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Trump’s Strategy of Overriding Constitutional Safeguards
Perhaps bearing in mind that only a minority of voters in the United States support U.S. military action against Iran, President Donald Trump has called the war a “short term excursion” and a “little journey” that may be over “pretty quickly”. The war is thus not a war, although Trump has said the U.S. will take Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong”, and the U.S. military has admitted to attacks on 14,000 Iranian targets, including ballistic missiles sites, airfields, and radar stations. There has been no word yet about the capture of nuclear-bomb material, stated as the aim of this adventure.
This semantic distinction between war and a ‘little journey’ is certainly not accidental. Trump has admitted at a republican fundrising dinner (Meidas Touch, march, 25th 2026) that labeling the war a war would “not be a good thing to say”, because an ‘ordinary’ war would need Congressional approval—a potentially difficult and time-consuming procedure. Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, has bypassed Congress by claiming Iran was planning an imminent attack, and, under Article II of the U.S. Constitution the President could order a swift, targeted response. Under the U.S.’s 1973 War Powers Resolution, the Commander-in-Chief is required to report to Congress within 48 hours any such military response and deployment of troops. Even then combat actions would be limited to 60 days without Congressional authorization. Needless to say, Trump has ignored these rules.
Long Live the King
Trump’s decision to start the war without Congressional approval is seen by experts as a significant acceleration of a long-term pattern toward unilateral executive decision-making. Trump, constitutional scholars argue, rules like an authoritarian, hardly questioned by the Republican Congressional majority. In February 2025, Trump suggested that “no laws are broken” if he is “saving his country” with illegal methods (New York Times, February 15, 2025). Trump sees himself as ‘American Royalty’, who does not need to adhere to banalities such as laws, treaties, or historical agreements.
Trump’s approach to the war is part of a broader pattern of using executive actions, including executive orders, to circumvent traditional legislative processes. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School in a June 4, 2025 report stated that the Trump administration is undermining U.S. democracy with aggressive assertion of executive power that violates constitutional and Federal law. The President has overstepped Congressional limits by, for example, sending Federal troops into U.S. cities to suppress alleged rebellious migrants.
Up to March 2026, Trump flooded the system of government with 255 executive orders, stipulating dramatic changes to, and reductions in, climate change laws, pushing massive fossil-fuel production, allowing drilling in protected areas, dismantling the Department of Education, canceling federal funds for National Public Radio, calling for an end to birthright citizenship, deporting migrants to Venezuela and Haiti, introducing tariffs, and reducing government spending, including on air traffic control, science, veteran care, and school meals. It amounts to a wave of radicalism hardly ever seen in the modern U.S.
Increasing Intensity
Almost 30% of these executive orders are contested in courts for exceeding governmental authority. Seven hundred legal actions had been filed against the Trump administration by March 27, 2026, reported the New York Times: “in more than 400 cases the courts have let the administration’s policies stay in effect even if they remain in active litigation. In more than 150 cases, however, the courts have at least, partially halted the administration s policies either through temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions”.
While lower courts frequent block Trump’s policies, Trump has found more success at the appellate level, where judges he appointed during his first presidency ruled in his favor in 92% of cases in 2025. Time and again, appellate judges chosen by Mr. Trump in his first term reversed rulings made by district court judges in his second, clearing the way for his policies and gradually eroding a perception early last year that the legal system was thwarting his efforts to amass presidential power. When Mr. Trump criticized a ruling from a so-called “Obama judge” in 2018, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. responded that “we do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges” (New York Times, January, 11, 2026).
Yet, the U.S. president is escalating his conflicts with the judiciary by calling for the impeachment of judges who ruled against him, labeling them “left wing radicals”, “Trumphaters”, or “unpatriotic lunatics”, accumulating, as noted by Al Jazeera on March 20, 2025, “a long listing of judges who oppose him”.
