By Dalal Abu Diab 13B
This is an opinion piece only in the sense that arithmetic is an opinion. Everything here is documented, depressing, and entirely unsuitable for readers who still believe American institutions can’t fail.
Donald Trump never set out to destroy American constitutionalism. That would imply intention, study, or even a moment of quiet reflection—three habits alien to him. His presidency was not a war against the Constitution; it was a misunderstanding so vast and so uncorrected that it became policy. Trump treats constitutional limits the way he treats business contracts, wedding vows, or tax filings: decorative, negotiable, and fundamentally beneath him. If American democracy feels fragile now, it is not because it was confronted by a brilliant authoritarian. It is because it collided with a man who interpreted the presidency as a mood, the law as ambience, and the Constitution as IKEA instructions for furniture he did not intend to assemble. America expected a tyrant; it got an illiterate with executive privilege.
It is a rare democratic tragedy when the safeguards designed for tyrants prove useless against a president who simply cannot be bothered to read them. Trump is the first modern leader who managed to expand executive power not through Machiavellian manipulation, but through administrative illiteracy so profound that it became a governing style. Scholars at Brookings, the Brennan Center, and the Knight First Amendment Institute have all noted that Trump’s abuses were not systematic assaults but “uncoordinated constitutional vandalism”—a form of damage harder to prevent because it stems from ignorance, not structure.
That is the true horror of the Trump years: not the malice, but the incompetence. Not the ideology, but the absence of one. Democracies are built to withstand ideologues; they are defenseless against the proudly uninformed. Trump’s four years in office (2017–2021), his post-defeat insurrection, and his triumphant return in 2025 together form the most thorough stress test the U.S. constitutional order has endured since 1861. The institutions bent. Then they cracked. And then, in January 2025, they welcomed him back with ceremonial fanfare, as if nothing had happened, as if the Constitution could survive a second collision with a president who does not believe it applies to him. You can warn a republic about demagogues; you cannot warn it about narcissists who believe warnings are for other people.
The metrics of institutional collapse are visible in the data: over 150 inspectors general reports documenting political interference, more than 200 inspector-general vacancies left deliberately unfilled, the highest rate of acting secretaries in U.S. history, and over 4,000 pages of internal memos later revealed to show that agencies were improvising constitutional compliance like jazz musicians with broken instruments. Even authoritarian regimes usually pretend to follow procedure. Under Trump, procedure itself became subversive.
The opening act of Trump’s constitutional vandalism arrived one week after his first inauguration: the Muslim Ban. Executive Order 13769 was not a counterterrorism policy; it was the legal enactment of a campaign slogan. It stranded families, revoked ninety thousand visas, trapped green card holders in airports, and forced Customs and Border Protection to improvise constitutional violations in real time. Federal judges issued injunctions; Trump declared them “so-called judges.” The ban eventually morphed into subtler versions, but the original intent remained inscribed in every legal brief: this was a religious ban disguised as national security. The Establishment Clause was not so much violated as dismissed—treated as an inconvenient footnote in the president’s attempt to turn prejudice into policy. It was the first constitutional principle to be sacrificed, but it would not be the last. Trump discovered quickly that constitutional rights are easier to dismantle when you pretend they were never rights to begin with.
Homeland Security’s own data later revealed that the ban had zero measurable national security benefit. DHS intelligence analysts complained, in leaked emails, that they were pressured to “reverse-engineer” threats to justify a pre-written policy. The Inspector General found that CBP officers ignored court orders nationwide, created ad hoc “Muslim-only” secondary screening queues, and in some airports literally turned off Wi-Fi to prevent lawyers from contacting detainees. The ban was not a security measure—it was an experiment in whether constitutional violations could be carried out as airport customer service.
The Emoluments Clause fared no better. It is the first explicit safeguard the Founders installed to prevent foreign influence. Trump converted it into a punchline. Diplomats lined up at Trump hotels like penitents at a shrine, each booking a transactional offering. Chinese state-owned companies fast-tracked dozens of trademarks for the Trump Organization. Saudi, Turkish, and Emirati delegations booked blocks of rooms while lobbying the White House. Trump made over a billion dollars from his businesses during his presidency, and when ethics lawyers raised alarms, he shrugged and said he wasn’t “taking anything.” The Founders feared a president corrupted by foreign gold. They never considered a president who would simply own the hotel. They wrote checks and balances; he wrote invoices.
