The Real Test Launched By Trump 2.0: Defining Executive Power

Teeing up the court fights now

Feb 06, 2025

To consider those clearly, we should remember an essential distinction. The president’s power should be understood in two different contexts: in relation to the executive branch over which he presides, and in relation to the larger constitutional system in which he plays a part. Donald Trump clearly wants to exert his authority over both, but the two are not the same.
A rough but useful rule of thumb would be that the president does command the executive branch but the executive branch does not command our government.
When it comes to the work of the executive branch, the president’s authority really is supreme. Article II of the Constitution begins with the stark pronouncement that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That means the executive branch is essentially a single individual. Everyone else who exercises executive authority in our government does so on the president’s behalf, with his implicit or explicit authorization.
The Constitution doesn’t trust anyone with truly unrestrained power, so executive authority is purposely entangled with the other branches, and in marginal ways this even extends to the president’s command over his underlings. Congress can create executive agencies, though their employees work for the president. Appointments to senior executive offices have to be approved by the Senate, and their occupants can be impeached and removed by Congress. The courts can review the legal and constitutional validity of some of the president’s uses of his power over those who work for him. But ultimately, in the everyday practice of administration within the bounds of the laws, the president is in charge of the executive branch.
He is not, however, singularly in charge of the government as a whole. In relation to the larger constitutional system, the president’s role is constrained and is in many respects overshadowed by Congress. His core function is to take care that the laws Congress has passed are faithfully executed. So he is accountable to the law and bound by its strictures. The resources at his disposal are determined by Congress, which alone has the authority to set the levels of taxation, spending, and borrowing. Executive orders and administrative actions by the president can command the executive branch regarding how to carry out the law, but not regarding whether to do so, and they are reviewable by courts.
The extent of both these sets of presidential powers — over the executive branch and within the constitutional system — is always contested and ambiguous. But the Constitution leans toward an expansive understanding of the first and a constrained understanding of the second.
Today’s originalist Supreme Court does too. A majority of the justices tend toward a unitary conception of the executive branch, which treats the president as supreme within his domain, but toward limits on executive power in the interbranch struggle. That’s how the same Court, in the same term, can overturn Chevron deference (constraining the power of executive agencies to interpret the meanings of laws) while reinforcing executive privilege (guarding the freedom of the president to exercise his power as chief executive).
Seeing this difference should help us draw some distinctions regarding some early actions of the new administration. Generally speaking, the president has a lot of leeway for setting personnel policy, or deciding who will operate what computer system to facilitate Treasury payments. There are still legal limits on these things, and it’s possible for executive officials, even with the president’s permission, to act illegally in administering federal agencies, but the courts will not be quick to limit the president’s discretion to administer his own administration.
On the other hand, the president cannot unilaterally close down government agencies created by law. And it is not likely that the courts will allow him to refuse to spend money mandated by Congress.
None of these lines is entirely simple and clear. But in broad terms, if the argument you hear is that President Trump is not allowed to decide who does what in his administration, then you should be skeptical. But the argument that the administration can’t refuse to do what the law demands or can’t act where no legal authority exists is likely to prevail.

The Origin of Make Gaza The Riviera?

The Telegraph reports.

It all seemed clear to Jared Kushner as he discussed the future of Gaza in an interview at Harvard University last February.
“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” he said, referring to the offices of his new investment firm, Affinity Partners, in the coastal Florida city that has witnessed an eruption of skyscrapers and deluxe hotels over the last decade.
Mr Kushner’s 11,000 sq ft headquarters boasts floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out over the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.
Like Miami, Mr Kushner mused that Gaza possessed “very valuable” waterfront property and could become a hub for tourism – if the Gazan people were relocated, at least temporarily, out of the area.
Prof Tarek Masoud, the interview’s host, appeared shocked at the apparently off-hand remarks by Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
“Is there anyone talking about this in Israel?” asked the chairman of the Middle East Initiative, which was hosting the talk. “I don’t know,” Mr Kushner replied, shrugging his shoulders.
On Tuesday morning, after Mr Trump announced strikingly similar plans to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”, the world was barely talking about anything else.
Flabbergasted analysts wondered whether Mr Trump, a braggadocious real estate developer who cut his teeth in 1980s New York, was simply dreaming of the deal of a lifetime, or proffering a madcap scheme to distract the attention of the world’s media.
But Mr Trump’s own words – and his choice of key Middle East advisers – suggest months, if not years, of forethought. A cat may have been thrown on the table, but this one is alive and clawing.
On Sunday, before he boarded the flight that would take him to Washington, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, praised his army for “redrawing the map” of Gaza, adding: “But I believe working with President Trump, we can redraw it even further and for the better.”
On Monday morning, as he waited for the arrival of Mr Netanyahu, White House aides told Mr Trump that rebuilding Gaza would take at least 15 years.
Then began a day in which the president’s blue-sky thinking started to show through the clouds. Signing a number of executive orders in the afternoon, Mr Trump said Palestinians had “no alternative” to moving out of Gaza, which was a “demolition site”.
As he welcomed Mr Netanyahu for a one-on-one chat, he added that the population should be “thrilled” to live somewhere better than in a disaster zone, claiming Jordan and Egypt would be happy to go along with his plan.
In the meeting, Mr Netanyahu reportedly gifted the president a golden pager, a nod towards the detonation of thousands of the devices in the hands of Hezbollah operatives last year.
It was evening when Mr Trump dropped his bombshell, speaking to reporters alongside Mr Netanyahu in a formal press conference at the White House.
The US would take a “long-term ownership position” of the Gaza Strip after relocating the Palestinian people, he said, rebuilding it into a glitzy destination not just for them, “for a specific group of people, but for everybody”.
“This was not a decision made lightly. I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he added, but said Gaza would become the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr Trump told Mr Netanyahu in late summer that the Gaza Strip was a prime piece of real estate, and he should think about what kind of hotels could be constructed there.

