Balance of Powers
CrowdSource 2.10.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: what kind of crisis is this?
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DC Power Struggle
Trump and his legally-suspect Department of Government Efficiency have seized Treasury data, fired civil service personnel, shuttered USAID and threatened to gut the Department of Education. The courts are pushing back. Congress seems irrelevant.
Is this a constitutional crisis?
Yes — it’s a coup. So writes Elie Mystal: “Many of Trump’s orders are illegal, and unconstitutional, and brazenly so.”
Yes — it’s a coup (2).
writes: “The current seizure of the payments system of the Treasury Department reminds one of fascist journalist Curzio Malaparte’s observations … that the most successful modern coups are not frontal assaults on the institutions of the state, or bold military uprisings, but seizures of the state’s technical ‘nerve centers’ …”Yes.
writes: “Trump’s sinister maneuvers can seem simultaneously more and less significant than they are; one feels silly for panicking and complacent for assuming the worst won’t happen.”No.* The Executive is well within its rights to do what it is doing, argues Harvard law professor
: “To date, all of the Trump administration’s responses in court have embodied ordinary appeals to these ordinary principles.” On X, Vermeule posted that the judiciary should not interfere with “legitimate acts of state”:
Not yet — but the Executive is defying Congress.
writes for WoC: “Whether you see it as an Executive power grab or a healthy constitutional rebalancing is not the important part. It’s the method of achieving this goal that’s at the heart of the story.”Not yet — but it will be if Trump ignores the courts.
clarifies: “To me, a constitutional crisis will arrive when the third branch — the judiciary — steps in to constrain the president’s powers, and the president openly ignores the court order. That’s the makings of a democratic breakdown.”Not yet — but it could be. Writes
: “If the Justice Department during the Trump administration claims that it doesn’t have to respect the decision of a ‘Biden judge,’ that would be a code red. If Trump claims the power to shut down the Senate to fast-track nominees with recess appointments, that, too, would be a code red.”No — Trump doesn’t care if the courts squash his plans. He’s trying to change the culture.
explains Trump’s strategy: “You create a debate over the issues knowing that, because of polarization, at least one-third of the American public is going to take your side, sometimes much more than that. These are your investments in changing the culture.”Unclear. A Baudrillard-inspired unique take from
: “What the architects of DOGE have intuited is that once we have all become nodes in the same vast network with no determinate center, the ambiguity around where power resides is a vulnerability to be exploited.”
*Corrected from an earlier version of this article.
What People Are Saying about USAID (Outside the US)
USAID will either be closed or at least, greatly diminished. The Global South will no longer count on it for humanitarian assistance.
At random, some global reactions and news:
Brazil. The newspaper Folha de S. Paolo remembers how USAID could be tool of American foreign policy: “USAID, a target of Trump in his first weeks in office, played a significant role in supporting Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985), particularly in police training.”
India. “Defunding [USAID] may force many critical projects in areas such as immunization and epidemic control to shut down, also lead to large job losses,” writes Himanshi Dhawan.
Malawi. “[Trump’s] stop work order highlights the broader implications of Malawi’s reliance on foreign aid. The country’s development agenda is often dictated by the priorities of international donors, rather than the needs and aspirations of its citizens,” writes Twink Jones Gadama. “Are Malawians truly in control of their own development, or are they merely pawns in a game played by foreign powers? ”
Mexico. “Incel ideology” is behind DOGE and opposition to USAID, writes Irene Tello Arista.
Nigeria. “This is one of the very good news for Africa because USAID is actually a weapon of unconventional warfare that is being conducted by United States Special Operations Forces that carry out unconventional method of psychological manipulation and also support insurgency and irregular warfare against Africans,” claimed Adamu Garba Talba, a lawmaker.
Pakistan. Journalist
writes: “the aid agency was the primary instrument of America’s soft power, and its scrapping represents a harder turn where quid pro quo-type calculations will be the future face of the US. Beyond good or bad, it is true that the withdrawal of soft power does not yield immediate consequences, but rather exposes its deficits when the US actually needs assistance from a country that was abandoned after aid was cut.”Paraguay. Five USAID-funded student scholarships on standby.
Peru. “There are many very positive projects that were developed under the auspices of USAID,” writes journalist Pablo Bustamente. “But the ‘woke’ pandemic infested this magnificent organization.”
South Africa. The waiver is too little, too late for PEPFAR, says Mia Malan.
Trinidad and Tobago. The editors of Newsday lament: “There has been no review of [USAID]’s operations. There has been no workforce audit. No study of its impact has been undertaken. Nor any considered analysis of how its demise will affect America.”
From the Crowd
Writing from Denmark,
with an important fact check to ’ piece, “Only the Mexican President Knows How to Deal with Emperor Trump”:
It’s a product of America’s faulty foreign reporting that I keep seeing the story that the Danish king updated the coat of arms in response to Trump. While it’s true that the new coat of arms was unveiled around the time when Trump made his first comments (at least since 2019) on taking Greenland, it was part of the process of a new monarch. Frederik took over as king last February and, as new monarchs often do, had the coat of arms updated.This kinda thing doesn’t happen that fast. The new coat of arms got rid of the tri-crown symbol of Sweden and also gave equal weight to the Faroe Islands. Could the release been due to Trump’s comments? Maybe, but the the new coat of arms was likely designed long before his election in November.
Frankly, Trump’s bluster has lead to a better conversation in Denmark about it’s historic (and current) treatment of Greenland and Greenlanders. There are a lot of dark chapters in the relationship between Greenland and Denmark but the goal in the last few decades has been towards independence, not sale to another state.
Not to dump on you
, obviously it’s not your reporting, and the point of your piece is well taken. More just my frustration as an American living in Denmark who, in reading American reporting about Denmark, has grown more distrustful of American foreign reporting in general as I’ve noticed lazy inaccuracies get bandied about often.
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A minor correction: the newspaper is Folha de S. Paulo, and it's only distributed in the State of São Paulo (not country-wise).
"distrustful of American foreign reporting in general as I’ve noticed lazy inaccuracies get bandied about often."
The hubris of Americans to think anyththing and everything must have some nexus to us..