Say what you like about Donald Trump, he gets things done.
Most leaders of Western democracies are struggling to muscle torpid political systems behind their programs for change. In Britain, you constantly hear people saying “nothing works” as they bemoan the aging and under resourced National Health Service, railways and successive governments’ failure to stop migrant boats crossing the English Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer won a landslide election victory just a year ago, but now he’s unpopular and reeling from crisis to crisis and parts of his Labour Party are in revolt.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s domestic program is in chaos amid a debt crisis. His latest beleaguered prime minister is trying to cut public holidays and the country's generous welfare state — a task that foiled each of his predecessors. Like Starmer, Macron is not liked and looks likely to limp through his last two years in power.
Given the turmoil, it’s a fantasy to believe European member nations of NATO will find the cash or political will to spend 5% of GDP on defense by 2035 — despite their recent promises to Trump.
But unlike his struggling counterparts in London and Paris, the US president is on a roll.
He just rammed his domestic program “The Big Beautiful Bill Act” through Congress, despite small Republican majorities. He’s soon likely to get another law, which will gut $9 billion in spending passed by previous congresses. He’s using his vast executive power successfully to do exactly what he’d promised to do. He’s punishing his enemies, intimidating law firms, media organizations and eviscerating a bureaucracy that Republicans long complained is full of left-wing obstructionists.
Trump is being helped by a conservative Supreme Court majority he built in his first term. This week, the justices gave the go-ahead for him to carry out mass firings of officials at the Education Department, which Republicans have wanted closed ever since it was one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite targets of liberal ideological excess.
There are two troubling implications of all this.
The first is that Trump may be making the US political system work, but he’s doing so by stretching it far beyond its democratic boundaries. He’s justifying many of his actions — like his southern border crackdown and erratic tariff policy — by declaring spurious national emergencies that unlock vast and unusual presidential powers.
He’s turned Congress — one of the constitutional constraints on presidential overreach — into a pathetic, pliant rubber stamp on his most extreme policies by driving out and demonizing any Republican lawmaker who dares to stand up to him.
And he’s worked out that even when courts might rein him in, if he acts speedily, it takes time for the law to catch up with him. For example, he destroyed the US Agency for International Development before judges issued interim rulings to stop him.
In June 1787, George Washington joined the Founders in Philadelphia to help draw up the new Constitution. He wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette that his greatest fear was that the nascent United States would fall under the sway of “some aspiring demagogue who will not consult the interest of his country so much as his own ambitious views.”
Sound familiar?
The second chilling takeaway from Trump’s administrative arson lies in the precedents it sets for Western liberalism. Both Starmer and Macron ran on a promise that they could fix political systems that made progress impossible. But they’ve struggled to shift entrenched interests, layers of bureaucracy and administrative stasis. They and their democratic structures are being damaged because they’ve raised expectations by promising change and can’t deliver it.
This is widening an opening for far-right parties modeling their appeal to voters on Trump’s brand of burn-it-all down grievance. In France, the National Rally may have its best chance yet to win the presidency in 2027, despite doubts over whether Marine Le Pen’s legal morass will allow her to run. In Britain, the new populist Reform Party might overtake the Conservative Party on the right ahead of the next election in four years. It was once absurd to think that the Brexit clarion Nigel Farage could be PM. But more and more frustrated voters confide privately they might give him a shot.
That’s exactly how Trump rose to power.