By 2020, watchdog groups documented at least 150 foreign official visits to Trump properties. The House Oversight Committee uncovered that the Malaysian prime minister spent $259,000 at the Trump Hotel in a single trip; the Saudi government spent over $270,000 in four months; Kurdish and Azerbaijani delegations booked suites while lobbying for weapons deals. One Chinese bank tenant—Industrial & Commercial Bank of China—paid the Trump Organization millions in rent while the administration negotiated trade penalties. Ethics lawyers called it “the most extensive foreign enrichment scheme” in presidential history. Trump called it “good business.”
Then came the pardons—not as acts of mercy, but as loyalty rewards. Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio for contempt of court, signaling that defying federal judges was no longer a crime but a credential. He pardoned Dinesh D’Souza for being “treated unfairly,” as if the criminal justice system were a customer service desk. Roger Stone and Michael Flynn were rewarded for silence. Trump openly asked whether he could pardon himself, not realizing that the question itself was an admission of contemplated illegality. Article II became less a constitutional provision and more a menu he used to reward allies, punish enemies, and test how many centuries of legal precedent he could break before someone objected. Under Trump, the pardon power ceased to be a constitutional safety valve and became an employee-retention scheme.
By the end of 2020, Trump had issued 238 pardons and commutations—over 85% to individuals with personal or political ties to him. Legal scholars pointed out that several pardons overlapped with active investigations in which Trump was a subject or potential beneficiary. The New York City Bar Association warned that his use of clemency “approached the frontier of criminal obstruction.” Trump treated the pardon power the way he treats nondisclosure agreements: as an investment in silence.
That theme—using constitutional powers as weapons rather than guardrails—defined his relationship with the Justice Department. Trump wanted an attorney general who acted less like the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and more like a personal consigliere. He repeatedly demanded prosecutions of political opponents. He instructed the DOJ to declare the 2020 election corrupt, regardless of evidence. He asked James Comey for loyalty, as if the FBI were another one of his casinos in need of managerial obedience. The independence of the Justice Department, arguably the most crucial norm in the American system, did not simply erode under Trump—it evaporated. He didn’t drain the swamp; he repurposed it.
Internal DOJ memos show that Trump pressured officials more than 30 times to prosecute Hillary Clinton, James Comey, John Kerry, and various state officials. In one infamous December 2020 call, he told acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” When Rosen refused, Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark—a mid-level official willing to sign fraudulent letters to state legislatures urging them to overturn election results. The Constitution is designed to restrain tyrants. It was not designed to survive a president shopping for a more obedient attorney general like a man browsing for a cheaper plumber.
Foreign policy under Trump performed similar gymnastics. He ignored the War Powers Resolution with theatrical sincerity, launching missile strikes in Syria and ordering the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani without meaningful congressional consultation. At least eleven military actions under his command failed to meet statutory reporting requirements. Trump did not expand executive power through careful argument—he expanded it accidentally, by behaving as if laws governing military force were suggestions drafted by unimportant people. He treated the War Powers Act the same way he treats tax law: as a personal challenge to evade creatively.
The Congressional Research Service later counted at least 48 instances where Trump deployed troops, repositioned forces, or ordered lethal action without timely notification to Congress. He repeatedly abused emergency powers—declaring a national emergency to redirect $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to build a wall Congress refused to finance. Courts struck parts of this down, but too late; the money was already spent. Trump discovered that separation of powers collapses when the executive treats delay as victory.
Congress’s “power of the purse” fared no better. Trump withheld nearly four hundred million dollars in military aid to Ukraine, prompting the Government Accountability Office to declare it an illegal violation of the Impoundment Control Act. It was the first time in U.S. history that a president withheld congressionally appropriated funds in order to coerce a foreign government for domestic political gain. He repeated the tactic with billions more in environmental programs, foreign aid, refugee programs, and public health funding. Congress passed budgets; Trump treated them as opinions. Separation of powers only works if the executive believes Congress is a branch of government, not a suggestion box.
