A friend recently admitted to me that she doesn’t read the news anymore.

“There’s too much going on. It’s overwhelming,” she said. “I read you, and Heather Cox Richardson, and that’s about all I can handle.”

While I was happy to be in the same category as HCR, it struck me that this is no way to get through the next few years. All of us are going to have to find ways to absorb and process the news without feeling buried by it.

“All these crazy things he’s doing,” she said, referring to the current White House occupant, “it all feels wrong. Illegal maybe?”

”Wrong, yes. Illegal… we’ll see.”

This was when it further struck me that readers here might appreciate how I, as a lawyer, absorb and process the “crazy things he’s doing.” To my mind, his trolling, threats, and official actions fall into three basic categories. And once you understand what they are, it’s easier to contain the flood.

It so happens these three categories are also of increasing concern, from bad to worse to worst. I call them the “CEO,” the “Usurper” and the “Red Caesar.” So let’s start with the “bad” and work our way up.

The CEO, or “unitary executive”

Trump thinks like a businessman, or perhaps more like a mafia don, and he tries to run his presidency that way. But a CEO has a number of powers that a president actually doesn’t have. For example, a CEO can pretty much fire anyone they want at any time, assuming they are “at will” employees. But a president doesn’t have this same power, at least not fully, at least not yet.

That limitation irks Trump and his advisers. So they are busy testing the limits of Trump’s power, hoping to get the Supreme Court to agree that, at least within the executive branch, he can act like a CEO and fire people whenever he wants.

There’s a great historical example of the current limits on that power. The President doesn’t have the power to directly fire a Special Counsel, even though that person reports to the Attorney General who leads the president’s Justice Department. That’s why when President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal, he had to find an attorney general willing to do it. That led to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” where Nixon had to go down the line firing attorneys general and deputies until he landed on Robert Bork, a man who was just unprincipled enough to do the job.

Trump wants to skip all that and claim he can just fire a Special Counsel at will.

The theory backing up the “CEO” version of the presidency is called the “unitary executive theory,” and it’s been kicking around for two decades or so. As legal commentator Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice aptly described it, the “unitary executive theory” is a

fancy way of saying that a chief executive can rule over the executive branch like a monarch. In other words, every one of its millions of employees serves at the president’s beck and call as though they were caddies at Mar-a-Lago.

Russell Vought is a principal architect of Project 2025 and the author of the part about the executive branch’s expanded powers under the “unitary executive” theory. And he is now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, where Trump hopes to consolidate his power over all federal agencies.

The unitary executive theory’s proponents cite language in the Constitution that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President” who should “take care that the laws [passed by Congress] be faithfully executed.” They inflate the importance of the words “vested in” and “faithfully executed” to assert that no other branch can set limits on anything that falls within the executive branch.

That has led to some aggressive and legally questionable moves. For example, Trump recently fired a score of inspectors general whose job it was to root out corruption and fraud, even though Congress said he can’t do that without cause and without following a process established by law. A case challenging those dismissals is already before the federal courts.

Trump also had Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut down the entire U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); ordered every Biden-era U.S. Attorney to be fired; and demanded that his department heads begin firing what likely will be hundreds of thousands of federal employees. Trump also claims he ultimately wants to shut down the Department of Education.

But can he really do all this? Maybe, but maybe not.

The Chief Justice has indicated that he’s a fan of a more muscular executive power, so I’m not holding my breath for the Supreme Court to tell Trump he can’t fire those who report to him, even if Congress gave them a fixed term. To do so, however, Chief Justice Roberts and the extremists on the Court would have to overrule a case from 1935 called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. In that case, the Court expressly (and correctly) ruled that experts in independent agencies, whom Congress said should be appointed for a term of years, are protected from the whims of a president.

That’s the gist of a case also currently on appeal to the Supreme Court. Trump fired an official named Hampton Dellinger, who until his firing led a kind of federal HR agency called the Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with Special Prosecutors over at the Justice Department). As Joyce Vance described it in her newsletter, Civil Discourse, the OSC’s role is

to protect federal employees and applicants from “prohibited personnel practices,” including reprisal for whistleblowing. Prohibited personnel practices include coercing political activity, nepotism, and discrimination.

