Trump Would Need Eight Years

T here’s a lot of euphoria and triumphalism right now among Trump supporters, and even among Trump-skeptical conservatives. It’s easy to get carried away in the whirlwind of activity emanating from the desk of a man who even announced in the middle of the Super Bowl that he is abolishing the penny. But it’s too soon to spike the football or — for that matter, if you’re a Trump critic — to rend your garments. A lot of what Trump is doing now will take eight years to complete.

He has only four, of course. And thus far since his return to the presidency, Trump has passed no new treaties through the Senate. He has seated no new judges on the bench. He has yet to propose, let alone pass, a budget.

He has signed precisely one piece of notable legislation: the Laken Riley Act, which requires illegal aliens to be taken into custody when charged with certain crimes. The House has passed the Women and Girls in Sports Act, which limits women’s sports to actual, biological women, mirroring a Trump executive order. It is possible that some form of the bill might pass the Senate, although the House version failed to attract the votes of even moderate-posturing Democrats such as Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi, who have questioned their party’s stance on this issue. These are not trivial things; they are the sort of wedges that one should exploit to enact good legislation in the aftermath of an election. But in the grand scheme of things, they are not revolutionary change.

By contrast, the great bulk of Trump’s actions so far have been unilateral executive decisions, such as executive orders and efforts through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reduce the government workforce and eliminate wasteful spending. Predictably, the latter efforts have run into a wall of resistance from federal employees, in the form of noncompliance and press offensives and lawsuits.

The “Deep State” of the permanent federal workforce has time on its side, and in some cases, it has the law on its side, too. Those who want to continue implementing policies against the president’s will believe, or hope, that they can wait him out. Trump and Musk believe, or hope, that they can create new facts on the ground that are hard for the next administration to undo.

They may be wrong on that score. Victories in the courts will take time. Even new policies that are not completely resisted are unlikely to be fully implemented and incorporated into new habits and practices right away. Federal bureaucrats who are not successfully removed from office can go back immediately to their preferred policies the instant a Democrat is back in power.

Is this healthy for our system? Yes and no. On the one hand, major changes in policy are supposed to go through Congress. Presidents get to run the executive branch how they want while they are in power, but they are supposed to give way entirely to the next president when they leave office. Anything that is properly done with an executive order is properly undone with another. Some areas of policymaking are more amenable to facts on the ground than others: for example, presidents pursuing a dramatic turnaround in immigration enforcement policy can affect who is and isn’t in the country in somewhat short order. Joe Biden certainly did. For more permanent policy, Congress is needed, and that’s as it should be.

On the other hand, there are two deeply unhealthy dynamics at work that combine to undermine the democratic character of our system as it was designed in the Constitution. One is appropriations that are either permanent by statute or de facto permanent due to the failure of Congress to consider a budget except as a single, take-it-or-leave-it, omnibus spending package. It’s fine to say that laws binding on the citizenry need to remain unchanged unless and until there are 60 votes in the Senate to change them. But if the government is doing things that the White House or a majority of either house of Congress disapproves of, those things are supposed to stop happening simply because there is no longer affirmative consent to spend money on them (at least, not unless a deal is made to get other concessions in exchange). The modern notion that, say, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gets to keep doing everything that is objectionable to Republicans even when there’s a Republican president, a Republican House, and a Republican Senate is baldly anti-democratic.

The other problem is that too much of the government is protected by civil service laws and collective bargaining from being removed. There are fair arguments about the merits of civil service protections and the downsides (which plagued mid-19th-century presidents to the point where it got one of them assassinated) of having the president personally replace much of the federal executive branch one employee at a time every four years. The president doesn’t need the people who mop the floors at the Smithsonian, or serve lunch at the Pentagon, or deliver your mail to be on board with his agenda. Then again, presidential control of postmasters was actually a precipitating cause of the Civil War, as Southern states feared that Republican postmasters would end the Democrats’ policies of censoring anti-slavery publications.

But the fact that we are even considering the possibility that USAID or other agencies will refuse to follow presidential orders because they are staffed by people who disagree with them shows that a significant part of our government is no longer under the control of the voters. Which undermines our self-conception as a democratic republic.

Some of that can be fixed if Republicans in Congress are on board with the Trump and DOGE agenda and are willing to put in the work in the appropriations process of actively defunding functions and even entire agencies and departments. There remains a roiling debate over what, if any, authority presidents have to impound funds — i.e., to refuse to immediately spend money that Congress has directed to be spent. But it is much harder legally to challenge Congress if it simply refuses to provide the money. That said, the appropriations process takes a year to really make itself felt. And if an agency has been given the authority to fund itself without the further consent of the voters and their representatives — as has the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — that alone won’t get the job done.

Eight years, however, is a long time. How many people are willing to wait out nearly a decade in a workplace battle with the boss? Not as many as the number who are willing to wait out four years, especially when the stakes involve things like work-from-home arrangements.

All of which leads back to a hard reality: Trump can’t rest on his laurels with the public. It may feel good to bask in the glow of “we won, suck it libs,” and a 78-year-old president who will never face the electorate again is apt to focus instead on what he can get done. As much as Trump enjoys trolling his critics by suggesting that he might run again, he can’t. But that doesn’t mean that keeping the voters on his side is irrelevant to his legacy. Incumbency may be overrated in presidential elections, but it’s still useful, which is why a major argument by Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primaries was that it was prudent to take on the bureaucracy with someone who could stay for eight years. Instead, Trump will need to ensure a political environment in which JD Vance, or DeSantis, or Glenn Youngkin, or whomever else the party chooses can carry on the work. Because it will still be unfinished when the next election rolls around.