GAO investigations show that Trump unlawfully froze or redirected more than $9 billion in congressionally mandated spending between 2017 and 2020. These included UN peacekeeping funds, WHO contributions, educational grants, and even military pensions. The Impoundment Control Act—written after Nixon—exists specifically to prevent such abuses. Trump treated it as a kind of historical trivia. The Founders feared monarchs. They did not predict a president treating Congress’s spending power like a Yelp recommendation.
But if there is a single moment when the constitutional order staggered, it was the aftermath of the 2020 election. Trump lost—decisively—but insisted that the Constitution owed him a second term. He pressured Georgia officials to “find” him votes, pressured the DOJ to declare the election corrupt, pressured state legislators to submit fake elector slates in seven states, and pressured Mike Pence to violate the Electoral Count Act. January 6th was not an ideological coup. It was a tantrum with a casualty count. A violent riot born not of theory but of entitlement: a president who believed the constitutional process was a personal affront. The republic survived by inches, and only because the system still had enough self-respect to say no. Trump did not attempt to overturn the election through legal reasoning; he attempted to overturn it through wishful thinking and brute force.
He also attempted, in December 2022, to terminate the Constitution altogether. In a Truth Social post, he wrote: “A Massive Fraud of this type allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” This was the first explicit call by a former U.S. president for suspension of constitutional order. Legal scholars pointed out that advocating termination of constitutional provisions is itself evidence of intent to violate 18 U.S.C. § 2383—rebellion or insurrection. Even autocrats usually disguise their contempt for law. Trump posted his on the internet with the casual tone of a man reviewing a golf score.
For a moment, it seemed that America had learned its lesson. Trump left office, howling. Biden restored institutional norms with the sobriety of a school headmaster. Yet four years of constitutional triage were not enough to stop Trump’s return. In January 2025, he was sworn in again, this time with fewer moderating forces, a more compliant Congress, a judiciary reshaped by his own appointments, and a sense of cosmic vindication. If the first term was chaos born of incompetence, the second promised chaos born of confidence. His return was not a resurrection; it was a relapse.
By 2025, over 30% of federal judges were Trump appointees, and many had already ruled in favor of expanded executive authority in cases involving immigration, surveillance, and administrative law. Trump returned to office armed with judicial precedents he had accidentally created. The Supreme Court—now deeply conservative—had already weakened the administrative state through decisions like West Virginia v. EPA and the dismantling of Chevron deference. Trump inherited a system prepared to accept executive overreach with polite deference. Tyranny usually requires force. In America, it only required vacancies.
The new administration immediately constructed an executive architecture designed to make constitutional constraints optional. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, a name that already signals unseriousness—placed Elon Musk in a position with access to IRS filings, medical data, Social Security numbers, and federal databases with no statutory basis. Privacy rights became a quaint historical curiosity. The Fourth Amendment was not overturned; it was bypassed through administrative creativity. In Trump’s second term, “efficiency” became the new euphemism for surveillance, and “streamlining” became the word used to justify abolishing oversight. The Privacy Act of 1974, a cornerstone of modern civil liberties, was treated as a suggestion manual. Under DOGE, data becomes power, and power becomes unmonitored.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) later reported that DOGE had pulled over 1.3 billion data points from federal systems without statutory authorization. Internal whistleblowers stated that Musk’s team requested algorithmic scanning of IRS filings for “indicators of ideological extremism,” a phrase never defined in law. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence—from Katz to Carpenter—requires warrants for searches with reasonable expectations of privacy. Trump didn’t challenge this. He circumvented it by inventing a department that pretended warrants were ergonomic inefficiencies.
Birthright citizenship, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment and reaffirmed in the landmark 1898 decision Wong Kim Ark, became the next target. Trump declared he could end birthright citizenship by executive order—an act so legally indefensible that even conservative scholars dismissed it as fantastical. Yet DHS was instructed to “prepare enforcement frameworks,” a bureaucratic phrase that masked the reality: an attempt to erase constitutional rights through administrative fiat. Trump’s governing method is simple: if a constitutional right is inconvenient, reinterpret it out of existence.
This was not new. Trump repeatedly attacked the Fourteenth Amendment on Twitter, calling birthright citizenship “a magnet for invasion” and insisting it “was never meant to cover illegal aliens,” a claim squarely contradicted by the text of the amendment, its legislative history, and 125 years of Supreme Court precedent. Scholars at the Cato Institute, hardly a bastion of liberalism, warned that Trump’s proposal would create the largest population of stateless children in the Western Hemisphere since the Dominican Republic’s 2013 “denationalization” crisis.