In other words, precisely the kind of stuff Trump and the MAGA right hate.

The case is in an odd procedural posture. Trump is on a hurry-up offense that seeks to undo a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge. He wants the High Court to issue a mandate quite early, before the case has even been fleshed out, and the Supreme Court may not want to bite just yet.

But when it eventually does hear the case, the odds don’t favor Dellinger. The Supreme Court already chipped away at Humprey’s Executor by ruling in 2020 that agency heads can be terminated by the President. While there’s still an open question about whether this same thinking applies to everyone else, it’s not a very big leap to get there.

Of gravest concern is the politicization of organizations that are supposed to be nonpolitical, such as the Federal Reserve. For reasons that remain unclear but we might reasonably guess at, as Prof. Steve Vladeck noted in his excellent write-up, the justices seem reluctant to take on the question of the president’s power to control who sits on the Federal Reserve. Every time they have had a chance to grant review of a case that would get squarely to this question, they have punted.

In deciding cases like Dellinger’s, it would be hard for the Court to carve out some kind of exception to Trump’s executive power when it comes to the Fed. They can’t treat that body differently simply because the role is too damn important, even though that may be what is staying the Court’s hand. After all, the same could be said for many other critical, independent agencies.

That reluctance may be the one thing that keeps the Court from wanting to rule on this question now.

The other hot potato is the Justice Department. The Supreme Court could one day agree that Trump has the right to fire whom he wants, turning the Department, including the FBI, into his own personal law firm and police force. He could then use the Department to go after his political enemies. That would be, to put it mildly, a very bad outcome. Weaponized investigations and prosecutions happen in banana republics, but Trump is intent on foisting that horror upon us here in the U.S. If the Court knows that this is where Trump is headed, it may again decide to pull back on any broad grant of unitary executive power.

So let’s now circle back and wrap this section up. For purposes of containing the Trump flood, the key takeaway here is this: When Trump fires people or issues directives to his cabinet to do so, he is testing the limits of his executive power within the executive branch. He’s trying to act like a CEO. The courts have yet to rule how far he can go, but at least the question here is only how far within his own lane can he push things. He’s likely going to win a lot of these questions, given the current Supreme Court, but where and if they draw a line—such as at the Federal Reserve or the Justice Department—will matter.

Don’t get too comfortable just yet. There’s a worse set of actions by Trump one level above this.

The Usurper of congressional authority

One of the most dangerous, damaging, and brazenly illegal things Trump did upon assuming office was to order a freeze upon hundreds of billions or even possibly trillions of dollars in federal assistance and grants. He did so by way of a memo, issued from the Office of Management and Budget, that ordered the funding freeze, ostensibly to provide an opportunity for the new administration to review each disbursement to see if it comports with the president’s policies.

On top of this, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by Elon Musk (though government lawyers now claim he is only in an “advisory” role and not the “administrator” of DOGE, apparently to avoid the Senate having to formally confirm him), on Trump’s authorization, gained access to critical federal payment systems that are the lifeblood of our economy. They have since begun canceling government contracts, claiming fraud and waste, even where there was none. Meanwhile, department heads at the instruction of the White House ordered billions in payments withheld or canceled, including for example $4 billion in grant money from the National Institutes of Health that would have gone to support indirect costs at research facilities.

But here’s the thing. These are all funds already appropriated by Congress. What Trump and his advisers have done is to illegally impound the funds, in direct contravention of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of 1974.

As I wrote about earlier, the Impoundment Act became necessary after President Nixon attempted to withhold funds from New York City for water treatment systems. The city sued, and the Supreme Court unanimously held that this kind of line-item withholding was improper under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1973.

In response to this power grab by Nixon, Congress then passed the ICA. It specifically reined in the president’s power to withhold appropriated funds, and it’s been in place since 1974.

Enter Donald Trump. His OMB’s order to freeze federal assistance and grants is a direct violation of the Impoundment Control Act. That’s why many courts hearing cases involving frozen federal money have issued temporary restraining orders against the Trump administration.

