Politics in Question
In this episode of the Politics in Question podcast, Colorado State Senator Faith Winter discusses the power of collaborative governance and how residents, activists, and elected officials can share in decision-making power to achieve common goals.
The United States of America is at a precarious moment. Our Constitutional republic is hanging by a thread when the President himself seems uncertain about his obligation to uphold the Constitution — while those who do are being honored for their courage, as though fidelity to our founding principles were exceptional rather than fundamental. The U.S. Constitution is what holds us together as a nation. Without allegiance to it, I fear we risk losing our very identity.
Meanwhile, the legislative branch envisioned by our founders as having the most power has completely abdicated its duty of good governance, surrendering instead to partisanship.
President Trump appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, May 4. When Host Kristen Welker asked whether due process should apply to both citizens and noncitizens, citing the Fifth Amendment, Trump replied “I don't know. I'm not, I’m not a lawyer.”
“Welker followed up: ‘Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?’” Trump’s response was troubling. “I don't know. It seems — it might say that, but if you're talking about that, then we'd have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” the President responded. “We have thousands of people that are—some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth...I was elected to get them the hell out of here and the courts are holding me from doing it.”
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In a time when leadership should reaffirm our commitment to the Constitution, uncertainty in its defense is not only troubling—it threatens the very fabric of our republic.
But even more concerning was this exchange. Welker asked whether he needed to “uphold the Constitution of the United States as president” and Trump said: “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
The President must recognize that he is responsible for the execution and enforcement of laws created by Congress, not to defer to the current U.S. Supreme Court, but to uphold the Constitution itself. Yet, he seems poised to ignore this sacred responsibility without consequence.
Just 104 days ago, Trump took his oath for the second time: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
In the sitcom “Friends”, Chandler tells Rachel and Ross that his girlfriend Janice is mad at him. Chandler tells his friends “Janice asked me, do I look fat today, and I looked at her.” In which Ross jumps in and responds “You looked at her? You never look. You just answer. It’s like a reflex.” Rachel and Ross explain to Chandler that there can be no pause, you just need to reflexively be able to answer.
Not to diminish the precarious situation the country is in by quoting a television comedy series, but the same instinctive certainty should be expected from all elected officials, and especially our chief executive, when asked whether he will uphold the Constitution of the United States. There should be no hesitation and a proud exclamation of “Yes!”
The events of Jan. 6, 2021, made one thing unmistakably clear. Donald Trump holds no love or commitment to our Constitutional order. He should never have been entrusted with holding the highest office again.
The founding fathers understood the potential for corruption and established the process for impeachment and Congress’ responsibility with it in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. Unfortunately, out of control partisanship has prevented Congress from upholding its authority. With no meaningful effort to restore accountability, presidential power continues to go unchecked.
On the very same day that Trump refused to commit to upholding the Constitution, Vice President Mike Pence received the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation 2025 Profile in Courage Award “for putting his life and career on the line to ensure the constitutional transfer of presidential power on January 6, 2021.”
Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and Jack Schlossberg highlighted the significance of Pence’s actions stating, “Despite our political differences, it is hard to imagine an act of greater consequence than Vice President Pence’s decision to certify the 2020 presidential election during an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Upholding his oath to the Constitution and following his conscience, the Vice President put his life, career, and political future on the line. His decision is an example of President Kennedy’s belief that an act of political courage can change the course of history.”
This is the dire situation we are in as a country: The President of the United States openly questions whether he must abide by the Constitution, while we feel compelled to give out awards to brave men and women who do.
Only when members of Congress prioritize putting the country over party, as Pence did, will we have any hope of rebuilding this great experiment. Sadly, I am not holding my breath.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Liz Truss speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on February 20, 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
America is having a Liz Truss moment. The problem is that America doesn’t have a Liz Truss solution.
Let me take you back to the fall of 2022 when the United Kingdom experienced its own version of political whiplash. In the span of seven weeks, no less than three Prime Ministers (and two monarchs, incidentally) tried to steer the British governmental ship. On September 6, Boris Johnson was forced to resign over a seemingly endless series of scandals. Enter Liz Truss. She lasted forty-nine days, until October 25, when she too was pushed out the black door of 10 Downing Street. Her blunder? Incompetence. Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Party’s third choice, then measured the drapes.
What most people remember of the Truss premiership is the Daily Star wager that a head of lettuce would last longer than Truss. The lettuce won. But Truss’ stint as Prime Minister—the shortest ever, I should note—holds some lessons for America today.
Truss suffered from a self-inflicted political wound. She tried to push through an aggressive tax cut at a time when the financial markets were edgy and inflation was high. She also pledged to increase government spending to counter those stinging inflated prices. As it turned out, hers was a foolish fiscal plan—tax reductions and public spending increases don’t exactly go hand-in-hand—and it failed spectacularly. The tax cuts never materialized, prices didn’t decrease, and the Pound lost a ton of its value. Truss was out.
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Her plan was to uproot the existing fiscal conventions, to dislocate the British financial landscape through radically bold and risky economic policy. She envisioned a new domestic world order.
