Consider This from NPR - Trumps first 100 days have pushed the limits of presidential power to new levels

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

President Trump is pushing the boundaries of executive power in nearly every area of policy. From his trade war, to immigration, to education, to the reductions in the federal workforce.Many of his actions are direct challenges to the Courts and to Congress. Those two branches of government are designed to act as checks on the president. Trump has governed largely by unilateral executive action... and left lawmakers on the sidelines. NPR's Juana Summers talks with political correspondents Mara Liasson and Susan Davis about the changing power dynamic.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The first 100 days of President Trump's term have at times felt like a tectonic shift in American government. So it might surprise you that so far Trump has only signed five bills from Congress into law, the fewest to start a presidential administration in seven decades. That's according to an analysis by Time magazine. Trump has instead governed largely by unilateral executive action and left lawmakers on the sidelines. He listed some of those actions at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday. Last month, I signed a historic executive order to begin the process. I signed executive orders to abolish critical race theory.

I signed an order that will lend automatic citizens. I also signed an order to require... And I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America. Executive orders are not new, but Trump has pushed the limits of his power further than any modern president. He's slashed money appropriated by Congress, a move Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington attacked as unconstitutional in an NPR interview earlier this year. We passed it with Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate.

The president signs it into law. He cannot then break that law and say, well, I like this part, but not this part. That's called impoundment and it is illegal. And his administration has resisted court orders saying they infringe on the president's constitutional authority. On Tuesday, Trump was asked in an ABC interview about Kilmar Abrego-Garcia. He's an immigrant who the Trump administration deported to a Salvadoran prison by mistake, a mistake they have admitted.

The Supreme Court has affirmed a federal judge's order that the Trump administration facilitate Abrego-Garcia's return from El Salvador. ABC correspondent Terry Moran pressed Trump on that point. And depending how you define facilitate, Trump seemed to admit he was defying the order. You could get him back. There's a phone on his desk. I could. You could pick it up and all the power of the presidency. You could call up the president of El Salvador and say send him back right now. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that. But the court has ordered you to facilitate that. Consider this. In his first 100 days, Trump's actions have challenged what are supposed to be

co-equal branches of government. How have they responded? From NPR, I'm Juana Sommers. on a summer's. It's consider this from NPR, President Trump is pushing the boundaries of executive power in nearly every area of policy, from his trade war to immigration to education to the federal workforce. Many of Trump's actions are a direct challenge to the courts and to Congress, the two branches of government designed to act as checks on the president. NPR political correspondents Mara Liason and Susan Davis have been covering this power

dynamic. They join me now. Hi to both of you. Hi there. Hi there. Mara, if you could kick us off, I want to start here with just a very basic question. What is at stake with this push from President Trump and his allies to consolidate power

within the executive branch? What's at stake is our system of government. The founders designed a system with three co-equal branches. They believed in broadly distributed power, what we call checks and balances. They knew that they couldn't stop someone from being elected who they would have said had monarchical tendencies.

They wouldn't have said authoritarian. But they did think that this broadly distributed power system could stop that person from doing a lot of damage if he was elected. But now we're going to have a test of that because the judiciary, which is one of the co-equal branches, cannot enforce its ruling. It depends on willing acceptance of its role as a co-equal branch of government by the executive. And we are now in the midst of a kind of rolling escalation of confrontation between the executive and the judicial branch.

And depending on how it comes out, we might end up with a system that has a vastly empowered executive and a kind of withered judicial and legislative branch. So, over to you. When Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House as it is now, there's not generally much pushback on the president. So tell us what's different about this moment. Right. Like part of this isn't a new story.

Congress over many decades has been ceding power to the executive. Some scholars would argue that dates back as far as the New Deal. But no president has gone as far as Donald Trump to intrude on Congress's constitutional power to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent. This Elon Musk led effort to cut spending has effectively shuttered agencies and institutions funded by Congress. And Republican lawmakers have by and large just gotten out of their way. This is Speaker Mike Johnson back in February saying he supported what the president was doing. It looks radical. It's not. I call it stewardship.

