Is President Trump going to resume nuclear weapons testing? When will this federal shutdown end? Will Californians be able to pass? Proposition 50mix up state congressional maps and shake up next year's midterm elections?
Amid the maelstrom of high-stakes confrontation and unprecedented statements from Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other leaders in Washington and Sacramento, the future of American politics and California's role in it have recently seemed highly uncertain.
Political debates – around things like sending military troops to American citiesby cutting off food assistance to the poor or questioning constitutional guarantees such as citizenship by birth – has become so unattached to established norms that everything seems new.
The paths to political power grabs—such as teasing Trump with a potential third term, appointing federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation, slashing federal budgets without Congressional input, and pressuring red states to redistrict in his favor before the midterm elections—have been so dramatically altered that many Americans, as well as some historians and political experts, have lost confidence in American democracy.
“This is completely unprecedented, completely anomalous — I think it reflects a major transformation of our normal political life,” said Jack Rakov, professor emeritus of history and political science at Stanford University.
“You cannot compare it to any other episode, any other period, any other set of events in American history. It is unique and radically new in alarming ways,” Rakow said. “As soon as Trump was re-elected, we entered a constitutional crisis. Why? Because Trump has no respect for constitutional structures.”
Abigail Jackson, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that President Trump's “unorthodox approach is the reason he has been so successful and why he has received massive support from the American public.”
Jackson said Trump has “accomplished more than any president in modern history,” including “securing the border, getting dangerous criminals off American streets, forging historic peace agreements.” [and] attracting new investment to the United States,” and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld his approach as legal.
“The so-called experts can spout all they want, but President Trump's actions have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court despite a record number of objections from liberal activists and unlawful decisions by liberal lower court judges,” Jackson said.
There are many examples of Trump flouting the Constitution or other laws, or suggesting he will flout the Constitution or other laws outright, in ways that leave people uncertain and worried about what's next for the country's politics, Rakov and other political experts say. His constant flirtation with the idea of a third presidential term contributes to this, as do his legal claims to birthright citizenship and his military's penchant for destroying suspected drug ships from international waters.
On Wednesday, Trump raised questions about the prospect of further violation of international law and norms, saying on social media that for the first time in three decades the US would resume nuclear weapons testing.
“Because of other countries' testing programs, I have directed the War Department to begin testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote, leaving unclear whether he meant detonating the warheads or simply testing the missiles that deliver them.
There are also many examples, experts say, of American political norms being tossed aside—and the nation's political future thrown into the air—by others around Trump, both allies and enemies, who are trying to either please or push back against the unorthodox commander-in-chief with their own deranged political maneuvers.
One example is House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). refusal to swear allegiance to Adelita Grijalvadespite the fact that she was elected to represent part of Arizona in Congress in September. Johnson cited the suspension, but others, including the Arizona attorney general, in litigation — suggested Johnson is trying to block a House vote on releasing records of the late Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire sex offender with whom Trump was friends before a reported falling out years ago.
Uncertainty about whether the tapes would implicate Trump or any other powerful people in any wrongdoing has swirled in Washington throughout Trump's tenure, showing more persistence than perhaps any other issue, despite Trump's insistence that he has done nothing wrong and that the issue is a distraction.
The mid-decade redistricting battle, in which California Proposition 50 looms large – this is another striking example, experts say.
Redistricting typically occurs every ten years following the release of federal census data. But at Trump's urging, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agreed to redraw his state's congressional lines this year to help Republicans maintain control of the House in the midterm elections. In response, Newsom and California Democrats introduced Proposition 50, which asked California voters to amend the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw the boundaries in their favor.
As a result, Californians, millions of whom have already voted, have been bombarded with messages both for and against Proposition 50, many of them overly focused on the uncertain consequences for American democracy.
“Let's fight back so democracy can be protected,” a Proposition 50 supporter wrote in a postcard to one voter. “This is contrary to democracy and denies the people the right to take away seats in Congress,” opponents of the measure wrote to others.
