The Trump administration ranks among the most intrusive in American history, driving the tentacles of the federal government deep into the nation’s economy, culture and legal system.
Economically, the administration is dictating corporate behavior through tariffs, subsidies and the punishment of disfavored industries and companies, while rewarding allies with tax breaks and deregulation. And that’s all before the government takes its cut.
Culturally, Trump is seeking to redefine the boundaries of public discourse: pressuring universities, elevating grievance politics and reshaping federal agencies to reflect ideological loyalty rather than expertise or experience.
Within the legal system, the administration is aggressively reshaping the federal judiciary, asserting executive power over independent institutions and using the Justice Department for political ends.
Taken together, these interventions reveal a presidency determined to expand executive reach into virtually every sphere of national life.
“No peacetime president has remotely approached the Trump administration’s campaign to control the conduct of all the major institutions that comprise American civil society as well as its governments,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote to me by email.
This is comparable to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini said even a teacher of mathematics must be a fascist.
Now all who do not take positions on American politics, policies and history that comply with the administration’s views are in danger of being denied funding, subjected to lawsuits, and derided by the White House in ways that can inspire violent private attacks. All this has precedents, but not in America’s peacetime history.
Trump’s intrusions are aimed at wide and varied subjects, with targets that include corporate governance, academia, the legal profession, the administration of justice, criminal investigations of political adversaries and such liberal Democratic organizations as Act Blue and Media Matters.
For Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, the word “intrusive” fails to capture the full scope of Trump’s agenda. Writing by email, Wilentz argued that Trump
has intimidated major institutions of civil society, including universities, major law firms, and the corporate media, to bend them to his will. He has deployed the military for political purposes. He has militarized ICE and turned it into nation’s largest law enforcement force, accountable only to himself and Stephen Miller, thus laying the basis for a police state.
He and his attorney general have hounded federal judges who oppose the Trump agenda to the point where those judges and their families rightly fear for their lives. His appointees to the Supreme Court, in concert with Chief Justice Roberts, are completing the gutting of the 14th Amendment and (as crucially supplemented by the 1965 Voting Rights Act) the 15th Amendment, thereby destroying crucial legal legacies of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
Trump has taken upon himself an attempt to force a revision of the American historical narrative. As Wilentz put it:
Most recently, he has commanded a rewriting of American history as a providential story culminating in his own divinely inspired rule. Approaching the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, he is grasping for a monarchy that the Revolution repudiated, in the name of a plutocratic and theocratic order that the Revolution rejected.
At one level, Trump’s policies are the embodiment of what have been core Republican principles since Ronald Reagan, as foreshadowed by the ultraright big business opposition to the New Deal: slash taxes on the wealthy, bash the poor, dissolve the social safety net and deregulate, deregulate, deregulate.
This is the main reason so many Republicans who otherwise despise Trump remain so loyal to him. They don’t quite get how, alongside his turbocharged Reaganism, Trump is building the framework of an international crime and corruption syndicate, ending restraint of private efforts to corrupt foreign governments, embracing Bitcoin, a currency custom-made for bribery, asset-laundering, and other gangster-like activities.
Trump, Wilentz argued,
is intruding like a wartime president when there’s no war. The only checks on his brazen lawlessness would be the Congress and the Supreme Court. But the first is supine and the second has thus far sustained Trump on 90 percent of the cases where lower courts have tried to restrain him. And if permitted, his assumption of war powers without a war will enable his authoritarian regime.
Bruce Miroff, a political scientist at SUNY-Albany, expanded on Trump’s autocratic approach to government in an email:
Trump himself has an authoritarian mind-set that ignores a checks and balances system that has frustrated some earlier chief executives. But he also has an advantage in the capitulation of the other two branches out of fear, but also out of hope that only under him can a long sought conservative agenda finally roll back the liberal welfare state.
From the early dismantling of the “deep state” to the current takeover of law enforcement in D.C. and Trump’s threat to institute a makeover of the Smithsonian that will stifle any exhibits that don’t use happy talk on even the darkest moments in American history, Trump has forged ahead to shut down anything he dislikes and replace it with his own imagination.
There are experts in presidential studies who contend that other presidents have been more aggressive and activist than Trump.
“Measured in terms of sheer scale and scope,” Terri Brimes, a political scientist at Berkeley, wrote by email, “Franklin Roosevelt’s interventions during the New Deal and World War II eclipsed anything attempted by Donald Trump.”
