Could President Trump’s agenda lead to a Constitutional crisis?
President Donald Trump’s pushback against the judiciary could change the how executive power functions.
Whatever is said about President Donald Trump by his critics, Cynthia Harrison remains a true believer.
“The guy, he has a track record, a four-year track record, so yeah, we trust him,” Harrison, a retiree from Stowe, Vermont, told USA TODAY.
Trump has “been right on everything,” she said.
Harrison cites the nearly two-year investigation into Russian election interference stemming from the 2016 campaign as example.
A 2019 special counsel probe did not find evidence Trump or members of his campaign conspired with the foreign government to sway the outcome, and another internal investigation released in 2023 concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation.
“He said it was a hoax,” Harrison said. “He was right about that. “
That fealty to the president fuels his administration, as demonstrated at a recent luncheon in Washington last month, where White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was asked about the U.S.-China tariff war.
Navarro suggested it’s foolhardy to speculate what Trump might do next, and that’s “because by now, it’s trust in Trump.”
Ahead of his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, the president has dismantled parts of Washington’s bureaucracy and warned the judicial branch to butt out. Many of his core supporters who spoke with USA TODAY remain faithful and jubilant about the cascading change despite daily alarm bells rung by legal scholars and historians, including early signs that voters are softening on certain parts of his agenda.
They are happy about the emphasis on tightening the U.S.-Mexico border, including televised raids aimed at mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and they defend firing federal workers to tackle the country’s roughly 36.2 trillion debt crisis, as an example.
“I get excited because (Trump’s) a disrupter and Washington needs to be disrupted,” Harrison emphasized.
“So love him tapping Elon Musk, who’s the smartest man in the world, to help out and weed out government corruption.”
That steely confidence among the MAGA-fueled base has been Trump’s strongest armor as he wields his power in sharp ways, from his demands to end birthright citizenship to a directive pausing the distribution of trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans.
But a new NPR/Marist survey released this week ahead of Trump’s joint address to Congress shows the first cracks in the armor. About 45% approve of the job he’s doing as president versus 49% who disapprove, according to the poll of 1,700 U.S. adults which has a roughly 3% margin of error.
The same poll found solid majorities unsure about his actions with 54% saying the country is moving in the wrong direction; 55% believing federal cuts will cause more harm than good; and 56% of adults, including 65% of independent voters, thinking he has rushed to make changes without considering the full impact.
“The president is doing the things he promised his base he would do, but you wonder what happens once all of these changes start to impact them personally,” said Patricia Crouse, a political science professor at the University of New Haven.
“What will be the consequences and ramifications of what he’s doing?”
‘We’re tired of it’: Americans deeply divided on Trump but job approval steady
Those who pulled the lever for Trump last fall overwhelmingly dismiss concerns about executive overreach, however, as being overblown by the press as much as Democrats.
Even those in the president’s coalition with some misgivings about MAGA say they have found things to like.
Malcolm Mahoney, a student at Dartmouth College, said he couldn’t bring himself to support Trump last fall, and instead wrote in former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley’s name.
“I’m of the philosophy that I don’t believe in voting for the lesser of two evils,” said the 20-year-old Republican, who is a Springfield, Massachusetts native and self-described social conservative.
Yet, Mahoney has been pleased with the president’s executive orders pardoning 23 anti-abortion activists and barring transgender student-athletes from playing women’s sports. Other social conservatives who spoke with USA TODAY also cited Trump signing an executive order requiring policy recommendations to protect in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, access and reduce out-of-pocket costs.
“I’ll make it clear, I am not a ‘Trumpy.’ I am appreciative of some of his efforts, and I am not appreciative of others,” Mahoney said.
The country at-large remains severely split on its opinion about Trump as a person.
When asked their opinion of the president, political data site FiveThirtyEight on March 3 showed Trump was averaging roughly 48% unfavorable versus 46% favorable across various polls, far better than the public’s opinion of him during the campaign.
The site’s same model had Trump with about a 52% unfavorable versus 43% favorable rating on Election Day last year.
Mary Mennona Ventresca, a Republican from Royersford, Pennsylvania, said Democrats and their allies should stop attacking them, and accept that Trump’s supporters aren’t uninformed but rather see the country’s solutions radically different from them.
“His opponents have behaved for generations now like they own this country by divine right. That they alone have a right to free speech but that their opponents really don’t,” the 64-year-old saleswoman told USA TODAY.
“Frankly, we’re all tired of it,” she added.
A Pew Research Center survey released last month demonstrates how much Trump engenders extreme feelings in either direction with most Americans.
The poll showed 37% of U.S. adults strongly support his job performance. Conversely, about 40% said they strongly dislike what he’s doing as president. That 77% with strong feelings either way is far more than those who hold more lukewarm feelings.
The Pew survey shows that of those Americans, 11% identify as “not strongly” disapproving of Trump versus 9% who said they were “not strongly” approving.
Jack Reeves, of Wellington, North Carolina, voted for Trump and said he doesn’t pay much attention to day-to-day happenings in Washington. But, he trusts the president to handle the economy and believes his actions are in America’s best interest.
However, he’s a bit more cautious on some moves, such as slapping 25% tariffs on imports.
“You do need your tariffs, but they don’t need to be really outrageous, outlandish where it causes everything to go sky high where you can’t really afford it,” Reeves, an independent, said.
Foes seek to make Musk the administration’s face
In terms of his policy prescriptions, Pew finds there is slightly more opposition to Trump than full-throated support, for example.
About 35% of U.S. adults said they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, compared with 24% who said they support none of his agenda. However, the Pew poll shows that 40% of Americans are somewhere in the middle, with 17% saying they support some and another 23% asserting they back “only a few” of his ideas.
Reeves, 60, a terminal operator at a shipping yard, believes the federal government is “too big for its britches.” He supports Musk coming into the administration to examine and dismantle certain agencies.
As far as any trepidation about giving Musk access to “all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” according to a Trump executive order, Reeves isn’t troubled. He said he sees it the same as powerful members of Congress, such as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, trading stocks.
“It ain’t no different than all the insider trading that all the Democrats were doing while they were in office,” Reeves said.
But Republican Candy Meintze, 64, of Stevenson, Michigan, who voted for Trump after being undecided, said she’s wary about Musk, an unelected official, having so much government oversight.
“The only thing I don’t like is he has so much access; that disturbs me,” said Meintze, a married grandmother of seven and great-grandmother of three.
Democrats have focused their early counteroffensives on Musk, who is viewed more negatively than positively overall, according to the Pew survey. Approximately 54% of Americans express unfavorable views of the billionaire, according to the survey, versus 42% who view the South African-born entrepreneur favorably.
Musk’s task force announced last month, for example, that it terminated 89 contracts worth $881 million and canceled another 29 “DEI training grants” totaling $101 million within the U.S. Department of Education.
Meintze, the Michigan Republican, had been on the fence about last year’s election. She said she wants Trump to tread carefully on some actions, including attempts to dismantle the department.
“I don’t think what he’s doing is reckless; I think it’s necessary, but he needs to give some of his actions more thought,” she said. “I’m like, what’s the rush?”
Other supporters, such as Jeanne Solnordal, a longtime real estate investor in Oakland, California, said every administration should seek to cut costs and question previous spending measures. She supports whatever actions are needed to cut wasteful spending.
“I’m glad somebody is finally thinking with some common sense, like (Trump) said,” Solnordal, also chair of the Alameda County (Calif.) Republican Party, told USA TODAY.
“Change is hard, so rapid change is even harder, but those who are against it are going to have to get used to it,” Solnordal added. “I’m going to have trust in President Trump that he knows what he’s doing.”