Washington, D.C. – 2025 was a crisis year for Donald Trump, the president of the United States.
Roaring into office on January 20 on the heels of a raucous political comeback, the president’s own telling describes a series of actions that have been swift and stark.
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To name a few, he has envisioned rooting out a migrant “invasion” that includes staunching legal immigrants, and, potentially, targeting US citizens, he has touted a hard reset of uneven trade deals that pose “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”, and, in the final months of the year, he has gone on the military offensive against “narcoterrorists” that he claims seek to topple the US through illicit drugs, possibly used as “weapons of mass destruction”.
Trump’s strategy has been a yet-undetermined stress test on presidential power, aided by the gears of broadly interpreted emergency statutes and untrammelled executive authority, according to legal observers.
In the midterm elections of 2026, the court, lawmakers, and voters could decide how that strategy is perceived or withdrawn.
“The use or abuse of emergency powers is only one corner of a larger picture”, Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera.
The administration is simply doing things, he said, in many cases, that no prior executive orders would have permitted.
National security and emergency powers
The US Constitution, unlike many countries, has no catch-all emergency power authorisation for presidents.
According to David Driesen, professor emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that presidents had no such implied authorities. Despite this, “numerous statutes grant the president limited emergency powers under limited circumstances.”
Nearly every modern president has used emergency powers with varying degrees of gusto, with Congress and the Supreme Court historically wary of reining in those actions.
Trump has also defended expanding his reach by making broad, ambiguous national security claims, as do many other US presidents.
However, Driesen said that Trump’s second term has been shaped by a number of factors, most notably the lack of distinct inciting events for many of the powers.
“I’ve never seen a president invoke emergency powers to justify practically all of this policy agenda”, he told Al Jazeera, “and I’ve also never seen a president use them to seize powers that really are not in the statutes at all”.
He continued, “To Trump, everything is an emergency.”
Trump’s broad executive order, which stated that irregular crossings at the southern border meant nothing less than “America’s sovereignty is under attack,” set the tone for the day. The order has been used to indefinitely suspend US asylum obligations, surge forces to the border, and seize federal land.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) were designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” by Trump on the same day as they were threatened by US “national security, foreign policy, and economy” by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
In part, the administration has relied on and expanded that order in its efforts to defy the law and rhetorically defend a militaristic policy toward Latin America.
Simultaneously, Trump also declared a wide-ranging energy emergency on his first day in office, laying the groundwork to bypass environmental regulations.
As Bowman put it, Trump’s use of official emergency statutes was only one component of the puzzle, combined with his broad understanding of the constitutional authority to change the government, both big and small.
That includes trying to fire heads of independent agencies, renaming institutions in his likeness, and allegedly bypassing necessary approvals to physically transform the White House, as well as cleaving civil servants from congressionally created government departments via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
But the invocation of emergency statutes has remained a backbone of his second term. Trump invoked an emergency to demand that the International Criminal Court (ICC) be prosecuted for its inquiries into Gaza’s Israeli war crimes.
He later unilaterally labeled the drug “weapons of mass destruction” using the “emergency” of fentanyl smuggling to support tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China.
In April, in one of his most challenged uses of an emergency authority, Trump cited an emergency statute to impose sweeping reciprocal tariffs against nearly all US trading partners.
A “mischung picture”
In summary, 2025 has demonstrated that Congress, where Trump’s Republican Party maintains a tightholdhold in both chambers, is hardly willing to put up a challenge on the president.
Rulings from lower federal courts, meanwhile, have offered a “mixed picture”, according to the University of Missouri’s Bowman, while the country’s top court has left wider questions unanswered.
Bowman noted that the nine conservative members of the panel, who contend that the “unitary executive theory” was a theory that the constitution’s drafters had in mind when creating a strong consolidation of presidential power, contributed to varying degrees.
Trump, according to Bowman, is undoubtedly willing to declare emergencies when no-one would actually believe they exist.
“On the other hand, at least the lower courts have pushed back, but it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will back them up”.
For instance, Trump has been given a temporary right to continue sending National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., a federal district where he declared a “crime emergency” in August. According to city officials, the characterization defies local laws.
Despite claiming similar overlapping crime and immigration crises in liberal-led cities in states across the country, Trump has had far less success. California, Illinois, and Oregon’s deployments of the National Guard are constrained by lower courts.
The Insurrection Act, a second law in the crisis portfolio that allows the president to “suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” has also been suggested by Trump, but it has not yet been invoked. It is a law that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
A judicial response to the tactics behind Trump’s deportation drive has also been mixed.
Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law intended to quickly expel foreign nationals from war, to quickly deport undocumented individuals has been constrained, but the Supreme Court has allowed it to proceed with limited due process protections.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legal justification of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs when it resumes its session in January in one of the most closely watched cases on the docket.
A lower court has previously ruled that Trump deployed the emergency statute illegally. The president’s assertion has also drawn the attention of some conservative justices in the top court.
In a landmark case involving whether Trump can fire the heads of independent agencies, which will also be decided in the new year, the panel has come across more sympathetic.
The spectre of war
According to Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Washington, DC-based Center for International Policy, Trump has been treading a well-trodden path of misguided presidential power when it comes to making war unilaterally.
Rights groups have called for the US military to launch strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats from Venezuela as extrajudicial killings.
The administration has claimed, without evidence, that over 100 people killed had sought to destabilise the US by flooding it with drugs. Trump has repeatedly roil the sabre and sputter of land strikes, making a similar claim about the Nicolas Maduro-led Venezuelan government.
The actions come in the form of a pugnacious rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a resemblance to the so-called “narcoterrorists” for criminal Latin American cartels, and a new effort to firmly place the Western Hemisphere under US control.
“We have to understand this in the context of multiple administrations of both parties abusing executive authority to essentially go to war”, said Duss, who explained that the practice accelerated in the so-called “global war on terror” post-September 11, 2001 attacks.
Republicans and a few Democrats in the House of Representatives recently rejected two separate war powers resolutions that would require congressional approval for upcoming strikes on alleged drugboats or on Venezuelan territory.
Duss claimed that the vote demonstrated Trump’s “almost total control of the Republican Party” despite the fact that he was blatantly violating his own campaign pledges to end wars rather than to start them.
Public opinion
In the midterm elections of next year, Trump’s ability to control both his party and his overall political influence will be largely under scrutiny. The House and Senate will be in control after the vote.
A slate of polls has indicated at least some degree of wariness in Trump’s use of presidential power.
In particular, a Quinnipiac poll found that 37% of voters believe Trump is handling his authority claims correctly, while 54% believe he is overstepping it. Another 7 percent think Trump needs to expand his presidential influence.
Another Politico poll in November found that 53 percent of US residents think Trump has too much power, while the president has seen an overall slump in his approval ratings since taking office.
It’s true that the US elections are determined by a number of factors, but it’s still unclear whether voters were more likely to approve of Trump’s presidential candidate’s choices or the ones that were made.
Does the typical person really consider any theoretical foundations for Trump’s actions? And frankly, would the average person care very much if the results were, in the short term, results of which they approved”? Bowman made up a rumor at the University of Missouri.
