The horrors and misdeeds committed by the United States government almost daily are directly caused by people like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and of course, Donald Trump. But Republicans outside of the administration you’ve heard of, such as House Speaker Mike Johnson and Chief Justice John Roberts, are responsible too. So are non-famous figures in powerful roles they could use to restrain Trump, like House Intelligence Committee Chair Rick Crawford of Arkansas or Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch of Idaho. And don’t forget about Florida Representative Kat Cammack, Arkansas Senator John Boozman, and the dozens of other Republican members of Congress and GOP-appointed federal judges (I chose Commack and Boozman at random) who each day assent to the president’s agenda.
The United States and the world are experiencing what it’s like when the American president is a madman and unbound by the rule of law or any other guardrails. In a two-week period, Trump’s administration has overthrown Venezuela’s government; threatened military action against Colombia, Greenland, and Mexico; killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good; and started a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to intimidate him into lowering interest rates, which Trump desperately wants. It’s heartbreaking, enraging, and scary. And much of the fault lies with Republicans in the judiciary and on Capitol Hill who refuse to use their power to rein in Trump.
Republican officials not serving in the Trump administration are central figures in the ongoing destruction of American democracy, and they should be named and shamed as often as Trump and his aides.
“We are in a universe where Donald Trump has basically no constraints on his presidency. None,” Columbia University political scientist Elizabeth Saunders said in a recent episode of TNR’s Right Now, the show I host.
The Republicans outside of the administration have committed three unforgivable sins. First, Senate Republicans approved basically everyone Trump nominated for key posts, thereby putting super-important federal agencies with thousands of staffers and billions of dollars in funding in the hands of people who are both incompetent and evil. This was a break from his first term. Back then, Trump was more willing to appoint serious people, and there was a sizable contingent of Senate Republicans like the late John McCain who wouldn’t just confirm anyone.
Now, as my colleague Alex Shephard wrote a few months ago, there are almost no “adults in the room,” such as first-term Defense Secretary James Mattis, who either counseled Trump out of bad ideas or refused to fully implement them. Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Attorney General Pam Bondi in particular had shown no prior evidence that they had the judgment or experience to hold the jobs they do. And they have been even more willing to do Trump’s bidding and make terrible decisions on their own than I expected.
Every Republican senator who voted for them should be ashamed.
“In the first term, you had Mattis and [White House chief of staff John] Kelly and others. His most instinctive whims would be checked,” said Saunders. She added, “Trump had to worry about his advisers and would take advice. It’s not that Trump has changed, it’s that there’s a permissive environment around him where his whims and instincts get translated into action with no filter, no process, no consideration.”
Second, both congressional Republicans and the federal judiciary have allowed Trump to essentially govern entirely through the executive branch, taking over numerous tasks that are normally and constitutionally the purview of the legislative branch. From cutting funding from colleges because he disagrees with their diversity policies to laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers to capturing Nicolás Maduro, Trump has accomplished the vast majority of his agenda without legislation. This is unprecedented, and a huge abdication of responsibility from the Republicans in the other two branches of government.
Even when Congress is controlled by the same party as the president, congressional approval is often an important check on the president and a means of ensuring a more democratic process of governing. Policies like gutting the Department of Education and overthrowing the Venezuelan government are so controversial and stupid that they likely would not have received enough votes to pass on Capitol Hill. Even if they had, formal votes in Congress would have allowed members in both parties, the news media, activists, and ultimately the American public a major role in sorting out these issues.
Instead, what’s happened over the last year is that Trump and his aides take sweeping policy actions, and then congressional Republicans either defend them or, more often, simply look the other way and pretend nothing is going on. Republican judges, including on the U.S. Supreme Court, often side with Trump in these very expansive uses of federal power, even though they constantly ruled against executive orders when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in office.
The third and most important sin is that Republican members of Congress have rendered toothless the only plank of the U.S. Constitution that truly reins in a president: impeachment and removal. There have been hundreds of impeachment-worthy offenses over the last year. Trump ordering federal prosecutors to file charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James and some of his other political opponents is perhaps the most clear and obvious grounds for his removal.
But a majority in the House and two-thirds of the Senate would be required to impeach and remove Trump, and we know such numbers are impossible, because the GOP opposed entirely justified bids to remove and/or convict Trump in 2020 (over his attempts to force the Ukrainian government to release negative information about the Bidens) and 2021 (the January 6 insurrection). As long as he knows that he will never be removed from office by Congress, Trump is free to violate core democratic norms and values whenever he wants. But it’s critical to keep in mind that every day Trump serves as the president, he is there because congressional Republicans chose, every day, to allow him to stay in office while he commits high crime after high crime.
Combine an aspiring dictator, super-loyal and corrupt aides, and no real limits on his power from other parts of the government, and you have a situation where people both in the U.S. and abroad have to wake up every day in terror. A citizen could be killed for protesting the government. The president of another country kidnapped. The head of the central bank threatened with jail time.
Republican judges and members of Congress aren’t bystanders to Trump’s horrible reign. They are active participants. And if the U.S. survives this presidency, the histories of this period should make sure the Boozmans, Cammacks, Crawfords, Risches, and all the rest of them aren’t forgotten. They have not played the high-profile roles that Noem and Miller have, but they are destroyers of American democracy just the same.
