The 5 Trump Amendments to the Constitution
When I step back to look at the legacy of President Donald Trump, a surprising conclusion emerges: He has substantially altered the Constitution. His changes aren’t formal, of course. But his informal amendments are important. If left to stand, they threaten to make Congress an advisory body and give carte blanche to rogue presidents.
The surprising aspect of this conclusion is not that the Constitution can be informally amended. That has been the usual way of making revisions. In 1803, the Supreme Court granted itself the power to review laws and overturn them. In 1824, the states tied the electoral vote to the popular vote. Neither of those changes was inscribed on parchment or envisioned by the Founders, but today we can’t imagine our constitutional system without them.
Presidents have been the authors of many informal amendments. George Washington set enduring precedents such as the two-term limit on presidential service (a norm so embedded that after Franklin D. Roosevelt broke it, it was written into the formal Constitution). Andrew Jackson reimagined the president as the direct representative of the people. Abraham Lincoln ruled out secession.
But Trump has been broadly reckoned to be a more ephemeral figure. His bark, many said, was worse than his bite. Sure, he broke a lot of norms and probably also some laws; but his oafishness and short attention span made his constitutional incursions easy to repel. Although his political footprint was deep, his constitutional footprint was faint. Such, at least, has been the conventional wisdom.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Though he was no Washington or Lincoln, Trump amended the
