New York Times: Welcome To America’s Fourth Great Constitutional Rupture

? CNN: “We’re living in a different world — 70% of Americans say Trump is doing what he promised to do.”

PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT! pic.twitter.com/qYd3BGufmM

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 10, 2025

It is Year Zero in Washington.

The New Deal era liberal order is being aggressively dismantled.

WSJ:

“I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.

There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place. Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.

There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century. …”

Apparently, I am not alone in thinking what we are witnessing is the death of the old liberal regime created during the Great Depression and World War II, and the construction of its replacement.

New York Times:

“Americans are prone to venerate our Constitution, mythologizing the founding generation as uniquely wise, and our subsequent constitutional history as a process of evolution toward an ever more perfect union.

But American constitutional history is far more fraught, its evolution a kind of punctuated equilibrium marked by mass extinction of prior forms and precedents. Each of these moments has reshaped the way our Constitution works in fundamental ways, providing a new framework for normal politics for a new era.

The scope of President Trump’s challenge to the existing constitutional order — largely through a blitzkrieg of executive orders, many of them in blatant disregard of established precedent and legislation — suggests we may be in the process of another such discontinuous and disruptive moment.

The question is whether it will transform our constitutional order fruitfully yet again, or accelerate a final degeneration into Caesarism. …

Mr. Trump’s challenge is strikingly different. He aims to unbind the executive from constraints imposed by the other branches and the normal process of administrative lawmaking. To stand, these changes will require the other players in our constitutional order to accept that the president by himself can make changes of such magnitude. That would be a fourth constitutional revolution. …”

Joe Biden’s handlers tried and failed to do something similar from the Left.

There are two major differences though: the first is that Republicans have a supermajority on the Supreme Court, which means that any attempt at regime change from Trump and the Right is much more likely to be ratified by the federal courts, and the second is that there is no comparison between the dynamic and aggressive leadership of Trump and his cult of personality and the frailty of Joe Biden.

Note: Lincoln and FDR’s regime changes were ratified by the Supreme Court. Like his predecessors, Trump changed the balance of power on the Supreme Court in his first term.