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Is The NFL The Last Major DEI Holdout?

Andrew Beaton.

In 2020, as protests over racial inequities and police brutality swept across the country, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell ordered the league to embark on an all-out blitz in support of social-justice issues.
“End Racism” was stenciled into the back of end zones. A song known as the Black national anthem was played before games. The league committed hundreds of millions of dollars to back equality initiatives.
But five years later, as the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles prepare to square off in Sunday’s Super Bowl, the NFL finds itself in a very different position. Even as the rest of America is running away from diversity efforts, America’s most popular sport is digging in.
Newly re-elected President Trump, who plans to attend Sunday’s game, has quickly moved to unravel diversity, equity and inclusion plans in the federal government. Fortune 500 companies have taken steps to roll back their own diversity practices. Firms that haven’t followed suit have faced criticism from activists and agitators.
At the same time, the NFL has come under fire over accusations that its own diversity practices aren’t tough enough. The league is coming off a hiring cycle that raised questions about whether policies designed to ensure a diverse pool of candidates gets considered for jobs such as head coach are actually working.
In the new national reckoning over DEI, the NFL is somehow feeling the squeeze from both sides.
Unlike many business leaders, though, Goodell wasn’t shy this week about taking a clear stance on the issue—even if it’s one that won’t find favor among many of the 100 million viewers who tune in for the Super Bowl. He firmly stood by the NFL’s diversity initiatives and said they won’t change just because the political climate has shifted, adding that they’re both positive for the league and a “reflection of our fan base and our communities and our players.”
“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League, and we’re going to continue to do those efforts,” Goodell said. “We’re not in this because it’s a trend to get into it or a trend to get out of it.”
That attitude, people familiar with the matter say, is shared by NFL owners, who have pushed for the league to stick with its policies—even though many of them have publicly supported Trump. They point out that the league has never had hiring quotas, but has stuck by the idea that the NFL is at its best when its teams select from a wide array of candidates.

The Right Young Things Take Washington

Kara Kennedy.

‘What made you open a restaurant?’ I ask Bart Hutchins, the owner of Butterworth’s, a French-style bistro turned Republican hangout, frequented by the youthful wings of the Grand Old Party. It’s home to figures from the intellectual right such as Curtis Yarvin and darlings of New Right media including Natalie Winters, the increasingly slim White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
‘Have you read Death in the Afternoon?’ Bart says. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s by Hemingway.’ ‘I know.’
Bart pulls his phone out and starts to recite a few lines: ‘In cafés where the boys are never wrong; in cafés where they are all brave; in cafés where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble table tops among the shucked shrimps of
seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in cafés.’
Not the response I was expecting, yet Bart isn’t the first to get all lyrical about the change happening in Washington. Trump himself has said his second term would usher in a new era of opulence and glamour. He told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago: ‘We’re hotter now than they ever were in the Roaring Twenties, I believe. We’re going to be a lot hotter.’ The contrast with Joe Biden’s D.C. could not be more stark. For Biden-era Washington-ians, to be cool was to be unpatriotic and pessimistic, and to believe that everybody else was bigoted, racist, misogynistic, dumb. The only people you would surround yourself with were people who thought like you. To argue with the other side was to enable or ‘platform’ them. This served to make an already notoriously un-fun and politics-obsessed city even less cool.
But the fog is lifting and Washington has changed. Millennial men in grey suits have been swept aside by blond Gen Z-ers with spray tans, still in suits but markedly more stylish and expensive. There are now right-wing bars and parties and MAGA hotspots. D.C. will always be a city that makes you, as they say, choose a side, so there are still lots of unnecessary outward displays of political tribalism. But the big difference is that the self-hatred has all but vanished – and fun is in the ascendancy. Out with the happy hours, the protests, the girlboss coffee lunches. What’s in are decadent house parties, martini lunches and miniskirts.
It took less than one week of Trump’s second presidency for the world to notice that the new conservative is bohemian, aesthetically conscious and, dare I say, sexy. Last week, New York Magazine ran a mocking cover story about the ‘young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers’ with the headline ‘The cruel kids’ table’. The article somewhat backfired. Its author, Brock Colyar, accidentally made the young MAGA crowd look suave and jolly. It also later emerged that the picture that magazine splashed on had been cropped to remove the black faces. The host of the event was named as Raquel Debono – a glamorous MAGA influencer and chief marketing officer of The Right Stuff, a conservative dating app created by former Trump staffers and funded by Peter Thiel. Her black co-host, C.J. Pearson, wasn’t named once in the article. He has since claimed that New York Magazine tried to ‘insinuate that I was throwing some KKK kumbaya’.