In April 225, Trump became the first sitting president in U.S. history to attend Supreme Court oral arguments in person, attending a case on his administration’ss challenge to birthright citizenship. Trump left after listening for one hour to the arguments of the judges, three of whom were appointed by him, declaring he was “disappointed” by the arguments.. He may ultimately be frustrated and angry if the court, as expected, decides to retain the rule that children born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens, even if their parents are undocumented
Trump and his allies, noted the New York Times (July 30, 2025) are “confronting the nation’s justice system with increasing intensity”. Yet, judges are not always falling to their knees when the administration snaps at them; a judge has halted Trump’s project to renew the East Wing of the White House, for example, on the basis he did not consult the controlling authorities for such a project. Trump argued the judge was at fault, since the $400 million construction is financed by private donors, but the judge reminded Trump that he a tenant, not the owner, of the White House, and the law and Congress must be respected.
Trump, who has been involved in more in 4095 law cases as a private businessman (1900 cases involving casino debt, 600 instances of real-estate litigations, tax problems, defamation, hundreds of personal injury cases, sexual harassment and university fraud), is a veteran in the courts and reacted as usual: by appealing the ruling (Wikipedia, 2026).
The Legal World is Dizzy
“The courts cannot save us from Trump”, the New York Times stated in a headline (March 22, 2026). “The sheer number of brazenly unconstitutional actions undertaken by the Trump administration this term has left the legal world dizzy”. Each day seems to bring fresh investigations into Trump’s political opponents or lawsuits against media organizations he dislikes. A number of lawsuits challenges the administration’s immigration policies, including its efforts to authorize immigration agents to enter houses of worship, speed up and broaden the scope of deportations, and make it harder for refugees to claim asylum in the United States ( American Immigration Council July, 23, 2025).
The battle between the Trump administration and the judiciary is widely regarded by legal scholars and historians as unique and unusual in its scale, intensity, and rhetoric. An increasingly fraught relationship between the Trump administration and judges “threatens the government’s credibility in court,” noted the Washington Post (October 10, 2025). Accoding to PBS (January 22, 2026), “over the past year the courts have moved to the center of the country’s most significant political fights, while the Trump administration has increasingly challenged the authority of judges, whose rulings stalled key parts of its agenda”.
“For those who care about the rule of law”, wrote the New York Times, “there is an understandable impulse to feverishly track the fate of these actions in court, tallying losses and wins, parsing judicial opinions, searching for signs of effective opposition from a besieged legal order. But that impulse is largely misplaced. As necessary as the courts are for in this fight, they are far from sufficient with a figure like Mr. Trump, who refuses to honor the conventions and commitments of constitutional law”.
Serious Damage to Democracy
In Politico (September 19, 2025), Jonathan Schlefer wrote, “we’ve seen plenty of serious damage to democracy lately. Experience shows that, if all else fails, the judiciary is the last bulwark of democracy. So far, lower courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s excesses. Still, the Supreme Court has the last say and Trump is openly counting on its justices to endorse his expansion of Presidential power”.
However, the Supreme Court did not follow Trump’s arguments that the presidential election results in 2020 were rigged, and thus the election was stolen from him. The court declined to hear his argument. The highest court in the land also concluded that Trump had no authority to unilaterally impose tariffs, which should be a decision for Congress, just as it should have been with the war against Iran. Trump declared the court’s tariffs decision a “disgrace”. Trump must now figure out how many hundreds of millions of dollars he has to return to U.S. importers.
Despite this historic ruling, constitutional expert Steve Vladek, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, remains convinced that “our institutions are under pressure in ways that they really heaven t been in America s history”. Although the expert believes “the courts have done a very good job, holding the line to this point, there’s going to come a point where there would need some help” (quoted in The Guardian, April 3, 2026).
The Authoritarian Playbook
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the U.S. Supreme Court has “become one of the most partisan in American history”, wrote Eric Segall, Constitution law professor at Georgia State University. “This judicial devotion to party”, the professor noted in JURIST news (October 23, 2025), “could not come at a more dangerous time, as President Trump endeavors to amass more power for the presidency than any prior chief executive”. The Supreme Court has now held that abortion is no longer a constitutional right, and gun rights must be emphasized and strengthened. The court has overturned campaign finance reforms at both state and federal levels, and has prohibited Congress from protecting the voting rights of racial minorities. “The authoritarian playbook”, as The Guardian observed (March 24, 2025), “targets judges, lawyers and law itself”.
