Trump’s wish is their command as a furious yet fearful bureaucracy bends to his will to do his bidding!
Can he do it? They asked as Donald Trump, the Disruptor-in-Chief, continued his campaign of slash, burn and sack for the second week running since he returned to the White House, without a care for the legal niceties.
As the Don tested the limits of his presidential authority with little regard for traditional checks and balances, stepping on the toes of Congress and the judiciary alike, he seemed to be egging for a fight.
He may lose some, but may get away with a lot more, suggest legal experts, as he floods the field with executive orders one after another, in a shock and awe strategy giving little time to opposition to recover.
Despite fierce criticism, he is likely to succeed on issues like firing federal employees, ending diversity policies and deporting immigrants who are in this country illegally because the Constitution and the laws generally put those powers in the hands of the president, suggest experts cited by the Los Angeles Times.
READ: Trump signs landmark Laken Riley Act into law targeting undocumented immigrants (January 31, 2025)
“Under our Constitution, the executive power – all of it — is vested in a president,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was cited as saying in 2020. And that includes the president’s nearly “unrestricted removal power” of officials throughout the government.
The court’s conservative majority has also struck down racial diversity policies in universities and said repeatedly that the president has broad authority to enforce immigration laws, the paper noted.
“The purges underway appear to be custom-made opportunities for the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority to strike down the statutes any legal challenges would be based on, furthering its trend in recent years of expanding presidential authority,” according to some experts cited by the New York Times.
“On one level, this seems designed to invite courts to push back because much of it is illegal and the overall message is a boundless view of executive power,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, was cited as saying. “But really, they are clearly setting up test cases.”
Back in 2017 when Tump first entered the White House after a surprise win, it took him 10 days to make his first major firing with his MAGA agenda facing resistance at every step.
READ: Trumpiana: The man with the big black pen (January 27, 2025)
Showing who is in-charge, the man who loves to say “You are fired,” since his “Apprentice” TV show host days, this time unleashed on Day One a firing spree that has sent the federal bureaucracy reeling!
Republican lawmakers afraid of risking his political wrath have quickly fallen in line, and furious yet fearful career officials have been all too willing to do his bidding.
So week two in Trumpiana dawned with a raids blitz across America to roundup “illegal aliens” that didn’t spare even gurdwaras in New York and New Jersey and sent shock waves around the world from neighbouring Mexico to distant India.
As planeloads of “illegals” from Brazil to Venezuela were sent packing, an alarmed Prime Minister Narendra Modi called his “dear friend” in the White House, to assure the Don that he would do “the right thing” about the undocumented from India.
Amid a surprising new trend that has sent the numbers of undocumented from India soaring to nearly a million — the second largest source after Latin America, New Delhi has reportedly agreed to take back 18,000 to begin with.
The Don on his part did not miss the opportunity to ask Modi to buy more defense stuff from the US after making an example of Colombia which agreed to accept deportees after he threatened it with high tariffs and sanctions.
Signing his first bill into law, the Laken Riley Act, expanding deportation powers, Trump ordered opening of a new detention centre for 30,000 ‘worst criminal aliens’ in Guantanamo Bay, where 15 remaining “terrorism suspects” including 9/11 master mind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, are still housed.
After booting more than a dozen inspectors generals, independent watch dogs in various departments, and firing prosecutors who worked on Trump investigations, he launched an overhaul of FBI starting with thousands of agents tied to those probes.
Trump didn’t even wait for the confirmation of Kash Patel, his Indian American pick for FBI director, who published a list of “corrupt actors” from the “deep state” in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters,” to begin a larger purge across FBI.
Trump also ordered the Pentagon to end diversity programs to push out openly transgender people as also reinstate many service members dismissed for refusing the coronavirus vaccine.
Trump also warned roughly two million US federal employees to return to in-person work by February 6 or face termination. Alternatively they could quit and get paid without work until Sep. 30 under a “deferred resignation program.” But there was no guarantee those who choose to stay would not be sacked.
In the midst of all this, he set the cat among the pigeons by wondering aloud at the House Republican Members Conference dinner in Doral, Florida whether he could run for a third term as president. “I’m not sure, am I allowed to run again, Mike?” he asked Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Earlier at an appearance in Las Vegas, Nevada, too he had remarked, “It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times,” stoking speculation about his future political plans.
Hoping that Trump was only joking, experts were quick to suggest that he can’t, even as Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee spoke about amending the US Constitution to permit Trump to run for a third term.
But when did Kings have term limits. So why would “King Donald,” as Patel describes Trump in his 2022 children’s book “The Plot Against the King” — a fairytale reimagining a kingdom where the “Russionians” weren’t a factor in the 2016 election — have to run again?!