Why the guardrails against Trump aren’t working

I’ve spent most of my professional life criticizing institutions — their failures, their exclusions, their hypocrisies, their quiet (and not so quiet) forms of violence. But like many of Donald Trump’s critics, I now catch myself fantasizing that those very same institutions will ultimately deliver his reckoning.

Think about it: How often have you woken up in the middle of the night to doom-scroll the news, searching for the one article promising that some institution — any institution — is finally putting an end to the relentless disregard for meaningful checks on Trump’s ongoing abuse of power?

Take the Federal Reserve. Not so long ago, it was common to hurl criticism at what many of us considered to be an elitist arm of rapacious capitalism. But today, we are all biting our nails and hoping that the Supreme Court shuts down Trump’s efforts to exert greater control over the Fed. We have resorted to worrying over an institution we loved to hate while remaining shocked that its integrity could be so fragile. 

Similar fantasies are everywhere right now — the hope that NATO will restrain Trump’s Greenland gambit, that international law will discipline his invasion of Venezuela and seizure of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, that constitutional norms will hold as the administration threatens to again deploy troops domestically.

Commentators keep scratching their heads at why Trump continues apace with virtually no meaningful pushback. But so far, the story has focused on Trump’s audacity, rather than the cultural conditions that have made restraint fragile in the first place.

We come to this impasse of our own making. While we may be celebrating the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York or reposting clips of Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis defending his city, most of us don’t even bother to vote for our own mayors. Even today in our highly contested political times, the typical turnout in mayoral elections is around 20%. There is something quietly ironic about expecting municipal leaders to serve as democratic guardrails when we have collectively abdicated our own responsibility in even the simplest level of civic participation.

Neoliberal culture has left us with two tendencies which, combined, have wreaked havoc on the functioning of our guardrails: a culture of negativity and a habit of entitlement. We criticize failures in our systems while expressing outrage when they don’t deliver.  

This dynamic can be seen most clearly in how we respond to the actions of Trump and his team. Each new provocation — threatening to seize Greenland, testing the limits of executive power, floating the use of troops in Minnesota — triggers a familiar cycle of outrage and institutional wish-casting. Surely the courts will stop this. NATO will intervene. Some agency will finally draw a line. What almost never follows is a conversation about what it would actually take — politically, culturally, materially — to rebuild the legitimacy and authority those institutions need in order to restrain a president who thrives on boundary-testing. We want institutional rescue, yet remain unwilling to commit to institutional repair.

Consider the fact that a 2024 Pew study found that only 30% of Americans could correctly answer three basic questions about NATO. Yet, 73% oppose the United States seizing Greenland by force, pointing in part to the fact that it falls under the NATO alliance. 

Trump and his team understand this asymmetry perfectly. They push legal barriers not simply because they are weak, but because the cultural cost of violating norms has collapsed. They know they can get away with it before they even try.

In a political environment trained to distrust institutions, procedural resistance looks illegitimate, slow, suspect or boring rather than stabilizing, productive and necessary. That makes escalation on our institutions cheap. When legitimacy is thin, power doesn’t need to justify itself carefully — it just needs to move faster than collective will can organize. 

This dynamic points to a more basic misunderstanding about what institutions actually are. We tend to imagine them as buildings, offices, legal codes or organizational charts — fixed structures that automatically constrain behavior. In reality, institutions are living systems of legitimacy: shared beliefs about authority, expectations of compliance, norms of enforcement and the cultural willingness to accept restraint at the service of the greater good even when it is inconvenient or slow. 

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Laws only matter when people believe they should be followed. Courts only function when their decisions are recognized as binding. Alliances only deter threats when their commitments are trusted as credible. None of this operates mechanically. It operates relationally.

When legitimacy infrastructure erodes — when authority is treated primarily as suspect, when procedural limits read like obstruction and when expertise is considered as nothing more than political theater — institutional power becomes fragile even if formal rules remain intact. Guardrails don’t fail all at once. They thin gradually, losing their capacity to generate voluntary compliance and collective enforcement. In that environment, power doesn’t encounter firm resistance; it encounters hesitation, fragmentation and cultural ambivalence.

The deeper problem is not simply that we criticize institutions too much or expect them to function automatically. It is that we have largely abandoned the harder work of imagining how institutions should be rebuilt when they fail. We move in a familiar loop: outrage at dysfunction, ritualized critique, then a quiet hope that the same brittle systems will somehow stabilize themselves when the stakes get high.

Consider: When was the last time you read yet another astonishing piece of bad news about yet another overstepping by the Trump administration and didn’t either sigh in disgust or think, well, I hope the Supreme Court, Congress, NATO or international law (or some other institution) manages to stop this? Then the waiting starts — to see if maybe, this time, something we’ve had no hand in building will finally make a difference.

And that leads us to the most dangerous part of this problem. Trump does not merely violate norms — he thrives on testing and breaking them. He has figured out something earlier leaders rarely pushed to its limits: Many political guardrails exist not because they are tightly enforced, but because those in power restrain themselves. 

Politicians have always overstepped boundaries and bent rules. But they typically do so quietly, operating within an underlying culture of self-imposed limits. What we are witnessing now is something different — not isolated norm-breaking, but the emergence of an institutionalized culture of impunity, where violations no longer trigger correction but instead become the operating logic of power itself. 

In abandoning trust, investment and responsibility for our institutions, we have not escaped institutional authority. Rather, we have opened the space for it to be replaced by the institutionalization of norm-breaking itself. 

One day, Donald Trump won’t be in office. Yet the institution he has helped consolidate may well remain: a durable culture of impunity in which violations no longer trigger correction, but, instead, set the new rules of the game. The question is: Will we be prepared to rewrite them?

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