Checks and balances.
I can’t count how many times I heard those words in the history and social science classes of my youth. They were less a phrase than a mantra, repeated endlessly by teachers assuring us of our Constitution’s genius. To answer monarchy, to deter despots, our nation’s founders had created this elegant separation of powers and these brilliant checks and balances, which supposedly had the added benefit of inoculating us from extremism. Checks and balances were our tyranny vaccine.
Its efficacy is fading fast. Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has exerted unfettered authority over pretty much anything and everything that tickles his fancy, caresses his ego or bloats his wealth. And he has been largely unchecked by Congress, whose Republican majority is his pathetic pep squad. He has been inadequately balanced by the courts, as his administration contrives ways to delay, defy or otherwise evade their rulings and as he benefits from decades of Republicans’ painstaking elevation of jurists friendly to the party.
He’s the monster the founders dreaded, rehomed from their nightmares to the Resolute Desk, where he’s teaching us a lesson I didn’t get in school: Some of the most important checks and balances reside not in the architecture of our government but in the stirring of our consciences, the murmurings of our souls.
Why is Trump attempting and getting away with power grabs that so few of his predecessors — and certainly none in the past half-century — did? Because he’s unscrupulous and unashamed. Because he’s unmoved by precedent, propriety, decency. Because he’s rapacious, and he has no interest in appetite control.
Presidents as a rule relish ruling, and believe that they’re especially suited to it. That amalgam of ambition and arrogance is what made them reach for the presidency in the first place. But most of our presidents before Trump seemed to worry at least a smidgen about overreaching — about dictatorial behaviors that would alienate allies, offend voters and earn them damnation from historians. They felt pinpricks of honor. Flutters of humility.
Trump is carefree. “I have the right to do anything I want to do — I’m the president of the United States,” he said on Tuesday, when, for three appalling hours, members of his cabinet competed to find the loftiest superlatives, the rosiest adjectives, to describe his majesty. Had one of his recent predecessors uttered that line, it would have been the story of the week, the month, the year.
But from Trump it’s routine. It’s also an uncharacteristically truthful review of the past seven and a half months, during which he and his helpers have unrestrainedly brandished such tools as executive orders, emergency declarations, lawsuits and investigations to extort law firms and universities; dismantle programs that Congress already funded; lay claim to all trade policy and tariff rates; fire federal workers who might resist his corruption of the Department of Justice or undercut his claims of unalloyed success; torment people he regards as political enemies; intimidate and marginalize unsupportive media organizations; and take over the policing of the nation’s capital. That’s a partial list. And Trump is probably just getting started.
We’ve seen cracks aplenty in our vaunted checks and balances before this cursed year; we’ve had other presidents who treated them as annoyances to be ignored or ankle weights to be ditched. And history harbors noble as well as shameful examples of such willfulness. While Andrew Jackson’s flouting of a Supreme Court ruling in favor of Cherokee sovereignty and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of an executive order to round up and incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry reflect our darkest impulses, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — also an executive order — reflects our brightest.
Trump, however, isn’t operating in a wartime context, no matter how much he huffs and puffs about migrant invasions and cities under criminal siege. He’s not animated, as was Lincoln, by any grand moral vision. Nor is he promoting and imposing any coherent ideology, a fact recently apparent in the right-wing socialism of his insistence on a 10 percent government stake in Intel and in his bids to set nationally uniform voting rules, to extract new congressional districts from Republican-led states and to sideline local law enforcement officials. So much for the free-market, small-government conservatism that Republicans once exalted. Trump exalts Trump, and his sole driver is domination — of the Kennedy Center, of the Smithsonian, of every corner of government, of every cranny of culture.
And of the lawmakers who could try to stand in his way. For Congress to check and balance Trump, its members must first be willing to. It’s a separate power only if those members hold themselves separate. But the Republicans who control the House and the Senate have instead surrendered all control to Trump, whose vanquishing of Democrats and potential wrath speak more loudly to them than ethics, a word I feel silly typing. They’re dutiful handmaidens and gushing cheerleaders who have given him whatever he wants, including a roster of senior administration officials who are, incredibly, yet more dutiful and gushing than they are. Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he’s extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them is calling dibs on a different toe. No checks and no balance there.
For the free press enshrined in the First Amendment to check and balance Trump — or, for that matter, any other president — the best information must be distinguishable from the worst, and it must find an audience with open minds. But the digital revolution has created a chaos of boutique obsessions, splenetic social media posts, deepfakes and slop. Reality is whatever we’ve decided to purchase at the pick-your-truth bazaar. We don’t hold our politicians to account; we turn to the cable news channel or click on the link that tells us what we prefer to believe about them and validates the simplicity of a black-and-white worldview and allegiance to our tribe.
We, the people, have always been the real check, the most important balance, with the power, through our votes, to reject and depose any would-be king with an unstirred conscience and a dormant soul. But we must recognize what’s happening, sit with the alarm of it and rouse ourselves to push back.
