Trump’s war in Iran marks the culmination of his imperial presidency | Mohamad Bazzi

5 hours ago 8

Since he reclaimed the White House, Donald Trump loves being compared with a monarch with unprecedented powers. “LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump said on social media last year, after his administration tried to kill congestion pricing in New York. In October, the US president posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping brown sludge on protesters who participated in a daylong mass protest, known as “No Kings”, against his administration. In the video, Trump wore a crown and was flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP”.

He has also launched a relentless campaign of self-aggrandizement, plastering his name and face on government buildings, including the Kennedy Center and the US Institute of Peace. Trump demolished the White House’s East Wing and is overseeing plans to replace it with an enormous ballroom; the National Park Service designated the president’s birthday as a free-admission day at national parks; and the US treasury is poised to issue $1 coins featuring Trump’s image to commemorate the 250th anniversary of America’s independence later this year.

In his drive to consolidate power and create a public spectacle, Trump has established a more dangerous version of the imperial presidency, which goes beyond the actions of any of his modern predecessors who sought to expand presidential authority. By plunging the US into an open-ended war against Iran, Trump has reached the zenith of his imperial ambitions. This war is the culmination of Trump’s lawlessness since he returned to office: he deployed troops into American cities, gutted federal agencies, ordered the US military to attack civilian boats in the Caribbean sea, and used law enforcement to punish his political enemies – all with little resistance from Congress or the supreme court.

The path to Trump’s reckless war in Iran was paved by the collapse of accountability in Washington. Weeks into his second term, the president issued dozens of executive orders expanding his power and undermining the authority of Congress to determine government spending and shape federal agencies. Trump also systematically weakened anti-corruption laws and ethical safeguards designed to constrain executive overreach after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. He fired 17 inspectors general who investigated corruption across the government and bypassed the Senate to appoint his loyalists as top federal prosecutors. Trump also installed two of his allies into the most senior law enforcement positions in the US: Pam Bondi as attorney general and Kash Patel as FBI director.

Trump transformed parts of the federal bureaucracy into instruments for his personal retribution, as he pressured Bondi and the justice department she leads to prosecute two political opponents: Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and James Comey, a former FBI director. In 2024, James won a civil court verdict against Trump for business fraud with a penalty of nearly $500m, although a New York appeals court subsequently threw out the enormous fine while upholding the fraud judgment. Comey, meanwhile, had been a thorn in Trump’s side since his first term, when Comey led an FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which led to Trump firing him in 2017.

Even the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, acknowledged that the prosecutions of Comey and James, which were quickly dismissed by a federal judge, were a form of “score settling” for Trump. “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it,” Wiles said of her boss in a series of unguarded interviews with Vanity Fair. She added: “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

Trump’s targeting of his political enemies has been even more brazen than the campaign carried out by Richard Nixon, the US president who had been most closely associated with the concept of an imperial presidency. The term was popularized by a book of that name, published in 1973 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, a Harvard historian who had worked as an adviser to John F Kennedy. Nixon used the federal government to harass and spy on his opponents, and authorized a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese supply routes during the Vietnam war. Under Nixon, Schlesinger argued that the US presidency “has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint”.

But while Nixon pushed the traditional limits of presidential power, he was eventually restrained by Congress and the supreme court. In a landmark ruling in 1974, the court unanimously rejected Nixon’s claim of “absolute” executive privilege to withhold audio tapes and documents related to the Watergate scandal. That decision forced Nixon to release tapes implicating him in the coverup and led to his resignation.

By contrast, today’s supreme court, which is dominated by a conservative majority that Trump helped produce by appointing three of its justices during his first term, has eased the way for the president’s power grab. In July 2024, the court issued a ruling, by a vote of 6-3, granting Trump substantial immunity from prosecution for his official acts as president. The liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a fiery dissent that seems prescient. She warned that the majority’s decision was a “mockery”, which could theoretically allow a president to assassinate political rivals or organize coups without fear of prosecution. “In every use of official power,” Sotomayor wrote, “the President is now a king above the law.”

Aside from the supreme court’s ruling and aides who reinforce his instinct to destroy presidential norms set by his predecessors, Trump has been emboldened by a compliant and Republican-led Congress. Terrified of alienating the president’s Maga political base, congressional leaders allowed Trump to usurp their authority over federal spending and agency oversight. Congress has also largely ceded its power to declare war, with Republicans in the House and Senate blocking two war powers resolutions introduced by Democrats last week that would have forced Trump to end his attack on Iran unless Congress gives its permission.

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, George W Bush secured approval from Congress for a resolution authorizing the use of military force. But while the Bush administration spent months promoting its false case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the US, Trump did not seek support from Congress before attacking Iran. In fact, as I’ve previously written, Trump and his top aides hardly bothered to make a coherent public case for why the president decided to unleash a war aimed at regime change in Tehran. Not to mention that Trump had campaigned as the “America First” candidate, who opposed foreign military interventions and pledged to end the US’s legacy of forever wars.

That’s another sign of Trump’s imperial approach to the presidency: viewing himself as impervious to public opinion and pressure. In Iran, Trump has plunged the US into a war without the support of the majority of American people. Historically, presidents enjoy a significant surge in approval at the onset of military action, especially if the public believes in the justifications for war. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Bush sent US troops to Afghanistan, up to 92% of Americans supported his decision, according to polling by Gallup. And in the leadup to the Iraq invasion, polls showed public approval of the war at more than 70%.

But Trump hasn’t been able to mobilize this “rally around the flag” effect in Iran. In several polls taken days after the joint US-Israel attacks started on 28 February, about 60% of Americans opposed military action in Iran. Americans are exhausted by foreign conflicts, and their president offers shifting explanations for why he started yet another one.

Emboldened by the lack of domestic constraints on his power, Trump became intoxicated with the overwhelming US military capabilities at his disposal. And with his embrace of the imperial presidency, Trump will avoid attempts to restrain that ultimate power.