“F.D.R.,” she continued,
shut down the entire banking system on his first day, imposed sweeping regulations on finance, built an industrial code regime through the National Recovery Administration that reached into prices, wages and production quotas, expanded federal oversight of labor relations, and through the Works Progress Administration and other agencies inserted the federal government directly into the cultural and intellectual life of the nation.
In 1942, through Executive Order 9066, F.D.R. ordered the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. This unprecedented domestic action, justified at the time as a wartime security measure, stripped an entire population of its rights and livelihoods, and stands as one of the most sweeping and controversial exercises of presidential power in American history.
There are, however, major differences between the Roosevelt and the Trump administrations, including Roosevelt’s willingness to respect court decisions and his willingness to seek congressional approval for his policies.
Roosevelt, Brimes wrote,
commanded huge congressional majorities, yet still encountered formidable pushback. The Supreme Court struck down key New Deal programs. Congress blocked or diluted others. Even at the height of his presidency after winning a major landslide election in 1936, his court-packing plan failed, his first attempt at executive reorganization was voted down, and his bid to purge conservative Democrats failed.
By contrast, Trump’s actions have met with far less resistance. Operating largely through executive orders, administrative reinterpretations, and emergency declarations, he has pursued an agenda aimed less at constructing a new administrative order than at dismantling existing institutions, a process requiring little cooperation from Congress.
In short, Roosevelt’s most ambitious projects were checked by resilient institutions; Trump’s have advanced in part because those institutions are weaker.
Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Texas-Austin, pointed to Abraham Lincoln as an activist president in his determination to prevent the South from seceding, to restore the union and ultimately to end slavery.
Lincoln, Suri wrote by email,
was more intrusive than Trump has been so far. Lincoln was the first president to use conscription, requiring Union residents (many recent immigrants) to serve in uniform. He remade the Supreme Court, creating a new bench dominated by Republicans. He limited civil liberties on a number of occasions.
Lincoln used a war order to end constitutionally protected slavery in Confederate-held territories. Lincoln then brought more than 100,000 of those former slaves into the Union Army, gave them guns and sent them to fight their former masters.
That comparison does not, however, diminish the import and adverse consequences of Trump’s invasive policies, Suri wrote:
What makes Trump so different and threatening is how he does things — he is acting unilaterally and on personal whim, largely ignoring separation of powers. He is pushing the boundaries from president to dictator.
That is new in peacetime. F.D.R. and L.B.J. were aggressive, but they worked through Congress and the courts. Trump is willing to work around them. That is what puts him beyond the pale for a historian.
Republicans in Congress have remained both prostrate and complicit in the face of Trump’s assaults on traditional party beliefs even as some of the administration’s policies have alarmed conservative and libertarian proponents of free markets.
The libertarian Cato Institute faulted Trump’s recent deal with Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices allowing the companies to export chips used for artificial intelligence to China in return for the payment of 15 percent of revenues from the sales to the government.
In their Aug. 13, 2025, article, “The Nvidia/AMD-Trump Deal: Legal Questions, Crony Capitalism and National Security for Sale,” Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon, both Cato researchers, wrote:
The president’s unprecedented deal with Nvidia and AMD raises serious legal questions, further entrenches Washington’s crony capitalist favor factory, and gives at least the appearance of putting national security up for bid. Whatever the future of this arrangement, it sets yet another dangerous precedent of the executive branch abusing its national security authorities to influence or dictate the actions of private entities.
Similarly, Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, which supports entrepreneurial scholars and market-oriented thinking, warned in an Aug. 11 essay, “To Aid Economy, Trump Must Restore Faith in Institutions,” that “if the president continues to treat disagreement as disloyalty — especially from vital, independent agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Congressional Budget Office — then Trump’s second term could leave a dark mark on the country.”
In February, Ryan Young, senior economist for the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, published a broadside attacking a key element of Trump’s economic policy, “Trump’s Unilateral Tariffs: Time for Congress to Do Its Job.”
“Why,” Young wrote,
does Donald Trump like tariffs so much? It’s clearly not on the merits. When he talks about trade deficits, or raising revenue, or being treated badly by another country, all he’s doing is rationalizing a conclusion he reached long ago. While Trump is unlikely to ever admit he is wrong about tariffs, the rest of us can learn from his mistakes. This includes Congress, which needs to take back the taxing authority it should never have delegated away in the first place.
“Other countries,” Young argued,
nearly always retaliate against tariffs. It happened with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which led to a 60 percent decline in global trade.
The Canadian and Mexican tariffs almost certainly violate the USMCA, which Trump himself signed in 2018. The best-case scenario here is that our allies think that only Trump is untrustworthy, and not the American government.