I think they're doing right by the American taxpayer. And we support that principle. The speaker did acknowledge that a lot of these actions are going to be challenged in the courts, and they'll have to respect that. I'll just note, though, it's not just Doge. The president is also trying to effectively legislate from the Oval Office through executive orders on practically everything from immigration to election law. Right. Like, consider that in his first 100 days, Trump has issued around 139 executive

actions. That's almost as much wanna as former president Biden issued in his entire four years in office. In that same 100 day time period, Congress has only passed five laws. It's the lowest number in decades. But again, Trump is not the first president to make law. Recall former president Biden tried to do the same thing with his student loan forgiveness program that was struck down by the Supreme Court. But Trump is certainly acting as an accelerant on this practice. Well, Mara, if Republicans control the White House and Congress, why doesn't Trump just try to propose and pass legislation, which is the way, as a former congressional reporter,

the system was intended to work? It was intended to work that way. but if you have an extremely small majority, as the Republicans do, that means you have to compromise. And that's hard. And when past presidents tried to do very big lifts and big, ambitious pieces of legislation, they had bigger majorities. But also, not passing a lot of things through legislation

goes with the President Trump's concept of executive power. He is the EO President, not the legislative president. And he gravitates towards things like immigration and foreign policy and trade, which were areas where presidents have a pretty free hand. They don't need the judicial branch or the executive branch to do what they want to do. But the other thing about executive orders is they are not permanent. What executive orders giveth, the executive orders of the next president can take it away.

And I also think Trump has benefited from a reality in which Congress has been incapable for years of passing legislation to solve tough issues. I think immigration is probably the best example of that. Former President Reagan was the last president to sign comprehensive immigration bill into law. So when Congress is this dysfunctional, it just creates an opportunity for the president to act on those issues. I gotta ask about the politics here. Republicans control the house by just a narrow two-seat margin, which I imagine must factor into the calculations on Capitol Hill. Always. I mean the party in the White House almost always loses seats in the midterms.

And I talked to Kevin Kosar about this. He's a congressional scholar with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. And he spoke to what I think is a pretty commonly held view here in DC that Republicans are likely operating within a two-year window. The amount of deference that legislators are showing is to some degree like we just have to do this to see if we can rack up as many wins as possible because those midterms are

probably not going to go our way. The majority largely rises or falls on the popularity of the president. So there's really no ability for Republicans here to create any daylight with Trump. So they just have to go all in. Mara, was any of this a surprise to voters who voted for Trump based on promises to make exactly the kind of changes we are seeing him make right now? Well, I think that to some people it has been a surprise. Remember, voters were tired of a for Trump based on promises to make exactly the kind of changes we are seeing him make right now? Well, I think that to some people it has been a surprise. Remember, voters were tired of a broken gridlocked Congress. That's part of why Trump got elected.

He was the change candidate. Voters wanted change. We're going to find out soon whether all these things were the kind of change they expected. But I think what Sue was talking about, Congress abdicating its role is so important here. This is a voluntary giving up of their constitutional responsibilities. And remember, Article 1 is about the legislative branch. The founders decided to put them first. And look, this is consequential to how this country works.

Congress was designed by the founders to be the branch that was most closely in touch with the people and best serves this ideal of self-governance. I spoke to Professor Joseph Postel of at Hillsdale College and he spoke to the urgency of it. Regardless of who the president is and regardless of which party controls Congress, I see the decline of a Congress that legislates as a serious constitutional crisis. Because look, arguably, if you shift more power to the executive, you have a government that is less reflective of the will of the people. Maura, you said that this is a test for really the entire system of American government.

So help us understand what might come next. Well, what comes next is does Donald Trump defy a judicial order? And then what does the judicial branch of government do since it has no power to enforce that order? The other thing that comes next is what does the public think about all this? Do they like the changes that Trump is making in terms of expanding executive power? Our latest NPR poll, NPR Marist PBS poll, showed that his approval rating is only 39% and 45% of people gave Donald Trump an F for his first 100 days in office.

That is NPR's Mara Liason and Susan Davis. Thanks to both of you. You're welcome. You're welcome. This episode was produced by Conor Donovan. It was edited by Kelsey Snell and Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR.

I'm Juana Sommers.