Sound familiar? President Trump is trying to kindle a similar revolutionary spark. He wants a new world order too, and he’s going to use giant tariffs—or at least the threat of giant tariffs—to realize his ambition. Like Truss, he is wagering the future of his country’s financial footing on an experimental and radical strategy. Like Truss, he is leveraging a plan that is almost impossible to simulate. And like Truss, he is staking the country’s very reputation, at home and abroad, on this untested ante.
Americans can only hope that Trump’s tariff train hasn’t gone completely off the rails, as the tax one did for Ms. Truss. Because here’s the thing: The Brits’ system of government enjoys at least one massive guardrail that the U.S. system cannot duplicate: Their head of government, their party leader, their administrative public face, indeed their constitutional chief, can quickly be replaced.
Liz Truss could float a genuinely radical and potentially calamitous idea and, if it didn’t stick, she could be sacked. Pursue an idea that causes domestic and international panic and the shelf life of any British chancellor is short. Donald Trump can’t be sacked. His shelf life is fixed by the Constitution: Four years. That’s a long time, far longer than the five days it took to replace Truss with Rishi Sunak.
In my four decades as a faithful student of the U.S. Constitution, I never imagined that I would question the wisdom of the Framers’ decision to separate the branches. But then again, I never imagined a president who held such disdain for the very conventions and traditions—and the rule of law—that made the office of the president so dignified and reverential. I’m now questioning.
Our system of separation of powers—unlike the parliamentary system in Great Britain—allows the U.S. Congress to shrug at the incoherence of the White House. There is little at stake for the individual members of Congress when the President is issuing controversial executive orders and playing fast and loose with America’s standing in the world. Aside from impeachment and conviction—a toothless process more political now than anything else—Congress has no ability to fire a rogue president.
Not so in Great Britain. The Prime Minister is a member of Parliament, an elected legislative official, so if she is incoherent or too radical or too risky, she can simply be replaced by another member of parliament from the majority coalition party. Hence the lightspeed transition from Truss to Sunak. It’s not a pleasant situation, and it triggers a spate of hand-wringing in London and elsewhere. But it is relatively painless and frequently invoked.
Once again, America’s Constitution is showing its age. A governing charter written for a virtuous and noble George Washington has a hard time standing up to an egoistic and mercenary Donald Trump.
It’s time for constitutional change. A number of proposals have surfaced that get us a bit closer to the British model without sacrificing the principle of separate powers. How about a constitutional amendment that allows for a Congressional vote of no confidence in the President? Or one that offers a national recall election? The bar for each of these possibilities would have to be extraordinarily high so that neither is used as casual political fodder. We’re experiencing too much partisan grandstanding these days.
Or maybe we should rethink the 25th Amendment. Article IV permits the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments to replace the President if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That is surely unlikely in this environment where those principal officers are hand-selected by the very leader they’re appraising.
No, I’m referring to the next clause of the 25th Amendment, the one that empowers Congress to appoint “[an]other body” to declare a President unfit. That “other body” could be an independent commission, a bipartisan conclave, or a representative sample of everyday citizens. It could be anyone. I could even imagine that it would be a good role for Article III judges on “senior status.” My point is that we might need that “other body.” Now and in the future.
If all this sounds strange, it probably is. Constitutional reform is always a bit out there. But before we completely dismiss the notion that Congress might invoke Article IV of the 25th amendment maybe we should ask ourselves if the proposal is any more bizarre than a process whereby a majority of legislators from the lower house can impeach a president but he isn’t convicted and removed from office, except by a vote of two-thirds of the upper house.
Make more sense? I’m not so sure.
Beau Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
Project Overview
This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy, explaining in practical terms what the administration’s executive orders and other executive actions mean for all of us. Each of these actions springs from the pages of Project 2025, the administration's 900-page playbook that serves as the foundation for these measures. The Project 2025 agenda should concern all of us, as it tracks strategies adopted by countries such as Hungary, which have eroded democratic norms and have adopted authoritarian approaches to governing.
Project 2025’s stated intent to move quickly to “dismantle” the federal government will strip the public of important protections against excessive presidential power and provide enormous and unchecked opportunities for big corporations to profit by preying on America's households.
In Part One of the series, we address attacks on the federal workforce, specifically, through the removal of protection for tens of thousands of federal workers underExecutive Order 14171 and through large-scale reductions in force directed under Executive Order 14201.
From Public Service to Presidential Loyalty
Beginning on Inauguration Day, President Trump has moved swiftly and steadily to dismantle the federal government. If successfully implemented, his stream of executive orders and related actions will result in the destruction of government as we know it, replacing it with a new operational system where conflicts of interest abound, checks and balances are gone, and government workers are chosen based on loyalty to the President instead of the duty to serve the public. Fact-based decisions made by professionals will become a thing of the past.
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Project 2025 – The Destruction of Government Agencies
Executive Orders 14171 and 14201 come straight from the Project 2025 chapter entitled, Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy. The intent of this chapter is to essentially replace the federal workforce with a decentralized and privatized system.