H. W. Brands, a professor of US history at the University of Texas at Austin, said: “Americans who worry about democracy have a right to worry” because Trump has “broken or compromised many of the barriers to democracy.”
But he also noted — in part as a reflection of the dangerous moment the country finds itself in — that Trump has long rejected a particularly “sacred” part of American democracy, refusing to concede his defeat to President Biden in 2020, and Americans still re-elected him in 2024.
“Americans have always been divided politically. This is the first time (with the exception of 1860) that the division has come down to the basics of democracy,” Brands wrote in an email, referring to the year the US Confederacy seceded from the Union.
High stakes
The uncertainty has been exacerbated in an era of rampant political disinformation and under a president who tends to defy reality almost daily. false, that he is posting his best poll numbers ever.
The uncertainty was also compounded by Democrats who held the only levers of power they had left, refusing to concede to Republicans in the raging shutdown battle in Washington and taking Proposition 50 to California voters.
The closure has serious, immediate consequences. Not only are federal workers across the country, including in California, furloughed or losing pay, but billions in additional federal funds are at risk.
Democrats are pushing back against funding the government, trying to force Republicans to roll back sweeping cuts to health care subsidies that help millions of Californians and many other Americans afford health insurance. Closing means receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. More than 40 million people could be cut off — nearly one in eight Americans — this weekend.
California and other Democratic-led states have sued the Trump administration, asking a federal court to issue an emergency order requiring the USDA to use existing reserve funds to distribute SNAP funding.
Jackson, the White House spokesman, said Democrats should be asked when the shutdown will end because “they are the ones who decided to shut down the government so they could use working Americans and SNAP benefits as 'leverage' to further their radical left agenda.”
The redistricting battle could have an even bigger impact.
If Democrats were to regain control of the House next year, it would give them a real source of oversight power to challenge Trump and block his MAGA program. If Republicans remain in control, they will help facilitate Trump's agenda, just as they have done since he took office.
But even if Proposition 50 passes, as polls show, it's unclear whether Democrats will win all of their scheduled statewide races or that those seats will be enough to win Democrats a House seat, given efforts to pick up Republican seats in Texas and elsewhere.
The uncertainty surrounding the midterm elections consequently creates even greater uncertainty in the second half of Trump's term.
What will Trump do, especially if the Republicans remain in power? Is he stationing troops in American cities as part of some broader game to retain power, as some Democrats have suggested? Is he laying the groundwork for challenging the integrity of US elections by citing his unsubstantiated fraud claims in 2020 and put fellow election deniers in charge of overhauling the system?
Is he really preparing to challenge the constitutional restrictions on his time in the White House? He said he “would like” to remain in his post this week, but then said it was “sorry” he is not allowed.
Fire with fire?
According to David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University, it is Trump's unorthodox policies and tactics, as well as his brash behavior, that “make this moment more unsettling than we are accustomed to feeling.”
“Sometimes when he does something that other presidents have done, he does it in such an outlandish way that it seems unprecedented,” or is “stylistically” but not substantively unprecedented, Greenberg said. “Self-aggrandizing statements that are often untrue. The brazenness with which he insults people. The way he changes his mind about something. It's all very unusual and unique to Trump.”
In other cases, Greenberg said, Trump pushed the boundaries of the law or violated political norms that previous presidents felt bound by.
“One thing that Trump has shown us is how much our functioning of the system depends not only on the letter of the law, but also on the norms,” Greenberg said. “What can a president do? How much power can he exert over the Department of Justice and who does it prosecute? Well, it turns out he can probably do a lot more than should be permissible.”
But the appropriate response is not the one that seems to be gaining traction among Democrats – “be more like Trump” or “fight fire with fire” – but to look for ways to strengthen the political norms and boundaries that Trump ignores, Greenberg said.
“The more the public, citizens in general, feel that they can ignore long-standing ways of doing things that have so far stood the test of time, the more likely we are to enter a more chaotic world—a world in which there will be less justice and less democracy,” Greenberg said. “It will depend more on the whims or preferences of whoever is in power – and in a liberal democracy that is what you want to fight.”
