How will Trump approach — and possibly transform — presidential power?

Washington, DC – United States President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office in just five days, completing a stunning reversal of fortune that saw him rebound from defeat after his failed 2020 re-election bid.

Trump’s second term in the White House, starting Monday, will serve as the latest test to his strong-armed approach to presidential power.

How he proceeds could transform an office that has, for decades, grown in potency, despite its constitutional design as a balance to the legislative and judicial branches of the US government.

Indeed, Trump’s sweeping claims of presidential authority — both in his norm-breaking first term and in the years since — have caused disquiet among experts who question what may come in the next four years.

Marjorie Cohn, a professor emerita at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said that Trump’s second presidency has the potential to fundamentally alter the operations of federal agencies that oversee health, safety, water, climate and labour.

She also told Al Jazeera that Trump’s personal desires — and rivalries — could blur the limits of what federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies are authorised to do.

“[Trump] has called for ‘televised military tribunals’ to jail his critics, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence,” Cohn said.

“He may well also enlist the military to target Americans engaged in lawful protest — against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for women’s, workers’ and LGBTQ rights.”

Trend of expanding authority

To be sure, predicting what the mercurial Trump may do is a fraught exercise.

But the next four years will likely reveal where Trump’s tough-talking style separates from his actual objectives, according to Mitchel Sollenberger, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who has written extensively about presidential power.

Trump may be blatant about his zest for power, but Sollenberger explained that modern presidents have, for years, laid the groundwork for expanded executive authority.

That, in turn, has been buoyed by congressional wariness to roll those powers back.

“We are in a relatively unique era of this kind of ‘presidentialism’ or presidential-centered governance,” Sollenberger told Al Jazeera.

He has argued that Trump’s first term saw the same “ratcheting-up” of presidential powers as many of his predecessors who, for the last 100 years, have increasingly relied on executive orders, presidential privileges and policy czars to enact their agendas.

But there are limits, Sollenberger added. One tipping point came under President Richard Nixon, whose belief in expanded presidential powers undergirded a secret bombing campaign during the Vietnam War and the wiretapping of political opponents.

When those actions became public, it prompted widespread backlash, and Nixon resigned in 1974.

Nevertheless, subsequent presidents have also sought to grow the White House’s reach.

In 2001, for instance, then-President George W Bush oversaw the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which allowed him to use “necessary and appropriate force” to pursue a so-called “global war on terror”.

Critics argue that the authorisation allowed Bush and his successors to sidestep Congress’s power as the sole body able to declare war, justifying a wide range of presidential military orders.

Just how far Trump himself can push presidential power will be delineated by the “give-and-take” between Trump, Congress and the judiciary, Sollenberger added.

Trump enters office with a Republican majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, including three appointees from Trump’s first term.

Dictator for a day?

Recent statements Trump has made have only heightened the concerns about his second term — and whether he will stretch the constitutional authority granted to the presidency.

During his re-election campaign, Trump referred to the 2024 election as “our final battle”, at one point telling supporters in Florida they would not “have to vote again” if he won.

Meanwhile, on his Truth Social platform, Trump’s account shared a video that referred to a “unified Reich”, a German word for “realm” often associated with Nazi Germany.

His political opponents also seized on his strongman leanings to blast him as an “autocrat”. For instance, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, described Trump as “a president who admires dictators and is a fascist”.

Trump has leaned into the outcry, with comments seemingly designed to set tongues wagging.

Responding to criticisms in 2023, for instance, he told Fox News he would be a dictator if elected but “only on day one”, pivoting to the executive actions he hoped to take upon entering office.

Since his November election victory, Trump has nominated a slate of loyalists to his incoming administration who have echoed his desires to crack down on critics.

One of his most controversial picks includes Kash Patel, a former federal prosecutor who signalled he may use his office as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to prosecute journalists.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel said on a podcast, repeating Trump’s false claims of election fraud during the 2020 elections.

Project 2025

Trump has also expanded the appointment of so-called policy “czars”, who do not require Senate confirmation, to oversee areas including border security and artificial intelligence.

Some of those appointments have elevated key architects behind Project 2025, an ultraconservative policy roadmap developed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Trump has largely disavowed Project 2025, but his staffing selections signal some of its tenets may become part of his presidential agenda.

“Border czar” Tom Homan, deputy chief of policy Stephen Miller, and Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, all participated in Project 2025. Vought even authored its chapter on presidential authority.

An analysis of the document by Center for American Progress, a left-leaning policy institute, warned that Project 2025 “aims to tear down the system of checks and balances and reimagine an executive branch on steroids and free from any shackles”.

It warned that the presidency could gain “unfettered power to take over the country and control Americans’ lives”.

The analysis highlighted seven areas of expanded presidential power outlined in Project 2025.

They include the weaponisation of the Department of Justice, the use of the Insurrection Act to stifle dissent, and the politicisation of independent agencies and civil servants.

Several of those goals already overlap with Trump’s stated goals or past actions, the report added.

Trump has repeatedly said he will seek retribution against political opponents and prominent critics.

In the case of fellow Republican Liz Cheney, he asked his social media followers to weigh in if they would like to see her jailed: “RETRUTH IF YOU WANT TELEVISED MILITARY TRIBUNALS.”

Media reports suggest his transition team has also questioned career civil servants during job interviews about whom they voted for.

All told, the analysis argues that Project 2025 would constitute “a radical governing philosophy, which contravenes the traditional separation of powers [and] vests presidents with almost complete control over the federal bureaucracy”.

Presidential immunity

Cohn and other analysts have argued that the ideology of Project 2025 dovetails with the Supreme Court’s July ruling granting presidents broad immunity for official acts.

Trump’s legal team had used the ruling to counter the criminal cases against him, including the federal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

That indictment highlights Trump’s actions during the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when his supporters used violence to temporarily stop the election’s certification.

While the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling has raised more questions than answers, it is widely expected to embolden Trump during his second term.

“Trump is getting off scot-free for fomenting the January 6 insurrection because the Supreme Court has given him a get-out-of-jail free card,” Cohn said.

Analysts also point out that Trump has managed to dodge any serious repercussions for the four criminal indictments he faced while out of office.

The two federal cases he faced have been dropped since his re-election, with officials citing a Department of Justice policy not to prosecute sitting presidents. A third case, also involving election interference, has stalled in the state of Georgia.

And in New York, Trump’s conviction on falsifying business records resulted in a largely toothless sentence of “unconditional discharge”, with no prison, parole or fines given as penalty.

Sollenberger noted that the federal case into election interference was not necessarily grounded because of its legal merits.

Rather, prosecutors maintained Trump would have been convicted for using “lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process”.

That case presages how Trump might once again test the limits of the presidency, according to his critics. But those limits remain far from clear, according to Sollenberger.

Sollenberger said that there “remains a grey area of what is presidential duty and what is not”.

“The question remains, how do we parse that out?”

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