Campus speech became another battleground. Federal funding was threatened for universities with DEI programs. Institutions that allowed pro-Palestinian protests were warned of consequences. The First Amendment, for Trump, protected speech only when the speaker was politically useful. Critics encountered administrative punishment or public denunciation. He treated civil liberties like a subscription service: they only applied to people who paid loyalty. The recurring pattern of Trump’s governance is that every right becomes contingent and every protection becomes revocable.
Trump’s assaults on speech weren’t limited to campuses. Multiple federal courts ruled that his habit of blocking critics on Twitter violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination in public forums. In one case, the Knight Institute documented that Trump blocked more than 7,000 users. His threats to revoke NBC’s broadcast license were textbook violations of the free press clause. His repeated calls to punish flag-burners—a form of protected expression under Texas v. Johnson—were so constitutionally illiterate that law professors began using his tweets as exam hypotheticals. Trump did not test constitutional limits. He ignored them so loudly that courts had to pretend they were listening to a president rather than a man rage-posting in all caps.
While Trump was conducting a constitutional demolition from the Oval Office, another arm of his government—ICE—perfected due process erosion at the administrative level. It was not enough that ICE routinely lost track of migrants; under Trump, the agency began losing track of citizenship itself. The ACLU documented at least four hundred and twenty cases of U.S. citizens illegally detained by ICE between 2012 and 2020. The Los Angeles Times identified over 1,480 instances in which ICE issued detainers for U.S. citizens. A Government Accountability Office audit found that ICE officers failed to follow required identity-verification procedures in over sixty percent of sampled cases. In any functioning legal system, this would be evidence of catastrophic institutional collapse. In America, it became another Tuesday. ICE manages to violate due process not by breaking the law, but by forgetting it exists.
A 2021 GAO probe found that ICE databases were so inaccurate that “no reliable mechanism exists” to verify citizenship before detention. ICE’s own officers admitted to congressional investigators that they lacked training on the legal definition of U.S. citizenship. One officer testified anonymously that “we assume brown equals foreign,” a statement that would end careers in any lawful government but apparently qualifies as policy guidance in ICE. A DHS OIG report concluded that “systemic disregard for due process rights” was widespread. Trump didn’t have to order ICE to violate the Constitution. He simply needed to appoint leadership that saw due process as administrative clutter.
Consider the individual cases—each one an indictment of constitutional governance. George Retes, a U.S. Marine veteran, detained for three days without access to a lawyer because an ICE officer decided his documentation “looked suspicious.” Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen with a REAL ID card—the gold standard of federal verification—detained twice because agents refused to scan the barcode. Three young U.S. citizen children, including a four-year-old with brain cancer, deported to Honduras alongside their mothers after ICE officers lied, denied legal counsel, and prevented the families from arranging medical care. A federal judge reviewing the case stated he had “a strong suspicion the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” A suspicion that understates the obvious: the United States conducted an extrajudicial removal of toddlers.
Other cases read like dystopian fiction: Peter Sean Brown, a U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia, nearly deported to Jamaica because ICE confused him with a man with a similar name; Mark Lyttle, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen deported to Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua despite having never been outside the U.S.; Davino Watson, a citizen detained for 1,273 days, refused a lawyer, and denied access to his family’s proof of his birth. A federal judge called Watson’s case “Kafkaesque”—a diplomatic way of saying that ICE operates like a bureaucracy designed by Franz Kafka after a traumatic brain injury.
Jose Hermosillo, a cognitively impaired U.S. citizen, was detained for ten days and coerced into signing a false statement because he could not read. His family brought proof: birth certificates, Social Security records, hospital documentation. ICE ignored all of it. Jason Brian Gavidia, an American citizen, was detained on camera in California in what his mayor described as “racial profiling.” Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, was arrested while attempting to conduct congressional oversight at a detention facility—proof that the agency did not merely violate the rights of individuals, but the constitutional powers of elected officials. ICE demonstrated a principle American history rarely admits: the easiest way to erode constitutional rights is to outsource the violations to an agency that confuses authority with impunity.