It is one thing to assert that you have power as the “CEO” within the executive branch to fire people under you. It’s quite another to claim you have powers expressly granted to another branch of government, in this case Congress’s power of the purse. If the president can refuse to pay out money that Congress has appropriated, then congressional power over the fiscal budget is essentially meaningless.

Nonetheless, Trump is testing these waters too. He’s leaving his lane this time to do it by swimming over into Congress’s lane. That’s a much worse situation if left unchecked because it essentially leaves Congress merely in an advisory position. “Please spend this money we’ve requested” is no power at all if the White House can simply say, “No.”

The Supreme Court will likely wind up with a handful of impoundment cases before it. Unlike the unitary executive cases, the question of impoundment is settled law in Congress’s favor. Even Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t seem to contemplate overturning that basic concept. Indeed, as I wrote earlier,

Justice Clarence Thomas recently wrote an 7-2 opinion upholding the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau where he began with a simple reminder that “Our Constitution gives Congress control over the public fisc” so long as the funds were appropriated correctly.

Some call the impoundment situation a constitutional crisis, but in technical terms, it is more a constitutional showdown, and one we have seen before. Nixon tried it and lost, and Congress responded with a law that was on point. Now Trump is trying it, and he will likely lose, too.

The difference here, and what turns this showdown into more of a crisis, is the sheer audacity and scale of the move. Nixon created a confrontation by testing the waters over a few billion dollars. Trump has thrown down the gauntlet over hundreds of billions, even trillions. The stakes are sky-high, and every day that the question goes unresolved creates further chaos and uncertainty.

There’s another way Trump is testing waters outside his own lane and creating incursions into Congress’s traditional authority: by seizing control of “independent agencies.”

Here’s a way to understand the issue. These independent agencies have expertise in fields that require very specific know-how—the kind of specificity that Congress can’t realistically be expected to have, let alone write down in a statute. The SEC and EPA are good examples where the enabling regulations would be too much for any Congressmember or staffer to tackle.

That makes these independent agencies a kind of hybrid legislative-executive beast. They issue rules that interpret or expand the law (acting like the legislative branch), but they can also issue enforcement actions and penalties (acting like the executive branch). Sometimes these ideas can blend. Congress often passes laws that are broadly worded, leaving them to the agencies to interpret. That interpretation can take the form of what’s called an enforcement action—basically, bringing a case against a violator in order to set the boundaries of that law.

Trump is now trying to bring these independent agencies all under his direct control. On Tuesday he issued yet another executive order requiring independent agencies to not only serve at his pleasure but to submit their budgets and their work for his approval as well, meaning a sign-off by Russell Vought at the OMB.

See how this is working?

It used to be that having political appointees at the top of these agencies sufficed to bring them into alignment with the president’s policies. But Trump is shifting to full and direct control of the agencies, including their budgets and programs. This isn’t just micromanagement; it’s power over their every move, including their legislative functions, i.e., writing the rules and regulations that Congress delegated to them.

Imagine, for example, if Trump were in full and complete charge of the Federal Elections Commission and could even go in and rewrite its rules. Or the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees licenses to media companies.

The move is a major usurpation of the traditional role of the president versus the independent agencies and a severe incursion into the role of Congress, at least as it has been since the New Deal. And while the Supreme Court has strong textual support and precedent to deny Trump in his attempt to impound congressionally authorized funds, the question of whether the executive can seize direct control of the rule-making part of independent agency work is new constitutional territory.

So let’s now wrap this section up. For purposes of containing the Trump flood, the key takeaway here is this: When Trump tries to stop the flow of money already allocated by Congress, he is swimming into the lane of a co-equal branch of government. What makes this a crisis and not a showdown is that Trump’s moves are creating enough waves to drown us all. Think of the courts as lifeguards blowing whistles at him and ordering him back into his lane.

Similarly, when Trump tries to seize control of all independent agencies within the executive branch, he is also swimming into Congress’s lane. That’s because Congress delegated the rule and regulation-making to these agencies, and if the president can simply go in and rewrite them, then Congress would become nothing but an advisory body.

I hate to do this, but there is yet a next level, which is the worst of all. Deep breath, here we go.

