This chapter addresses the Supreme Court’s recent, partly paradoxical lines of cases involving issues of presidential power, prerogative, and immunity. On the one hand, the Court has held that Article II and the Constitution’s overall structure endow the president with sweeping authorities and prerogatives. These include powers to control a “unitary” executive branch by removing officials who refuse to do the president’s bidding and, separately, a prerogative-like “immunity” from prosecution for many unlawful official acts, including ones that would constitute serious crimes if committed by anyone else. On the other hand, the Court has sought to limit the powers of agencies within the executive branch, which the president heads, on the theory that post–New Deal agency officials were allowed to assume functions that the Constitution reserves either to Congress or to the courts. Nowhere, this chapter explains, has the Court’s conservative supermajority pursued, or does it seem more likely to continue to pursue, a doctrinally revisionist agenda with more sweeping practical consequences.

This chapter addresses the ways in which the Trump administration has exemplified and accelerated a long-term trend toward democratic backsliding in the United States by undermining public sector institutions. The Trump administration has sidelined administrative expertise and scientists in many areas, selecting senior leaders whose lack of qualification is frequently matched only by their disdain for their organizational mission, and shown a willingness to push the boundaries of the law beyond its breaking point. While avoiding a direct attack on civil service legislation, the Trump administration has sought to weaken the ability of public sector unions to negotiate for benefits, punished individuals and units deemed not to be politically loyal, and weakened oversight bodies such as the Merit Systems Protection Board. All of this has been accompanied by a rhetoric of delegitimization, wherein the President and his supporters frequently invoke conspiratorial theories of deep state plots. These tendencies, and the costs that they raise, are illustrated both in President Trump’s impeachment process and a botched response to the coronavirus pandemic.