How the Supreme Court Defeated Trump: A conservative court watcher explains why the president has failed to bend the judicial branch to his (Hosted by Ross Douthat, 4/16/26, NY Times)
Isgur: There’s very little that Donald Trump has done — in fact, I’m hard pressed to think of anything — that is wholly unique. What Donald Trump has done is turned the amp up to 11 on places that his predecessors had built on in the past.
On the one hand, we can go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” moment.Archival clip of Barack Obama: I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone. And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.
In a lot of ways, you can see Trump using a much bigger pen and a much bigger phone and really having done all of government by executive action.
In another lens, you could go all the way back to the progressive era, to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, where they think Congress is a bunch of dumb-dumbs coming from wherever, saying: What if we did government by experts in the executive branch? And instead of having Congress decide this, we’ll have the smartest people, because there are right and wrong answers. And instead of representative democracy that’s so passé, we will basically have this constitutional revolution and move power from Congress over to the executive branch?
In another sense, Trump is the end point of this hundred-year experiment that we’ve been running, of, “Meh, let’s just have the presidency do it all.”
Douthat: So it’s the endpoint. Where are we ending? What has Trump actually succeeded in claiming, and where have his claims fallen short or not achieved as much as it looked like they might?
Isgur: I say it’s an endpoint because it has so obviously failed. He has failed to implement any of his major policy initiatives through executive order in any realistic sense. Think about the Alien Enemies Act, federalizing the National Guard, worldwide tariffs, birthright citizenship. These are the main pillars of Donald Trump’s policy presidency, the substantive aspects of it. And they’ve all failed, with the exception of birthright citizenship, which is going to [fail].
In a few years it will be like Donald never existed.