Trump has hollowed out the post-Watergate reforms

President Trump never made any secret of his desire to make the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary bigger and better than the Bicentennial festivities of 1976, with more fireworks, military flyovers, and red-white-and-blue hoopla. But he's said almost nothing about something else Washington was celebrating half a century ago—the good-government reforms of the post-Watergate era.

Trump's goal, largely achieved by July 4, was less scrutiny of the executive branch, less deference to the other branches, and less accountability for the White House.

The Bicentennial in 1976 came as the country was just starting to recover from the Watergate scandals and a president only belatedly checked by Congress and the Supreme Court. Both emboldened and chastened by Richard Nixon’s resignation, Congress had just received an infusion of energy from the large class of "Watergate babies"—75 new Democrats and another five in the Senate, all elected in 1974.

Today, Trump and his administration relentlessly attack the legislative response crafted by those 1970s Congresses. They've tried to weaken the War Powers Act (1973), the Impoundment Control Act (1974), the National Emergencies Act (1976), the Ethics in Government Act (1978), the Presidential Records Act (1978), the Inspector General Act (1978), and amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (1974).

All these laws either restricted a president’s freedom to operate or restricted political money. And if there is one thing Trump has been consistent on in his almost six years in office, it is that he doesn’t recognize restrictions. To him, Article II of the Constitution gives him permission to do anything. “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said more than once.

Historian Julian Zelizer, writing on Tuesday, argued that the evisceration of post-Watergate reforms goes beyond legislation. “Insulating the Department of Justice from presidential pressure was a product of post-Watergate reform,” Zelizer wrote. “The wall between presidents and federal prosecutors was only instituted relatively recently, and Trump has spent much of his second term tearing it down.”

With all this, Trump claims more unilateral power than anyone envisioned even in 1973 when historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. introduced a new term with the title of his book, The Imperial Presidency. The term was revived when President George W. Bush flexed his presidential muscles after 9/11. And now, 53 years after Schlesinger’s book, The New York Times' Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have raised it again in their new work, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Nixon never publicly announced he was simply going to ignore a law passed by Congress and signed into law by a president. Yet at a forum last year, Samuel Breidbart, a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, marveled at Trump’s response to the ban on Chinese ownership of TikTok, signed into law just before his swearing-in. "It’s almost like the Trump administration is just pretending the law doesn’t exist," Breidbart said. Trump signed five executive orders that in effect refused to implement the law.

It was, said Breidbart, “monarchical.” Trump, he said, was “literally claiming, much like a royal prerogative, that the president is above the law, or at least above the laws that Congress passes and the president doesn’t like.”

Barbara Perry, co-director of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump and his aides “just keep pushing, pushing, pushing against the laws and against tradition, against precedent and against the Constitution.” She added, “I don’t think Nixon ever fell into that category, with that breadth of overturning and working against laws and the Constitution.”

Perry, who has written or edited 17 books on presidents, said the key to understanding Trump’s power is the supine response of the other two branches: “Congress isn’t standing up to him, and only on a few instances is the Supreme Court standing up to him, which means that this president is more imperial and more imperious than Richard Nixon.”

Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said the Supreme Court’s response in particular empowers Trump in his self-aggrandizement. “I can’t think of any other time, including wartime, where the Supreme Court has systematically written larger and larger blank checks for the executive,” Engel said, also faulting Congress.

“All the branches are supposed to be competing with each other,” he said. “When I think about some of the ways in which Congress has rolled over in the last decade, they don’t quite understand Madison’s theory of government.”

He added, “When we talk about power-shifting back and forth in Washington over the last 250 years, there’s no doubt about two things: The first is we’ve never seen so much power centralized in the executive branch. And, secondly, we’ve never seen the other two branches so eager to give over power to the executive.”

The key difference for the Court is the adoption by conservatives of the “unitary executive” theory of the presidency, a hypothesis birthed in the Reagan Justice Department when now-Chief Justice John Roberts was an assistant to the attorney general. Before several of today’s justices embraced that theory, the Supreme Court had a long history of butting heads with presidents who tried to wield more power than granted by the Constitution.

“The Court did not in the 1930s say, ‘Please, Mr. President Roosevelt, would you like more power?’” Engel said.

William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, said the “court pushback has been selective and has left the executive with much more power than it began with in January of 2025.” Saying he was “alarmed” at this development, Galston, who was President Clinton’s chief domestic policy adviser in his first term, has started an executive-power project at Brookings to examine Trump’s growing strength.

The most important lesson he has learned, he said, is “that the Constitution is not a self-enforcing document."

"There need to be real human beings somewhere in the system who are willing to stand up and enforce it.”

This has not been the case over the last 18 months, he argued: “If you’re in a situation in which the Congress is supine, the Supreme Court is doctrinally committed to a stronger executive, which this one is, and the American people care a lot more about other things, then the Constitution becomes what James Madison feared it would be—‘a parchment barrier.'”

In 1976, when the country was celebrating the Bicentennial and rebounding from Nixon’s excesses, few could have envisioned such a situation 50 years later.