Just 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term, some wonder if the US faces a constitutional crisis. Yale law professor Samuel Moyn tells Jacobin that, rather than resisting authoritarianism, the courts have enabled Trump’s rise.
One hundred days into Donald Trump’s second term in office, it is clear that he is acting with a greater sense of purpose than he did during his first. Not only has he pursued a reactionary anti-immigration agenda, but he has also used executive power to upturn the global free trade order through tariffs and launched an assault on higher education at home. While the goals of these actions remain unclear, many have begun to question whether he is testing the limits of the United States’ constitutional order.
Daniel Bessner spoke to Samuel Moyn, a professor of law at Yale and the author, most recently, of Liberalism against itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, about the helpfulness of describing Trump’s actions as engendering a constitutional crisis. Talk of a constitutional crisis, Moyn argues, relies on a rose-tinted view of US history. Concentrations of power within the presidency have been the norm, and the courts have more often facilitated, rather than halted, the executive’s reactionary actions. To defeat Trump, liberals and the Left will need to come up with a political, rather than legal, strategy.
Daniel Bessner
What do you see as being the major points of interest for Trump in his second term? Obviously Trump has put the institutions and subjects that…
Auteur: Samuel Moyn
