It's the Supreme Court that has expanded the powers of the President, and previously of the Federal government, far beyond what was ever intended.
By allowing the federal government to dominate the states, the Supreme Court created a position of unrivalled power.
Trump may be an evil narcissist by the standards of normal people, but there's plenty of those sorts of people in politics. That's why you have a constitution.
But that is not that much of a consolation if the government is allowed to pick winners and losers for kleptocracy or there is strong central planning and oversight on what should independent institutions
Sort of, but Congress also wrote a bunch of pretty broad, vague laws, delegating a significant amount of power to the executive via agency rulemaking, and it turns out the agencies are part of the executive branch and have to do what the head of the executive branch says they have to do (within the limits of those broad, vague laws). If Congress can't get back to smaller, simpler, more specific laws, and they continue to pass the burden of this complexity over to the executive branch to figure out, the executive branch will continue to wield outsize power.
He did not know. He was also not expecting to win, and so had to scramble to get people appointed.
He asked around and got people who were experts in their respective fields. The problem is that those experts (a) knew his ideas were bad, and (b) had integrity. It was, by and large, Trump's appointees that worked hard to counter his agent and not the government bureaucracy.
Trump did not make the same 'mistake' this time around: he appointed folks not for their competence but for their loyalty to him. That was and is the only criteria for serving under Trump.
He wanted his run to allow him to start his own tv channel: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/donald-trump-tv-netw...
And it's really fumbling as of now. The tarrifs were 100% on Trump and it's clearly thrown a monkey wrench in everything. the federal judges have slowed everything to a crawl, and these spectacles with immigration have activated American eyes in ways we haven't seen in decades. These kinds of plans work in the shadows and as of now it's all out in the open.
It will reverse in November at this rate, but even a few more reisngations or deaths in the house can dramatically shift plans.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
It remains to be seen whether the courts will agree with that. Last I saw, they didn't, but it wasn't a final decision.
It's just grift.
Trump is not a smart person, he doesn't know much aside from what he's been told, and the people playing him to further their agendas would love more than anything to be kept in the shadows in case it all comes crumbling down to just pin it all on Trump, the moron.
Judiciary: appointments and ideological alignment with some of the Supreme Court. Thomas and Alito are fully controlled, Kavanaugh just loves a powerful executive, the rest aren't controlled but often in agreement.
Then there's his use of executive power to punish his adversaries, e.g. Perkins Coie.
He's not directly controlling the judiciary yet, but he has appointed wildly extremist judges and threatened judges who rule against him with impeachment, so he's certainly making an effort.
They really didn't. It was a dog and pony show under the belief that he would not make his way back into power. The dems/reps did not want to set a precedent of holding a president to account for doing terribly illegal things. They didn't intend to actually do anything to prevent this.
And so here we are.
If so, they have been well-paid for that bit of "strategy". Trump was able to delay the cases long enough that the election came first, and now he has immunity at least while in office.
I think they didn't realize the moment the country was in. They put a judge in charge of the justice department when we needed a bull-dog prosecutor. It was a bad choice.
(If you doubt this, go watch some clips and compare how he talks now to how he talked during his first administration. If you were concerned about Biden's state in 2024, you should be concerned about Trump now.)