ABSTRACT
Despite four years of media alarm over Donald Trump’s actions, long before Trump arrived on the political scene, presidents began to bolster their capacity to govern unilaterally, substituting executive orders and other political decrees for legislation, while attempting to enhance their influence over the nation’s bureaucracies and courts.
In this time, the imperial presidency has given rise to an imperial politics in which presidents seek to govern through edicts while their opponents counter by planning coups. How else should we characterize the Watergate affair, the Iran Contra imbroglio, the Whitewater investigation and the Mueller probe, to say nothing of the formal impeachment effort launched by congressional Democrats in 2019? However justified, these are effectively coup attempts by political opponents hoping to weaken or depose presidents before their elective terms have ended. This politics of edicts and coups has become the hallmark of contemporary American politics. And, perhaps inevitably in the new world of imperial politics, a president has now shown the possibility that chief executives can launch their own coup attempts to rid themselves of congressional foes.