Executive Order 14171 achieves the goals of Project 2025 by removing due process and other employment for thousands of federal workers by reclassifying as many as 50,000 members of the civil service as “Schedule F” employees. This enables the administration to fire these employees without due process and to replace them with political appointees. Media reports describe a process where hiring focuses more on loyalty to the President than on merit.
Executive Order 14201 complements that directive through mandated, large-scale, and widespread reductions in the federal workforce, without any requirement that such firings be based on performance, productivity, or merit.
Why This Matters
These Executive Orders empower the administration to fill positions that were once occupied by nonpolitical employees with unqualified loyalists. Although some high-level government workers are typically replaced following a change in federal administration, the vast majority are not. This stability enables the government to perform vital services without interruption, by people with expertise in health, safety, law enforcement, national security, and other crucial areas.
Civil service protections were created more than a century ago in response to the corruption of the “spoils system” in which government jobs were rewarded for political loyalty. They were designed to protect government workers from political interference, allowing them to serve the public while shielded from political pressure.
The executive orders ignore this history and will have direct impacts on the public by reducing the quality of government services and jeopardizing public health and safety. The examples are many and include:
The executive orders will result in cuts to essential government services and increased costs for taxpayers.
The executive orders will open the door to patronage systems and corruption and will eliminate vital expertise.
They also threaten the independence and integrity of agency officials.
Key Takeaway
This creation of a practice of governance that rewards supporters, friends, and loyalists and that reduces the size of federal agencies without regard to the services they provide will reduce needed services and threaten our health and safety. It should raise alarms for all those who believe that federal employees must be free to provide crucial services without political interference.
Lawyers Defending American Democracy is dedicated to galvanizing lawyers “to defend the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented threat to American Democracy.” Its work is not political or partisan.
Few would argue with the claim that President Trump’s tariff policy is chaotic.
In early April 2025, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on all U.S. trading partners, including a 10% blanket tariff and higher rates for specific countries like China (145%) and Canada (25%). Just a few days later, however, he rolled back many of these tariffs, citing the need for "flexibility".
Again this past weekend, Trump announced major changes—this time targeting the tech industry. Products like smartphones, laptops, hard drives, and semiconductors were suddenly exempted from the 125% tariffs he had imposed on Chinese imports just a week earlier. But these exemptions are temporary, the administration noted, hinting at future tariffs that target semiconductors and other electronics.
The uncertainty has rattled business leaders. Last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned that the lack of clarity could push the U.S. into a recession if trade deals aren't finalized swiftly. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon also highlighted the challenges of navigating the instability caused by these policies.
“There’s no strategy here... zero,” said Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump confidante-turned-critic who testified against him in his Manhattan hush money trial. “This isn’t about strategy, this is about brute force... and dictating demands.”
Cohen is not alone. Michael Strain, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, believes that Trump has no coherent policy, saying, “People are trying to figure out what game of five-dimensional chess the president is playing and I don’t think there is one. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing and he’s making mistakes and making this up as he goes along.”
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But while many worry about the chaos and suggest Trump has no idea what he is doing, could this actually be part of Trump’s “Art of the Deal”?
For years, many have described Trump’s negotiating style as chaotic and unpredictable and have suggested this is an intentional strategy to gain leverage in the tariff negotiations. This approach aligns with a negotiating approach known as "chaos negotiating," where unpredictability is used as a tool to unsettle adversaries as a way to push for favorable outcomes.
Proponents of this method believe it can be a calculated way to shift power dynamics. Critics argue it creates confusion and can backfire. In truth, it may be a bit of both. Many academics believe that negotiators are better off setting specific and clear goals when negotiating, although others believe that improvisation and even chaos are powerful methods as well. Thomas Green, a managing director at Citigroup Global Markets, believes that embracing chaos can be advantageous at the bargaining table. Admittedly, Green's approach challenges conventional wisdom; “I’ve learned to make chaos my friend in negotiations,” says Green. He played a pivotal role in negotiating the $350 billion settlement of lawsuits against major U.S. tobacco companies and used this approach as the team leveraged the unpredictability of the situation to outmaneuver the opposition. The negotiation demonstrated how chaos, when managed effectively, can be a powerful tool in negotiations.
Of course, no one can really know what Trump is thinking and perhaps that is his goal. David Bahnsen, the founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group suggested this, saying: “There is a certain chaotic dimension to this that lends itself to uncertainty.” Part of it is that President Trump likes that style. I do not think he has liked the last 4 or 5 days, and I think that's where this announcement is coming from. But investors that are trying to trade around this should be extremely careful unless they think they're inside the President's mind. I'd be very careful thinking you know what President Trump's going to do next, when I can assure you that he doesn't know what he's going to do next.”
So, what will become of this latest round of tariffs—and the complex web of negotiations they’re fueling? Will Trump’s unpredictability give him leverage or will it weaken the United States' credibility and negotiating power? The truth is, no one knows. The long-term implications for trust in U.S. trade policy and the stability of strategic partnerships remain uncertain.
However, Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player known for his witty and paradoxical sayings, might have summed it all up best for what the future holds for the U.S. tariff policy:
“It is very difficult to make predictions—especially about the future.”
When it comes to Trump’s tariff policy that certainly rings true.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
