that keeps saying ‘you took an oath!’ but the court has been bedeviled by partisan appointment for generations.
We all hope there’ll be an ‘after’ for the US, but it won’t follow the kind of wholesale defeat and occupation that allowed, after 1945, for a thorough reset of the institutions charged with maintaining democracy in Germany. I don’t see how there can be an ‘after Trump’ that isn’t just as dysfunctional and rogue unless a new Supreme Court is established; new people, new rules, somehow protected from partisan control. How can such a thing be? Is there somewhere a Baldric with a cunning plan?