In 2020, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith published After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. The book argued that Donald Trump’s first term had exposed serious weaknesses in the constitutional guardrails, laws, norms, and institutional practices that constrain the presidency. They offered reforms covering conflicts of interest, foreign influence, abuse of the pardon power, Justice Department independence, special counsel rules, war powers, emergency powers, vacancies, and other areas where presidential power had proven more vulnerable to abuse than many Americans had assumed.
It was an important book. It was also, in retrospect, optimistic.
The premise seemed to be that Trump had revealed the weak points in the system, and that responsible people in both parties might respond by repairing them. That was not a foolish hope. After Watergate, Vietnam, and the Church Committee, Congress did enact reforms intended to constrain executive abuse. The American system had failed before, learned from the failure, and tried to build stronger guardrails.
But that requires goodwill.
It requires elected officials who care not only about whether their side wins, but about whether the rules survive. It requires members of Congress to defend Congress as an institution. It requires courts to enforce legal limits where they can. It requires political parties to screen out candidates who are plainly hostile to constitutional restraints. It requires voters to punish misconduct even when the misconduct is committed by someone who says the things they want to hear.
The Constitution is not self-executing. Neither are statutes. Neither are norms.
Rules work only when enough people in positions of power feel some obligation to preserve them. When that obligation disappears, the rules become less like walls and more like lines painted on the floor.
That is the lesson of the current moment.
It would be naive to pretend that presidents of both parties have never bent, scraped, or even occasionally jumped the guardrails. They have. American history is full of examples of executive overreach, partisan hardball, and self-justifying claims of necessity. But the current moment feels different in scale, scope, and intent. What once appeared as episodic abuse now looks increasingly like a systematic effort to convert weak points in the constitutional order into ordinary tools of governance.
The problem is no longer simply that Trump found weak points in the presidency. The problem is that those weak points are now being used as a governing strategy. Conflicts of interest, attacks on law enforcement independence, pressure on neutral institutions, threats against political opponents, abuse of pardon and prosecutorial discretion, and the blending of public power with private grievance are no longer aberrations. They are becoming part of the operating manual.
A revised edition of After Trump would not be a 400-page book. It might be 1,000 pages.
That is not because the first book was inadequate. It is because the second Trump term is testing whether the American political system can respond to known vulnerabilities after one party has decided that exploiting them is preferable to repairing them.
Republicans should think harder about what they are teaching.
They may believe that bending the rules is justified because Trump is their candidate, because Democrats are worse, because the bureaucracy is hostile, because the press is unfair, or because the stakes are too high to lose. Those rationalizations are not new. Every faction that weakens institutional restraints tells itself that its emergency is unique.
But no party stays in power forever.
At some point, a Democrat will win the presidency. Perhaps that Democrat will be center-left, restrained, and institutionally minded. Or perhaps the next successful Democrat will be a left-wing ideologue with Trump’s appetite for grievance and Trump’s willingness to use public power against enemies. Perhaps that person will also be a gifted performer, a relentless fundraiser, and a shameless grifter.
If Republicans believe that possibility is impossible, they are fooling themselves.
Every precedent they set now will be available later. Every weakened ethics rule, every politicized prosecution, every retaliatory investigation, every permissive theory of presidential power, every excuse for self-dealing, every attack on neutral administration, every effort to turn law enforcement into a partisan weapon—those lessons will not be forgotten by their opponents.
Republicans may think they are building a fortress. They may be building a road map.
This is the part of constitutional politics that partisans often refuse to see. A rule that protects only your side is not a rule. A norm that matters only when the other party violates it is not a norm. A legal restraint that depends entirely on whether the president feels like obeying it is not much of a restraint at all.
That is why goodwill matters.
Goodwill does not mean weakness. It does not mean refusing to fight for policy goals. It does not mean pretending that the parties are the same or that disagreements are unimportant. It means recognizing that there are some tools a decent political movement should not use, because once those tools become legitimate, no one can control who uses them next.
The American constitutional system was designed with ambition counteracting ambition. But ambition does not counteract ambition if Congress becomes an extension of the president, if party loyalty overwhelms institutional duty, if courts avoid hard questions, and if voters reward abuses because they are aimed at their favorite targets.
The result is not strong government. It is government by retaliation.
A healthy political system needs more than written rules. It needs officeholders who accept that victory is temporary, legitimacy matters, opponents are not enemies of the state, and power borrowed from weakened institutions must eventually be repaid—with interest.
That is the warning Republicans should hear now.
The damage they tolerate because it benefits them today may become the weapon used against them tomorrow. The constitutional shortcuts they excuse now may be used by someone they fear far more than the current Democratic leadership. The presidency they are helping to reconstruct around personal loyalty and unchecked discretion will not always be occupied by their champion.
That should worry them.
It should worry everyone.