The “Red Caeser” or monarch

So far, we have discussed attempts by Trump to expand his own power within the executive branch and to usurp power from Congress by taking control of the money and the legislative rule-making inside of agencies.

We haven’t talked much about the judiciary, however, which under our Constitution has the power to order Trump to stand down. The thing that keeps legal experts up at night is a simple question: What happens if Trump defies the courts?

That’s what takes our current constitutional showdown into a full-blown crisis, to the extent we’re not already deeply in one because of the magnitude of what he’s already done.

We had already seen rumblings from JD Vance and Elon Musk about how Trump should ignore the courts. As I noted in an earlier piece in The Status Kuo, Musk retweeted a post by a MAGA account that concluded with chilling words: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us.” And Vance went a step further, tweeting, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Now Trump himself has joined in, tweeting a quote often ascribed to Napoleon. On Saturday on social media, Trump posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

That is quite a statement, and it runs contrary to anything resembling constitutional limits. As the Washington Post observed,

The logical extension of it is that a leader can’t break the law as long as they are acting to “save” the country. The problem is who gets to determine what saving the country entails. It’s a license to do pretty much anything. It’s also anathema to how America’s founders envisioned and set up our system of government.

The idea of the president as a monarch was something the framers of the Constitution soundly rejected. But what was once a fringe theory of a “monarchical” presidency, represented by the writings of right-wing tech bro Curtis Yarvin, has now gained a solid foothold among many close to the President. Adherents include Vice President JD Vance, who has mused publicly about Yarvin’s writings, and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who openly champions monarchy over democracy.

Per a report by The Guardian, Yarvin “considers liberal democracy as a decadent enemy to be dismantled.” Since Trump was elected, The Guardian notes, the country has seen “actions and rhetoric from Trump and his lieutenants that closely resemble Yarvin’s public proposals for taking autocratic power in America.”

Yarvin has a close compatriot in Michael Anton, who is a senior fellow of the extremist Claremont Institute (with which John Eastman is also affiliated) and is now in a senior role under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Anton and Yarvin publicly discussed Anton’s idea of a “Red Caesar” to rule over America as a way to resolve the “decadence” of the liberal left. In his book, Anton describes the Red Caesar role as an “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity,” i.e., “the breakdown of republican, constitutional rule” for “a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled.”

For his part, Yarvin believes democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person acting as a monarch. So it’s no accident that recently the White House has been posting images of Trump as King of America. Trump himself recently posted “LONG LIVE THE KING!”—an odd thing to pair with the news that he was ending congestion traffic pricing in New York City.

This may be mere trolling. But the place it comes from is a dark one for our democracy. Given who is advising and around him, Trump may well be preparing to defy federal courts directly, even including an order from the Supreme Court. This could be done in the spirit of Andrew Jackson who apocryphally once declared, “The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

JD Vance already has uttered those same words with admiration. If Trump actually adopts them, we will arrive at the edge of the abyss.

To wrap up this final section, simply know this: Every time Trump claims to be king or to be above the law in any way, he is not just talking about his power within the executive branch, or even his improper incursions into the legislative. He is of course talking about being entirely unanswerable to the courts—something that, if he openly insisted upon it, would truly call the question on whether we can keep our Republic.

For now, these are only words, which always mean little coming from Trump’s mouth. It will be when Trump acts directly to defy the courts that we will truly see the Constitution shredded, with the last judicial guardrail gone and only the people and their power to alter our course.

That is why Trump’s growing unpopularity—which has now dropped quite low for a president at this point in his term at just 45 percent approving with a majority of 51 percent disapproving according to Gallup—matters a great deal. Public anger over mass firings, the loss of billions in federal funding, politicization of our Justice Department, and now abandonment of our allies and Ukraine, just to name a few, could soon spill over into far larger public protests than we have seen to date. Trump is counting on public support to sustain his anti-democratic and unconstitutional assaults on our government and our society, but that may quickly fade as the chaos and lawlessness of his regime continue.

At that point, Trump will either back down from his threats and submit to the federal courts, or up the ante yet further. Those who stand in resistance to him will need to prepare for both possibilities.