Economists of all political stripes know that trade deficits have nothing to do with a country’s economic health.
Tariffs have built-in diminishing returns. The higher the tariff, the less people will import. The steeper the rate increase, the steeper the drop-off in imports, until imports (and revenues) hit zero. This is the point of most tariffs. They are supposed to discourage imports.
These complaints from the right have not deterred Trump, even as his standings in the polls decline.
In terms of public support, Trump began his second term with positive job approval numbers, 50.5 percent favorable to 44.3 percent unfavorable, according to RealClearPolitics. The numbers turned negative in late March, and in the most recent aggregated count, Trump had a disapproval rating of 51.2 percent and an approval rating of 45.8 percent.
Trump’s deviousness, his disregard for the truth and his all-consuming narcissism are exceptional, even among politicians and even among the kind of men and women who seek the presidency.
“Any attempt to compare Donald Trump to any other president is a pointless exercise,” Jack Rakove, professor of history and American studies at Stanford, argued in an email:
His overt acts, craven ambition, delusional beliefs, erratic behaviors, perpetual dishonesty, and mental capacities lie so many norms of deviation apart from all his presidential counterparts that he has to be taken as a unique case.
Simply asking whether “any peacetime president has been as intrusive as Donald Trump” virtually answers the question in itself. Of course not — it would have been literally inconceivable.
Trump, Rakove argued, has adopted a strategy of making false claims to justify casting “himself as a wartime or emergency president.”
The flow of immigrants across the border, Rakove wrote,
may create social problems aplenty, but that does not turn them into the form of “invasion” to which the Constitution refers. You cannot place cities in a state of emergency warranting unprecedented action by federal agencies and the National Guard when their crime and especially their homicide rates are falling.
The fact that American families prefer Japanese automobiles to the Fords we used to buy may contribute to our trade balance, but that does not create the narrowly defined economic emergencies that empower an intrusive president to usurp congressional authority over taxation.
Along parallel lines, Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote by email:
What distinguishes Trump from his predecessors is the aggressive, holistic nature of his intrusions. As with so many other aspects of his second term, Trump stands alone.
The president has used federal funds to intimidate universities into adopting policies he supports, cut research grants that cover issues of diversity and inclusion, forced law firms to agree to pro bono work in order to do business with the government, sued media outlets, called for C.E.O.s to be fired, made F.B.I. agents cops on the beat in Washington, D.C., and forced museums to vet their content to meet the administration’s version of history.
Trump stands apart from his predecessors, Dallek wrote,
because he has been so eager to push past laws, norms, and constitutional guardrails to force institutions and individuals to cater to his vision of American greatness. His intrusive acts have been more aggressive, covering more areas of domestic life, than anything seen in the modern presidency.
George C. Edwards III, a professor emeritus at Texas A&M and a fellow at Oxford, contended that “President Trump is unique”:
No peacetime president has been as intrusive in intervening in the economy, including extracting funds from corporations (Nvidia), requiring domestic investments, strongarming the selection of C.E.O.s, picking winners (fossil fuel companies, steel manufacturers) and losers (wind farms, EV vehicles) in the economy, and using tariffs — to raise revenue, to reduce trade imbalances, and to coerce both U.S. companies and other nations.
And no other peacetime president has so blatantly sought the territory of a sovereign nation. No president has been as hostile to environmental protection, financial regulation, and efforts to advance civil rights.
What makes Trump one of a kind, Edwards wrote, are
his efforts to influence so many other spheres of American life. No president has reached so far into the governing of universities, been so active in determining Kennedy Center honors, and been so eager to employ the symbolic politics of naming everything from athletic teams to mountains and oceans.
What may be most significant of all, in Edwards’s view,
is the president’s undermining the structural and moral underpinnings of the government. Unilaterally dismantling the administrative state by destroying expertise that took generations to build in areas ranging from investigating and prosecuting crime and protecting the public against environmental hazards to predicting the weather and curing cancer can cause long-term, structural harm to American society.
Disregarding appropriate legal bases for action, disobeying judicial orders, punishing law firms, stretching the interpretation of laws, and employing the military for domestic purposes weakens the foundations of American government. So do the many ethical lapses and brazen profiteering of the president and his family. The rule of law is the bedrock of any democracy, and the White House itself is threatening it.
For Trump, the rule of law is not a principle of democratic government; it is a speed bump on the road to exercising unilateral authority. In his own mind, he is on a path to the ultimate in gold-plated power.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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