Trump Isn’t Staging a Coup—He’s Stopping One

Democrats, bureaucrats, and the media have (somewhat) figured out that the “Nazi” and “fascist” labels for their enemies aren’t moving the American public. The new propaganda term now on an infinite loop is “coup.” Trump is committing a coup! Elon is committing a coup! They both are staging a coup!

“The media needs to WAKE UP and stop calling the administration’s actions ‘chaos,’” wrote the American University historian Allan Lichtman on X/Twitter. “THIS IS A COUP against American democracy.”

Professor Lichtman is right about the existence of a coup. But that coup against American democracy and indeed constitutional order occurred long ago. The Trump administration is finally stopping it.

What is a coup? The Cambridge English Dictionary’s definition is: “a sudden illegal, often violent, taking of government power, especially by part of an army.”

Most people understand that a coup could indeed be bloodless. But the essence of a coup is that it is an illegal seizure of government power. On this score, Americans need to understand that the notion that the Trump administration’s actions thus far constitute a “coup” makes no sense.

Donald Trump is the elected President of the United States. Article II of the U.S. Constitution declares, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The buck stops, as Harry Truman famously said, in the White House. It is not vested in our administrative agencies. They report to the president, not the reverse.

Yet this has been the struggle for decades now. Americans experienced a slow-motion coup starting at least with the New Deal, which was itself the revving up of the “progressive” President Wilson’s establishment of independent agencies.

As Myron Magnet explains in a review of Ronald J. Pestritto’s 2021 America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism, Wilson had himself declared in 1885, long before his presidency, his understanding that the new situation of an America much larger and more technologically advanced than it was a century before required administration that could be separated from politics.

When he came to power, Wilson made clear that his “administrators” were not just enactors of power vested in the Executive, as our Constitution had it. Instead, they were the ones to lead and even “rule.” Administrators were qualified to rule—in a way that politicians were not—due to their specialized knowledge.

In short, the age of experts had begun. Magnet cites Wilson’s own words about them: “Only comprehensive information and entire mastery of principles and details can qualify for command.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt built upon this foundation of the American administrative state based on the claim that his expert commanders were themselves the heroes protecting ordinary Americans from the rich. Yet even FDR understood, as Magnet quotes him, that the attempt to exercise power over the millionaires by “creating independent regulatory commissions, who perform administrative work in addition to judicial work, threatens to develop a ‘fourth branch’ of Government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.” As Magnet notes, “whether his tone was rueful, bemused, or proud I’d love to know.”

If FDR was ambivalent about an unconstitutional administrative state, the architect of his New Deal administration, Securities and Exchange Commission chief and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) board member James Landis, was not. Looking back later on the work of his expert hands, Landis took for granted, as Wilson had, “the inadequacy of a simple tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems.”  

To Landis, the Constitution’s tripartite structure, with its antiquated notion of a separation of government powers, was simply too slow and inefficient for the modern world. After all, there are people suffering from problems.

Rather than a government by and for the people, the newly envisioned government was now an establishment of an expert commander, ruler, and leader class that is “for” the people. The language of “democracy,” however, was then and is now still used to justify this decidedly undemocratic system.

H.L. Mencken’s old, cynical definition of democracy was “the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The newer “progressive” definition is less cynical but much worse. It is that the experts know what the people need, and the people deserve to get it good and hard.

The ruling in the case of Humphrey’s Executor vs. United States (1935), which established limits on the power of the American president to remove the head of the FTC, ended up judging that the administrative agency also had both a “quasi legislative” and “quasi judicial” character.

In other words, administrative agencies that were supposedly in the executive branch of our government now had that executive power vested in them—and some of the legislative and judicial power. This meant that there was effectively no way to stop administrative agencies, even by electing a new Congress or president.  

That class of supposedly benign Übermenschen in administrative agencies got a boost as successive administrations (especially Lyndon Johnson’s) both accepted the New Deal administrative state and increased its size and power to levels unheard of before. The administrative state cancer had metastasized. Nor was there much resistance to it in Congress, where many who enjoy not having the buck stop with them began to rely on these administrative agencies to effectively legislate for them. Easier to legislate vaguely and let the agencies figure it out.

This long-term development was the real coup—albeit one that took decades to accomplish. And it is what is being threatened now.

The Supreme Court, which had given unto the progressives for decades, has been taking away of late. And this is making the original progressive coup harder to justify, as its illegality is being recognized and scaled back by the highest court in the land. Reuters summarized in an article (surprisingly objectively written) what happened in the last Supreme Court term to our administrative state:  

“The Court ended judicial deference to agency interpretations of statutes (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo). It invalidated a regulation restricting ownership of bump stocks, suggesting that courts shouldn’t defer to agencies on mixed questions of law and fact, either (Garland v. Cargill). It exposed decades-old regulations to challenge, changing the long-held understanding of a key statute of limitations by ruling that the time limit runs from an injury rather than from when the agency first issues its regulation (Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System). Finally, the Court reaffirmed that procedural requirements for agencies have teeth (Ohio v. EPA).”

The Reuters piece goes on to say there may well be more coming from the justices this term. The Article I doctrine that Congress may not delegate its lawmaking powers to other branches may become more alive than it has been since 1935.

But courts move slowly and do not have the power to enforce their decisions. This is why the Trump administration’s actions have become the focus of those who want to defend the administrative state. Trump’s executive actions are changing things immediately.

Give the Democrats credit, however. The smarter ones have generally been targeting their ire more at Elon Musk than at Donald Trump. After all, to say that the President of the United States is launching a coup by seizing the reins of the Executive Branch gives away the game a little too much.

Instead, they attack Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “We didn’t elect Elon!” is the rallying cry. The correct retort is that we didn’t elect anybody in the DOE, the EPA, or any of the other monstrous administrative agencies in our government. The key to making them really democratic in the fullest sense of “by” and not just “for” (really “over”) the people is to make them accountable to the people through the elected president.

While many have attempted to say DOGE is a new creation and thus needs all sorts of approvals, the reality is quite different. Lawyer Tom Renz described in “DOGE—A Lawyer’s Perspective” how he investigated what exactly this agency is and whether it is legal.

Renz examined the executive order that established DOGE found that it is not a new agency but an old, repurposed one. The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) was a creation of Obamacare designed to make government software run better. DOGE is a reorganization of that agency that uses existing law to create temporary staff, thus bypassing lawsuits and other lawfare that would have held up bringing on Musk and his team.

The executive order established that this agency would be operating in the entire administrative branch. Renz writes, “Trump ordered that DOGE teams be hired in every administrative branch agency. These teams are to include a team lead, a lawyer, an HR person, and an engineer. These teams work for USDS (DOGE) but work with and within various agencies.”

It was getting the DOGE team into the government networks quickly that eliminated the possibility of administrative state actors hiding everything that has been going on under their watch.

Thus, Donald Trump has ensured through DOGE that the president now has regained access to and a certain amount of control over the Executive Branch, whose power is vested in him alone by the U.S. Constitution. The confirmation of Trump’s appointment of Russell Vought as the director of the Office of Management and Budget ensures that another fighter for presidential control of the Executive Branch is now in a position to make sure that the president has that control.

All the screaming about a coup has been accurate enough, if not for the details. It happened long ago. Government by the people became government by the bureaucrats. Now, Donald Trump is taking action to end that.

If, God willing, he succeeds, we will again know that the buck stops in the White House.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.