Trump's defeat in the Epstein case was a rare example of Congress challenging his authoritarianism. But resistance is still weak.
President Donald Trump speaks during a state dinner with Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, November 18, 2025.
(Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Whenever Donald Trump faces loss of power, he threatens violence against his opponents. (When he does lose power, those threats become very real, as anyone who lived through January 6th knows.) So it made sense that, having been utterly defeated in the fight to stop Congress from voting on the release of new Jeffrey Epstein files, a weakened and humiliated Trump would unleash violent rhetoric in response to the video of six Democrats in Congress.
In the video, the Democrats, all veterans, reminded members of the military that they have a responsibility to resist unlawful orders. Trump responded with an angry Truth Social post, in which said“This is called SEDIMENTARY CONDUCT AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each of these traitors to our country must be ARRESTED AND TRIALED.” Another post read: “SEDIMENTARY CONDUCT, punishable by DEATH!” White House spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt subsequently denied at a press conference that Trump wants to execute members of Congress. House Speaker Mike Johnson said with typical obsequiousness: protected Trump's comments as an adequate response to the Democrats. Johnson added that Trump was simply “defining the crime of incitement.”
Trump's posts are crazy, sure, but in a strange way, they, along with the passage of the Epstein File Transparency Act, may be a sign of constitutional health—or at least a reminder that the democratic structures of the United States have not completely collapsed.
The lawless authoritarianism of Trump's second term occurred in part because, contrary to long political traditions, he rarely faced resistance to existing limits on presidential power—whether from the coequal branches of government in Congress and the courts or from civil society more broadly.
The judiciary and the legislature are the only two institutions with the constitutional authority to challenge Trump's lawlessness. But thanks to decades of Republican presidents (including Trump himself) filling the courts with fanatical judges who believe in the theoryunitary executive directorCongress, if anything, was made even more subservient by the partisan affiliation of GOP legislators.
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The imperial presidency, of course, is a problem that long predates Trump. The term was popularized by the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in his 1973 book Imperial Presidencywhich linked the Watergate scandal to decades of political centralization of executive power at the expense of Congress. Although there was some decline in the imperial presidency after Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, this renewal of congressional checks was short-lived; by the time Ronald Reagan took office in the early 1980s, the pendulum had already returned to the pre-Watergate norm. Iran-contra scandalwhich saw the White House brazenly flout the law to fund military aid that Congress had refused to support was a sign that the imperial presidency was back in full force – a reality that was reinforced by the fact that many of the Iran-Contra culprits only received a slap on the wrist and were subsequently pardoned by President George H. W. Bush..
Militarism has long been the driving force behind the imperial presidency, and the argument that the commander-in-chief needs discretion in matters of war provides a ready justification for overreaching Congressional power. Naturally, this belief only intensified after the September 11 terrorist attacks turned President George W. Bush into an overeager wartime president.
In an important, recently published essay in Quarterly Journal of Political ScienceEric Schickler, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, argued this “nationalized polarization” also led to the Congress becoming more submissive. According to Schickler, “The lack of serious congressional attention to the failed American effort in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 was a harbinger of an emerging dynamic in which the primary commitment of party and committee leaders is to protect their party's president.”
Donald Trump rose to power in this more polarized political system and used it to assert presidential power in ways that previous generations would have considered illegitimate. As Schickler summarizes:
Donald Trump has accelerated this shift in incentives. With very few exceptions, the first important rule if one wanted to survive the Republican primaries was the same, regardless of the district: “Don't piss off Donald Trump or his supporters.” These incentives allowed Trump to adopt a strategy of all-out resistance in the face of Democratic investigations in 2019–20. By rallying Republicans around him, Trump could demand a complete refusal to comply with congressional subpoenas and face little political resistance. The Republican cohesion behind Trump has undermined one of the main mechanisms by which investigations have shaped public opinion in the past: Voters did not update their views of the president when the signals they received ran completely across party lines. Trump's approval rating remained unchanged during the first impeachment battle. Even Trump's second impeachment reinforced the lessons of his first term: the handful of Republicans who voted to convict were much more likely to face electoral fallout (and sometimes death threats fueled by Trump-inspired social media activists) than the vast majority who voted to acquit. After this vote, it became clear that Congress' impeachment power is essentially meaningless in the current context. It is therefore inconceivable that Trump could act in a manner that would lead to his conviction and removal from office.
Schickler paints a vivid and compelling picture of the United States' descent into presidential authoritarianism. This is consistent with how Trump has acted without restraint for months, destroying federal agencies with executive orders, sending troops into American cities and illegally bombing boats in international waters. During this period, the courts only fragmentarily and partially checked Trump, while Congress was completely obedient. Moreover, many of the civic institutions that were supposed to serve as a counterbalance to the state have also bowed the knee to Trump, a pattern seen (as Schickler notes) in elite universities, the business community, and the mainstream media.
It is against this story of a president out of control that the rebellion against him over the Epstein Transparency Files Act makes complete sense. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna deserves all the credit for taking on this issue and enlisting the support not only of his party, but also of four brave Republican dissidents: Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene. For weeks, they stood alone in their party as Trump terrorized most Republican lawmakers. Ultimately, the strength of public opinion, fueled by clear disgust at Epstein's crimes and the possibility that his co-conspirators would go unpunished, broke Trump's stranglehold on the Republican Party.
The question is, was the Epstein uprising a one-time event or a turning point? Could this herald a larger turn against the imperial presidency in its most extreme form?
New York Times reports There are other signs that congressional Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy about always being under intense pressure from Trump, “notably Senate Republicans' refusal to comply with Mr. Trump's demand to gut the filibuster during the shutdown fight, and resistance in some states to his insistent efforts to redraw House district maps to bolster GOP power and prevent a Democratic takeover that would imperil the president.”
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Unfortunately, the most likely answer is that Trump will reassert his power in the Republican Party and, by extension, in Congress. The imperial presidency, as scholars such as Schlesinger and Schickler have documented, long predates Trump. The same applies to the nationalized polarization that Trump has embraced.
Resolving the deep constitutional crisis facing the United States will require many bold anti-Trump votes in Congress. The best hope is that Democrats will regain control of the House and Senate in the 2026 midterm elections. If they do, they will have to start thinking not only about checking Trump but also about restoring the long-eroded powers of Congress and the courts. It is a project that will take many years and will require Democrats to first reclaim the presidency and then restore balance in the courts, especially the Supreme Court. The “single executive” doctrine, as well as the president's long-established emergency powers to wage war without congressional approval, must be abolished. This project will not be easy, but it is the only way to ensure that there are no more would-be dictators in the White House.
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