President Trump called for one federal judge seeking basic information about his deportation efforts to be impeached amid mounting concern about a constitutional showdown.
Another judge found that Mr. Trump’s efforts to shut down a federal agency probably violated the Constitution and stripped Congress of its authority.
The president was accused of overstepping his executive authority yet again in firing two Democratic commissioners from an independent trade commission.
And that was just Tuesday.
Nearly two months into his second term, Mr. Trump is trying to consolidate control over the courts, Congress and even, in some ways, American society and culture.
His expansive interpretation of presidential power has become the defining characteristic of his second term, an aggressive effort across multiple fronts to assert executive authority to reshape the government, drive policy in new directions and root out what he and his supporters see as a deeply embedded liberal bias.
“We’ve never seen a president so comprehensively attempt to arrogate and consolidate so much of the other branches’ power, let alone to do so in the first two months of his presidency,” said Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, has ceded some of its core duties to Mr. Trump, handing off elements of the legislative branch’s spending authority to the White House and standing aside as congressionally chartered agencies are shuttered. The president has threatened to “lead the charge” against the re-election of the rare Republican who dares challenge his agenda, and the party has bent to his will at every turn.
Mr. Trump has dismantled independent measures of checks and balances, fired inspectors general and installed loyalists at the Justice Department willing to carry out his campaign of retribution. He has targeted private law firms with connections to those he views as political enemies and cowed previously skeptical or hostile business leaders into pledging public support, even as he has imprinted his “MAGA” stamp on the private sector by trying to dictate hiring practices.
His efforts to reshape institutions in his image have not been limited to the government and policy. Mr. Trump has tried to spread his influence through the arts, as well, by making himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.
But Mr. Trump’s latest target — the judiciary — has been described by constitutional scholars and historians as perhaps the most alarming power play to date.
The Trump administration brushed off an order by James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, who sought to pause the deportation of a group of migrants, many of whom received little to no due process. Administration officials said that most of the migrants were from Venezuela and that all of them were affiliated with gangs. But officials did not release the migrants’ names or evidence of their alleged crimes.
Mr. Trump has called for Judge Boasberg to be impeached, arguing on social media that “if a President doesn’t have the right to throw murderers, and other criminals, out of our Country because a Radical Left Lunatic Judge wants to assume the role of President, then our Country is in very big trouble, and destined to fail!”
The White House did not respond late Wednesday to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has never been consistent in his attacks on the judicial system generally and on judges in particular. Last week during a speech at the Department of Justice, he suggested that criticism of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida jurist who dismissed the classified documents case against him last summer, may not be legal.
But he has applied the same logic of fairness to court cases that he has to presidential elections: They’re fair if he wins but not if he loses….