When a republic is brought to the brink of its legitimacy by opaque, technocratic elites, by faceless bureaucrats and supranational networks with unclear, and most often no, accountability, it faces a choice: capitulation or resistance.
When the administrative state begins to live its own life, detached from the democratic control of citizens; when it begins to pursue its own independent state policy that does not obey the instructions of the supreme political authority constituted by the vote of the voters, then the time has come for radical change.
This is what Assoc. Prof. Dr. Borislav Tsekov writes for "Trud".
This is exactly the kind of change that Donald Trump is implementing - the man who, in the eyes of many, seems like a destroyer of order, but in fact restores the strength and morality of the republic. The president through whom the republic strikes back - not arbitrarily, but institutionally, legitimately and strictly constitutionally. For at the heart of Trump's philosophy of governance is a constitutional doctrine that the American left has been diligently ignoring and vehemently reviling for the past few decades. And which has been stifling with mountains of regulations and with Congressional annexation of territories of power that, by their original design, belong to the holder of executive power - the president.
This is the doctrine that forms the substantial core of the American republic - the doctrine of the unitary executive doctrine. This is not just a legal concept dug out from between the lines of the Federalist Papers, but the constitutional shield of the republic forged by the Founding Fathers against any creeping administrative absolutism. This is a restoration of federal executive power in the hands of the one to whom the Constitution entrusted it - the president of the United States. Unlike the parliamentary form of government, this doctrine is inherent and applicable to the presidential republic in the United States, due to the sole holder of the executive branch and the strict separation of powers.
The basis of the single executive branch is Article II of the US Constitution, which grants it to the president. This means that every executive function of the federal government emanates directly from the president, who has supremacy and control over all federal agencies and employees. This interpretation opposes the view that the executive branch is decentralized and can have entire constellations of "independent" agencies, commissions and all sorts of other bodies that do not report directly to the White House. Even Alexander Hamilton - the constitutional architect of the executive branch - wrote in Federalist Papers No. 70 that a vigorous executive branch is the leading ingredient of good government. What clearer embodiment of such vigorous power than President Donald Trump? A president who does not hide behind structures and committees, but acts; who does not delegate responsibility to “independent agencies“, but takes it personally – with all the risks and consequences. In accordance with the principles of constitutional democracy.
The doctrine of the single executive branch is not just a political declaration or ambition, but also has its foundations in the interpretative practice of the US Supreme Court. For example, in Myers v. United States (1926), the Supreme Court confirmed that the president has the absolute right to dismiss employees appointed by him without the approval of the Senate. The case arose from President Woodrow Wilson's refusal to comply with a congressional restriction in this regard. The Court explicitly confirmed that the president, as the holder of executive power, has the right to dismiss employees at all levels of the federal administration. Later, however, this position was eroded to some extent by the decision in the case Morrison v. Olson (1988), which approved the existence of special prosecutors protected from dismissal. On this occasion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote his historic dissent, in which he emphasized: “The theory of the separation of powers does not mean a balance between powers. It means that power should not be dispersed beyond those to which the Constitution expressly entrusts it.” This view of Scalia is today the basis for the revival of the doctrine of the single executive branch by the Trump administration. It is no coincidence that in the case of Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020), the US Supreme Court declared that the statutory provisions according to which the independent director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau cannot be fired by the president without good reason are contrary to the US Constitution. It was this decision of the highest federal jurisdiction that revived the original constitutional force of the doctrine of the single executive branch.
Donald Trump is putting this doctrine into practice. DOGE – the structure currently headed by Elon Musk – is based on it. In Trump’s words: “You can’t have a president elected by the people being neutralized by officials nobody elected. That’s not democracy – that’s the swamp.” In the same vein, one of his legal advisors during his first term, Don McGahn, argued that: “The president is the executive branch. There is no constitutional basis for independent agencies that are not accountable to him. That’s not how our government is designed.”
These words defend the original constitutional idea on which the American presidential republic is built – that state policy should be guided and implemented by the democratically elected president, not by bureaucrats who are not elected by anyone. Liberal progressivism has built a powerful administrative state in which it has installed its emissaries and made them independent of the will of American citizens. In order to bypass the democratic system whenever they lose the vote of the citizens. That is why Trump's policy, which is dismantling this administrative state, has caused real hysteria among the bureaucracy, among the corporate media and globalist transnational structures. Trump has restored the operation of the constitutional decree that the president is the only executive body elected by the people, from which it follows that his power must be real, not nominal. Yes, his rhetoric is sometimes harsh. His style is confrontational. But the real essence is not in the tweets, but in the constitutional paradigm to which his government is subject. He is a president who applies the doctrine of the single executive power. A president like Hamilton, not like Jackson. He does not believe in general consensus, but in the will of the democratically elected leader. And this will, no matter how much it outrages the custodians of liberal globalism, is the purest form of political accountability and observance of democratic principles.
The Republic is not dead. It is striking back. In the spirit of the Federalist Papers. And with the actions of a president who - without being a constitutionalist - understood better than many lawyers that power that is not fully exercised by its legitimate holders is usurped by other factors and subordinated to extra-institutional forces.
Donald Trump has returned the American nation to the fundamental question: whose power is in the republic? And if the answer is that it belongs to the people - then there is no other option but for the president to be the real, active, uncompromising executor of this people's mandate. This is exactly how the republic is striking back - not by obeying the system, but by taming it, educating it, and subordinating it to the people again.