By Trump’s second term, ICE had become a constitutional liability. Dozens of federal judges issued opinions condemning the agency’s disregard for court orders. In 2023 alone, courts found ICE in contempt nine times for refusing to release individuals after judicial rulings. The agency responded not with reform but with expanded enforcement raids and new memoranda interpreting due process as optional “where operationally burdensome.” In any other democracy, this would trigger a parliamentary crisis. In the U.S., it triggered fundraising emails.
Legal residents and visa holders experienced similar chaos. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder, was arrested without cause and denied counsel. Yunseo Chung, another Columbia student, was targeted under a fabricated warrant. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national with U.S. citizen children and legal protection from deportation, was sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador after ICE ignored a judge’s ruling and even defied a Supreme Court order to assist his return. He was eventually brought back—not because ICE regretted its error, but because federal prosecutors wanted to charge him. International students like Suguru Onda and Akshar Patel had their legal status terminated and faced deportation for trivial infractions that were dismissed by courts—a fishing citation, a reckless driving charge. ICE is the only agency in American government that can produce constitutional violations faster than the courts can issue paperwork.
Immigration courts—already absurdly backlogged—became laboratories for executive impunity. Under Trump, the number of immigration judges with zero prior immigration-law experience increased by 170%. Many were former ICE attorneys. Denial rates for asylum rose above 70%, with some judges denying over 95% of claims. Administrative closure, a standard procedure allowing cases to be paused, was effectively abolished. By 2020, the average wait time for an immigration hearing reached 811 days, while the average time ICE took to deport someone without a hearing fell to under 48 hours. Efficiency, in Trump’s legal universe, meant removing the judge.
The cruelty was not the byproduct. It was the method. The system was not malfunctioning; it was functioning as designed: to prioritize removal over rights, speed over accuracy, and punishment over process. ICE demonstrated a truth the Founders never anticipated: administrative agencies can nullify constitutional rights not by breaking the law, but by ignoring it at scale. Due process does not disappear with a bang. It disappears when the agency tasked with enforcing it decides it has better things to do.
ICE’s due process collapse represents a constitutional loophole so large you could deport a citizen through it—and they did, repeatedly. Legal scholars now describe ICE as a “Fourth Branch,” one that exercises executive, legislative, and quasi-judicial power with almost no effective oversight. The Founders imagined tyranny through concentration of power. They did not imagine tyranny through the bureaucratic equivalent of forgetting to log out of your account.
In Trump’s second term, this administrative cruelty has been integrated into governance. It is no longer improvisation; it is doctrine. The executive branch now operates on the principle that law is enforceable only when it is useful. The rest can be overridden by executive order, emergency declaration, bureaucratic restructuring, or public intimidation. Constitutional rights have become conditional—not in theory, but in practice. Trump’s America is not lawless; it is oversaturated with laws selectively applied.
The Brennan Center documented 123 uses of emergency powers by Trump during his first term—36 more than any president in modern history. His second term is on pace to exceed that. The National Emergencies Act, intended as a narrow safeguard, has become an executive cheat code. Trump’s governing philosophy resembles that of a man who found the “override” button on a vending machine and decided that was how all food should be dispensed.
This is the tragedy of American constitutionalism in the age of Trump: not that it is being violated, but that it is being out-neglected. The Constitution survived civil war, global conflict, mass disenfranchisement, and McCarthyism. It now struggles against something more banal and more dangerous: a president who believes he can revise constitutional rights by announcing them on television, and a bureaucratic apparatus eager to test the theory. Democracies rarely die from defiance. They die from disinterest.
The early architects of the republic braced themselves for demagogues with ambition. They did not foresee demagogues with Wi-Fi. They feared a Caesar; they got a man live-streaming constitutional violations between golf rounds. And the most frightening statistic of all? In 2025, 68% of Republican voters agreed with Trump’s claim that a president should be able to “override” courts if national security demands it. Constitutional decay is no longer institutional—it is cultural.
The Founders imagined despotism would come draped in ambition. Instead, it arrived wearing ignorance like a crown. The Constitution was not defeated by a strongman but by a man too weak to read it and a government too polite to stop him. Empires rarely fall to enemies; they fall to paperwork, apathy, and the slow rot of institutions that forget what they were built for.
America is not being overthrown. It is sleepwalking off a cliff, reciting the First Amendment on the way down.