Washington, DC – For United States President Donald Trump, 2025 was a year of crisis.
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”.
For legal observers, Trump’s approach has been a yet-undecided stress test on presidential power, cranked by the gears of broadly interpreted emergency statutes and untrammelled executive authority.
Decisions by the court, lawmakers and voters in the 2026 midterm elections could determine how that strategy resonates or is restrained.
“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.
“In many cases, the administration is simply doing stuff that certainly any pre-existing understandings of executive authority would have said you cannot do,” he said.
Emergency powers and ‘national security’
The US Constitution, unlike many countries, has no catch-all emergency power authorisation for presidents.
In fact, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that presidents have no such implied authorities, explained David Driesen, professor emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law. Still, Congress has passed “numerous statutes that grant the president limited emergency powers under limited circumstances to do specific things”.
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.
Like many US presidents, Trump has also used broad and ambiguous national security claims to justify expanding his reach.
But several factors have set Trump’s second term apart, most notably the lack of distinct inciting events for many of the powers claimed, Driesen said.
“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.”
Put simply, he added, “to Trump, everything is an emergency”.
The tone was set on day one, with Trump’s broad executive order declaring that irregular crossings at the southern border meant nothing less than “America’s sovereignty is under attack”. The order has been used to indefinitely suspend US asylum obligations, surge forces to the border, and seize federal land.
The same day, Trump declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to designate Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as “foreign terrorist organizations”, posing a threat to the “national security, foreign policy, and economy” of the US.
The administration has, in part, relied on and expanded that order in efforts to circumvent due process in its mass deportation push and to rhetorically justify a militaristic approach to Latin America.
Simultaneously, Trump also declared a wide-ranging energy emergency on his first day in office, laying the groundwork to bypass environmental regulations.
To be sure, as Bowman explained, Trump’s use of official emergency statutes has been only a piece of the puzzle, combined with his broad interpretation of constitutionally mandated power to reshape the government in ways big and small.
That has included cleaving civil servants from congressionally created government departments via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), trying to fire heads of independent agencies, renaming institutions – possibly illegally – in his likeness, and allegedly bypassing required approvals to physically transform the White House.
But the invocation of emergency statutes has remained a backbone of his second term. Trump invoked an emergency to justify sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its investigations into Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
He used the “emergency” of fentanyl smuggling to justify tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, later unilaterally labelling the drug “weapons of mass destruction”.
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 ‘mixed picture’
In review, 2025 has shown virtually no willingness from Congress, where both chambers remain narrowly controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, to challenge 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 the six conservative members of the nine-judge panel ascribe to varying degrees to the “unitary executive theory”, which argues the drafters of the constitution envisioned a strong consolidation of presidential power.
“On the one hand, Trump is obviously willing to declare emergencies where no rational person would really believe they exist,” Bowman said.
“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 example, Trump has been temporarily allowed to continue the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, DC, a federal district where he declared a “crime emergency” in August. City officials have said the characterisation defies facts on the ground.
Despite claiming similar overlapping crime and immigration crises in liberal-led cities in states across the country, Trump has had far less success. Lower courts have limited deployments of the National Guard in California, Illinois, and Oregon.
Trump has also floated, but not yet invoked, the Insurrection Act, another law in the crisis portfolio dating back to 1792 that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement to “suppress insurrections and repel invasions”.
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 designed to quickly expel foreign nationals during times of war – to swiftly deport undocumented individuals without due process has been constrained, but allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court with limited due process protections.
In one of the most-watched cases on the docket, the Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling when it returns to session in January on the legal justification of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
A lower court has previously ruled that Trump deployed the emergency statute illegally. Some conservative justices on the top court have also expressed wariness over the president’s claim.
The panel has appeared more amenable in a landmark case determining whether Trump can fire heads of independent agencies, also set to be decided in the new year.
The spectre of war
When it comes to unilaterally making war, Trump has been bounding down a well-trodden path of misused presidential power, according to Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Washington, DC-based Center for International Policy.
The end of the year has been marked by US military strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats from Venezuela, decried by rights groups 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 made a similar claim about the Nicolas Maduro-led government in Venezuela, as he has continued to rattle the sabre of land strikes.
The actions have been accompanied by a pugilistic rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a reframing of criminal Latin American cartels as so-called “narcoterrorists” and declaring a new drive to bring the Western Hemisphere firmly under the US sphere of influence.
“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.
Most recently, Republicans – and a handful of Democrats – in the House of Representatives voted down two separate war powers resolutions that would require congressional approval for future strikes on alleged drug boats or on Venezuelan territory.
The vote, Duss said, underscored “Trump’s near-total control of the Republican Party despite the fact that he is blatantly violating his own campaign promises to end wars, rather than to start them”.
Public opinion
Trump’s control over his party and his influence writ-large over the country will largely be tested in next year’s midterm elections. The vote will determine control of the House and the Senate.
A slate of polls has indicated at least some degree of wariness in Trump’s use of presidential power.
In particular, a Quinnipiac poll released in mid-December found 54 percent of voters think Trump is going too far in his authority claims, while 37 percent think he is handling the role correctly. Another 7 percent believe Trump should go further in using the power of the presidency.
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.
To be sure, a panoply of factors determine US elections, and it remains unclear if voters were more likely to respond to the results of Trump’s approach to the presidency, or to the approach itself.
“Does the average person really think much about any of the theoretical bases for the things Trump is doing? And frankly, would the average person care very much if the results were, in the short term, results of which they approved?” University of Missouri’s Bowman mused.
“I don’t know the answer … How all this is perceived across the country, and what’s going to happen next, is anybody’s guess.”
