Writer hopes Trump's overreach will make the left reconsider big government

Over the weekend, we saw millions of people take to the streets in communities all over the country to protest the Trump administration. The No Kings demonstrations drew an estimated 7 million people at thousands of events nationwide.

People spoke out against the administration’s immigration actions, slashing of federal funding, educational and environmental protections and more.

The events were arranged by a network of progressive organizations that accuse the president of behaving more like a king than an elected president.

But, as progressives are watching what President Donald Trump is doing with the powers of a big national government, Robert Robb wonders: Will it make those traditional big-government Democrats rethink their commitment to it?

Robb is a former longtime columnist for The Arizona Republic. Today, he writes a Substack. Robb is a small-government conservative, so, to him, the answer here is less-than-hopeful.

Full conversation

ROBERT ROBB: Small-government conservatives have always believed that if you have an accumulation of power at the national level, and you concentrate that power in the president, you are likely, one day, to get someone who will misuse and abuse that power, which Donald Trump is doing on almost a daily basis.

Liberals, on the other hand, have tended to support that expanded role for the federal government and greater authority for the president, vis a vis the Congress, so long as that power was used to advance liberal policy.

So, now that they have seen how that power can be used in ways that they oppose and are very worried about, I think it's an interesting question. Will there be some kind of movement on the left to sort of try to reinforce the guide rails that the founders tried to create? The founders tried to create a structure of government in which no one would have the power that Donald Trump is now exercising so arbitrarily and capriciously.

LAUREN GILGER: This is what you mean when you say to a small-government conservative like you, "Trump was almost inevitable?"

ROBB: Yes. The assumption is that if you concentrate power, you won't always have, as our founder said, angels running the government — that you will have people that will try to use that power for personal advancement or to suppress opposing points of view or further aggrandize power and exercise it on a personal basis.

So for a small-government conservative, this is sort of one of the likely consequences of creating a federal government that's much more extensively involved in American society than originally intended and concentrating the power of that federal government in a single individual.

Robert Robb

GILGER: Are you surprised this is coming from the right and not the left?

ROBB: Not really. I mean, if the liberals wanted to use a bigger federal government and greater presidential authority to achieve liberal policy objectives, there really aren't conservative policy objectives that that kind of power can be used for.

So, while I think it's probably highly likely, if not inevitable, that if you concentrate this power, it will ultimately be misused and abused, I think it's also reasonable to expect that is more likely to occur on the right than the left because there's less legitimate purposes for using that kind of power from the right.

And you're seeing that in Trump's arbitrary march through all these constitutional guardrails, they aren't really to achieve much in the way of policy objectives — outside of immigration and tariffs — they're, instead, exercising raw political power.

GILGER: So what do you think the answer is? Like, you pose this question that Democrats should maybe think about big national government and what that means in light of what they've seen Trump do, but do you think they will rethink that?

ROBB: I think it's generally highly unlikely that they will want to return to sort of the separation of responsibilities between the national government and state and local governments and rebalance that. But there does appear to be, on the left, a renewed appreciation for the importance of separation of powers and checks and balances. You've seen two attempts by Democrats in the Senate to create some kind of restrictions on the president's tariff authority and his ability to simply shoot boats out of the water based upon the assertion that they are carrying drugs headed for the United States.

You had a very small number of Republicans willing to support those efforts. And so right now, we're still in the historical position where the members of Congress only support the separation of powers when someone from the other party is in the presidency. But at least you have Democrats starting to make this an effort at the congressional level.

And you do have some ferment within intellectual circles on the left about trying to restore some of these guardrails against the exercise of arbitrary power.

GILGER: You offer a really interesting example in the piece about Barack Obama early in his presidency saying that he didn't have the authority in the Constitution to give legal status to Dreamers, even though he thought they should have legal status. But then later on he establishes the DACA program, right, Like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and does that.

And now we're kind of watching similar — or opposite — things happen from the Trump administration. Is this sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Democrats, you think?

ROBB: Well, I do believe that if you create that kind of authority and you applaud doing things like Barack Obama saying that he's going to create a new immigration category, even though the Constitution clearly gives the authority over immigration to Congress, not to the president, you are likely to get a President Trump on the issue of tariffs, which the Constitution also clearly gives to the Congress, not the president.

Similarly, trying to stretch whatever statutory authority might be misinterpreted to give one some kind of legal fig leaf for violating the division of responsibilities that are clearly set forth in the Constitution. Now, I will say while there's democratic precedent for all of this, Trump is pursuing a scorched-earth approach to the exercise of presidential power, either given or assumed, unlike anyone in our previous history.

So my hope, although not my expectation, is that the shock of that may create on the left a stronger, or at least some degree of support for reducing the role of the federal government vis a vis state and local governments. Infrastructure is a great example of that. Trump is singling out infrastructure projects in Democratic polities.

Well, if those were things that were done at the state and local level, he wouldn't have that lever to exercise. So I'm hoping, but not expecting, that seeing what can be done with that power may renew on the left some sense that, well, maybe that power ought not to exist.

Maybe we should go back to the guardrails that the founders established that was intended to ensure that no one could exercise the kind of authority that Trump is currently exercising.

GILGER: All right, well, we'll wait and see. Bob Robb, former longtime Arizona Republic columnist and now Substack-er, joining us to talk about his recent piece on this. Bob, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

ROBB: Always good to be with you.