I mentioned Roosevelt and his internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. That happened not only because the Supreme Court, stuffed with his appointees, declined to check it. Not only because Congress fell in line. It happened also because he silenced whatever qualms he felt — and his occasional use of the term “concentration camps” perhaps suggests he felt some — and because the American public supported it. The law that Roosevelt relied on was the same one that Trump has invoked to help authorize his mass deportations, which have junked due process and are being hastened by his tripling of the budget for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and his turning of ICE officers into his own paramilitary force. His actions are wholly unbalanced. Will they go unchecked?
Bonus Regan Picture!
Was she ignoring me in protest of my absence? Weary of the sound of my voice? (I know I am.) Or just, well, too tired to stay awake? (It’s an arduous life she leads.) All I know is that I briefly left town for a television appearance, the friend with whom she stayed gave her a chance to keep tabs on me, and she declined.
Didn’t make me any less elated to be reunited with her the next day.
For the Love of Sentences
In The Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith wondered how so many rock musicians remain so fit and energetic in old age: “Is a nightly smash of the guitar the most bracing form of exercise? Is heroin somehow good for you? Does biting the head off a live bat release antioxidants? I’m 59, and my knees make a dispiriting crackling sound, like a pine cone in a campfire, every time I try to jog across the street before the light turns red.” (Thanks to Michael Smith of Georgetown, Ky., for nominating this.)
In another article in The Journal, Smith panned “The Roses,” about a miserably married couple: “People are going to want to walk out of this movie even when it is shown on airplanes.” (Ray Psonak, Tokyo)
On Cleveland.com, Kevin McLaughlin described the keen attention that the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason paid to the rest of the Cleveland Orchestra during a concerto that depended on it: “Kanneh-Mason was the picture of focused listening — concentration so intense his ears seemed to squint.” (Chuck Isaacson, Oshkosh, Wis.)
In The Dallas Morning News, Will Clarke ticked off various American tech companies, including Apple, whose early labors were situated in a humble domestic annex: “Our digital gods are born in garages, not mangers.” (Ann Madonia Casey, Fairview, Texas)
In his newsletter, Alexander Sorondo fondly described an older woman among the regulars where he works: “Maybe 70. She comes into the grocery store armed with smiles and ‘hi’s. Grabs a basket and goes. Less walking than wafting. A stewpot for a purse and a ladle in her hand, dolloping good will and compliments on the heads of passing children. She does her shopping and then rolls up to the register with her Grandma Haul. A Grandma Haul is a cart full of groceries in which no single item is ready to eat; everything is an ingredient for something larger, more nourishing.” (Dave Piazza, North Las Vegas, Nev.)
In The Pickup, John Paul Brammer took issue with a proposal to build the tallest skyscraper in the United States in a very flat state: “It’s difficult to communicate just how dramatically its completion would transform the Oklahoma City skyline, but picture, if you would, a pancake with a yardstick plunged into it.” He added: “I don’t mean to say OKC doesn’t deserve iconic architecture. Far from! I simply think that buildings should reflect the character of a place, like how Santa Fe is all adobe and how Dallas looks designed by a sentient Ford F-150.” (Perry Sailor, Longmont, Colo.)
In her newsletter, Mary Geddry experienced Trump’s ramblings to journalists in the Oval Office last Monday as “less a press conference than a slurred soliloquy of decay, staged under the chandeliers of American decline.” (Teri Sopp, Jacksonville, Fla.)
In his newsletter, Jim Acosta reacted to the labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, fawning over the president during that three-hour cabinet lovefest: “Get a room. Just not the cabinet room, please.” (Linda Hoffman, Georgetown, S.C.)
In The Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi offered an explanation for what she sees as unusually conspicuous cosmetic surgery among the MAGA elite: “These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging.” (Chris McDonald, Gainesville, Va.)
In The Bangor Daily News of Maine, Jason Cook, a Canadian, responded to a Maine legislator’s invitation for western Canada to join the United States: “No thanks, senator. Keep your welcome mat. It’s frayed, it smells like hypocrisy and it leads straight into a house that’s on fire.” (Lee Clein, Bangor, Maine)
In Esquire, Dave Holmes contemplated the choice confronting young American scientists facing the Trump administration’s assault on research: “You could live in fear of being sent to the gulag for your frog embryos not having their citizenship papers in order, or you could go live in a place like Australia, where you’re valued and well compensated, where your lifesaving work is free of political manipulation and where Chris Hemsworth is a 6. Who wouldn’t take that deal?” (Dave Pramuk, Napa, Calif.)
In The Times, David Wallace-Wells charted our response to artificial intelligence: “As A.I. has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives, A.I. hype has evolved, too, passing out of its prophetic phase into something more quotidian — a pattern familiar from our experience with nuclear proliferation, climate change and pandemic risk, among other charismatic megatraumas.” (Kevin Campbell, Brattleboro, Vt., and Jeremy Posner, Manhattan)
Also in The Times, Vanessa Friedman weighed in on fuselage fashion: “The way we dress to fly suggests we’ve surrendered to the mortification of the experience. And yet there is nothing worse than disembarking from a plane in full rumple, waiting for your bags at the luggage carousel and running into someone you know while looking like the most crushed version of yourself.” (Rob Reilly, Darien, Conn.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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