WASHINGTON, DC – For U.S. President Donald Trump, 2025 was a year of crisis.
The president himself, who took office on January 20 after a tumultuous return to politics, speaks of a series of swift and bold actions.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
To name a few, he envisions eradicating immigration “invasions” that include shutting out legal immigrants and, in some cases, targeting U.S. citizens. He touted a hard reset of unbalanced trade deals that pose an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.” And in the last months of this year, he launched a military offensive against “narco-terrorists” who he claims are trying to overthrow the United States through illegal drugs that could be used as “weapons of mass destruction.”
To legal experts, Trump’s approach appears to be a yet-to-be-determined stress test of presidential power, fueled by broadly interpreted emergency laws and unfettered executive branch cogs.
Decisions by courts, lawmakers, and voters in the 2026 midterm elections could determine how that strategy resonates or is curtailed.
Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera: “The use and abuse of emergency powers is only one part of the picture.”
“In many cases, the administration is simply doing things that our previous understanding of executive power would definitely not allow them to do,” he said.
Emergency powers and “national security”
Unlike many countries, the U.S. Constitution does not have sweeping emergency powers powers for the president.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that the president has no such implied authority, explained David Driessen, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University School of Law. Still, Congress passed “a number of laws that give the president limited emergency powers in limited circumstances to do certain things.”
Nearly every modern president has used emergency powers to varying degrees, but Congress and the Supreme Court have historically been wary of reining in such actions.
Like many U.S. presidents, Trump has used broad and vague national security arguments to justify his expanded reach.
But several factors made President Trump’s second term stand out, Driessen said, most notably the lack of a clear inciting event for many of the claimants.
“I’ve never seen a president use emergency powers to justify virtually all of this policy agenda, and I’ve never seen a president use emergency powers to seize powers that aren’t actually in the statute at all,” he told Al Jazeera.
Simply put, “for Trump, everything is an emergency,” he added.
The tone was set on the first day, with Trump’s sweeping executive order declaring that irregular crossings at the southern border amounted to “American sovereignty being under attack.” The order has been used to indefinitely suspend U.S. asylum obligations, rush troops to the border and seize federal land.
On the same day, President Trump declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and designated Torren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as “foreign terrorist organizations” that pose a threat to the “national security, foreign policy, and economy” of the United States.
The regime has relied on and expanded on that mandate, in part in its efforts to circumvent due process in its push for mass deportations and to rhetorically justify its militaristic approach to Latin America.
At the same time, President Trump declared a widespread energy emergency on his first day in office, laying the groundwork for circumventing environmental regulations.
Indeed, as Bowman explained, President Trump’s use of official emergency laws, along with a broad interpretation of the Constitution’s mandated authority to reorganize the government in large and small ways, is only part of the puzzle.
These include cutting off civil servants from government departments created by Congress through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), attempting to fire the head of an independent agency, possibly illegally renaming an organization after his likeness, and allegedly circumventing necessary approvals to make physical changes to the White House.
But invoking the emergency law remains the cornerstone of his second term. President Trump invoked a state of emergency to justify sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
He used the “emergency” of fentanyl smuggling to justify tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and later unilaterally labeled the drug a “weapon of mass destruction.”
In April, President Trump cited the emergency law, which imposes broad reciprocal tariffs on nearly all of the United States’ trading partners, as one of the most difficult uses of emergency authorities.
“Mixed photo”
Looking back to 2025, Congress, with both chambers still narrowly controlled by President Trump’s Republicans, has shown virtually no appetite to challenge the president.
Meanwhile, lower federal court decisions paint a “complicated picture,” said Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri, who said the country’s highest court left broad questions unanswered.
Bowman pointed out that the six conservative members of the nine-justice panel, to varying degrees, subscribe to the “unitary executive theory,” which argues that the framers of the Constitution envisioned a powerful expansion of presidential power.
“On the one hand, President Trump is clearly willing to declare a state of emergency that no reasonable person would believe exists,” Bowman said.
“On the other hand, at least the lower courts have pushed back on this, but it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will uphold the lower courts.”
For example, President Trump was temporarily allowed to continue deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., where he declared a “crime emergency” in August. City officials said this characterization contradicts the facts on the ground.
Despite claiming that liberal-led cities in states across the country are experiencing similar crime and immigration crises, President Trump has had less success. Lower courts have limited National Guard deployments in California, Illinois and Oregon.
Trump has also proposed the Insurrection Act, another law in the Crisis Portfolio dating back to 1792, which would allow the president to send troops to domestic law enforcement agencies to “suppress insurrection and repel invasion,” but has not yet invoked it.
The judiciary’s reaction to the tactics behind Trump’s deportation push has also been mixed.
President Trump is restricted from using the Alien Enemy Act, a 1798 law designed to expedite the deportation of aliens during wartime, to quickly deport illegal aliens without due process, but the Supreme Court has allowed him to proceed with limited due process protections.
In one of the most closely watched cases, the Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the legal validity of President Trump’s reciprocal tariffs when it meets in January.
A lower court previously ruled that President Trump illegally invoked the emergency law. Some conservative justices on the Supreme Court have also expressed caution about the president’s claims.
The commission has taken a more deferential stance in a landmark case to determine whether President Trump can fire the head of an independent agency, which is also expected to be decided in the new year.
ghost of war
Matt Das, executive vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Policy, said President Trump is taking a well-trodden path of abusing executive power when it comes to waging unilateral wars.
The end of the year was marked by U.S. military attacks on suspected drug-smuggling vessels from Venezuela, which rights groups denounced as extrajudicial killings.
The administration claimed, without evidence, that the more than 100 people killed were trying to destabilize the United States by flooding it with drugs. President Trump has made similar claims about Venezuela’s government led by Nicolas Maduro, which continues to rattle its ground attack sabers.
These actions are accompanied by a punitive rebranding of the Pentagon as the Department of the Army, a reframing of Latin American criminal cartels as so-called “narco-terrorists,” and a declaration of a new commitment to bringing the Western Hemisphere firmly under the U.S. sphere of influence.
“We need to understand this in the context of multiple administrations of both parties effectively waging war by abusing executive power,” Das said, explaining that this behavior accelerated in the so-called “global war on terror” after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Most recently, House Republicans and a handful of Democrats rejected two separate war powers resolutions that would have required Congressional approval for future attacks on alleged drug smuggling vessels or Venezuelan territory.
Das said the vote highlighted “Trump’s near-total control of the Republican Party, even in blatant violation of his campaign promise to end wars, not start them.”
public opinion
Mr. Trump’s control over his party and his influence over the country as a whole will be greatly tested in next year’s midterm elections. Votes determine the majority in the House and Senate.
A series of polls shows at least some degree of wariness about Mr. Trump’s use of executive power.
In particular, a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-December found that 54% of voters think President Trump is asserting too much of his authority, while 37% think he is handling his role correctly. Another 7% think Trump should use more of his presidential powers.
Another Politico poll conducted in November found that while 53% of U.S. residents think Trump has too much power, the president’s overall approval ratings have declined since taking office.
To be sure, U.S. elections are determined by a variety of factors, but it remains unclear whether voters are more likely to react to the outcome of Trump’s approach to the presidency, or to the approach itself.
“Do ordinary people really think deeply about the rationale for what President Trump is doing? And frankly, do ordinary people really care that much about whether the results are outcomes that they approve of in the short term?” wondered Bowman of the University of Missouri.
“We don’t know the answer… How this whole thing will be perceived across the country and what will happen next is anyone’s guess.”
