President Trump recently attempted to explain the complex relationship between the federal government and the states, as outlined by the framers in 1787: "You can call it 'federalist,' you can call it 'the Constitution,' but I call it 'the Constitution.'"
That statement to reporters April 10, and several others of his recently, highlights one of the key issues that has affected America's response to the coronavirus pandemic: federalism.
In its most basic terms, "federalism" is the Constitution's way of distributing decision-making authority. It grants the national government the power to conduct certain activities and reserves the rest of governmental decisions to the states. But who does what is not always clear-cut.
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, the president has made contradictory statements about who is responsible for key aspects of the nation's response to the pandemic.
For example, while Trump asserted he has the authority to order the states to reopen the economy, he also insisted that it is the governors' responsibility to manage coronavirus testing. From my perspective as a constitutional scholar, Trump's statements are haphazard at best and unconstitutional at worst.
But what is the president's role when it comes to guiding the nation through the coronavirus pandemic? How much power do governors have? Who is in charge?
One of the most difficult tasks facing those who drafted the Constitution was the proper distribution of power. Experience living under British rule taught them that power centralized in a single executive could lead to oppression. As a result, many were reluctant to grant too much power to a president.
This was reflected in the Articles of Confederation, adopted after the Declaration of Independence but before the Constitution. They gave a lot of power to the states and almost no power to the national government. Yet governance under the articles illustrated that individual states can fail to work together to overcome big problems, like national security.
What became clear to the Founders was that a central authority is often necessary to coordinate the responses of individual states to the big economic and security issues that face the nation.
Their solution was to grant the national government authority to regulate citizens but not to regulate the states themselves. Put in the most basic terms, Congress and the president lack the constitutional power to tell states what to do.
The Constitution gives the federal government the ability to address national issues like defense, foreign policy and monetary policy. The states retain the power to address the well-being of their citizens. This includes setting health and education policy and even regulating elections.
This constitutional balance between state and federal power is still in flux. Enormous changes in our federal system mean the national government now takes on challenges the framers could not have imagined. For example, the national government protects human health by regulating the environment and helps our ability to communicate by providing uniform standards for internet technologies.
As a result, the president has more expansive power than anticipated. Yet, a large part of the president's executive and administrative tasks involve managing the relationship between the national government and the states.
The president cannot constitutionally issue directives requiring states to address certain problems or commanding governors to administer specific programs. But their administrations can encourage states to adopt certain policies, such as uniform education standards.
Sometimes this occurs by providing federal funding to states, conditioned on their adopting certain policies. The Obama administration, for example, routinely used federal funding to encourage states to adopt his preferred health care policies.
Federalism is often viewed as a conflict between the national government and the states. Yet there are many areas in which coordinated action between all levels of government occurs on a regular basis.
Health care is a prime example. While states have the constitutional power to regulate health and welfare, there is a long history of national government involvement in health policy.
Historical crises such as the Depression and the two world wars highlighted the fact that not every state has the means to address all the medical needs of its citizens. Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has used the national government to expand or improve health care in the states.
The framers recognized the importance of national government in times of crisis. Both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton acknowledged the need for unified, national leadership when the country faced threatening circumstances. Madison said in the Federalist Papers, "The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security."
The coronavirus is such an emergency. So what does all of this constitutional history mean for the nation's response to Covid-19?
First, consistent with constitutional principles, Washington's response so far has largely been directed at providing help to individuals and private entities. The provisions of the back-to-back recovery measures of March and April that do relate to state and local government simply offer opportunities for federal funding.
Second, the Trump administration retains the authority to administer funds. The president has used this authority to do things like direct military aid to states and relax rules that regulate government approval for coronavirus testing. He also has announced guidelines for states to use when reopening state economies.
However, consistent with the Constitution, governors have discretion whether to implement these guidelines.
This means it is still up to individual states to craft policies that protect their citizens' health and welfare during this crisis. Some are working closely with the White House, and others are coordinating their response efforts with neighboring states.
So if the country's response to the coronavirus crisis will likely remain piecemeal and state-specific, perhaps this is what the framers intended.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.