In his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term, hand-wringing about norms seems quaint.
Other presidents have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits.
“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law. The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”
Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal.
More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed so far challenging moves by the Trump administration, though many overlap: At least nine, for example, concern his bid to change the constitutional understanding that babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents are citizens.
Courts have temporarily blocked that edict, along with his blanket freeze on disbursing $3 trillion in domestic grants from money Congress appropriated. And a federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender federal inmate to a male prison, pausing a move in line with one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
But those obstacles so far have been rare in Mr. Trump’s blitzkrieg, which has raised the question of whether, in his return to office, he and his advisers feel constrained by the rule of law….
Mr. Musk and employees from his various companies have also been rampaging through the federal bureaucracy, including by seizing access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, whose disclosure is limited by the Privacy Act. Mr. Musk’s team also got into a standoff with employees at U.S.A.I.D. over its demand for access to classified information.
Federal employees at both the Treasury and U.S.A.I.D. who resisted him were placed on administrative leave. Mr. Musk’s team also shut down U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters overnight, emailing employees not to come in, and its website went dark.
The Trump team has been opaque about exactly what legal status allows Mr. Musk to be exercising executive power, even at Mr. Trump’s behest, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Musk has been deemed a “special government employee.”
The administration has not said when he acquired that status, nor whether or to what extent Mr. Trump has waived a criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds even special employees from touching government matters that could affect their personal interests. For Mr. Musk, that category is vast given how heavily his companies rely on federal contracts….
Mr. Trump also has little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice. He has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, which controls Congress and so far has put up scant defense of its institutional prerogatives.
No Republican joined Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a letter on Sunday warning Mr. Rubio that “any effort to merge or fold U.S.A.I.D. into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.”
A Virginia Democrat, Representative Don Beyer, echoed that point on Monday during a news conference outside the aid agency’s headquarters, calling what Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk were doing “illegal.” He added, “Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.”
Nor have congressional Republicans sharply pushed back against Mr. Trump’s summary firing of 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs Congress created to hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in the government. The firings defied a law that required him to give detailed, written justifications to lawmakers 30 days in advance.