How America finds its way after Trump

Someday, Donald Trump will no longer be president. His name will disappear from executive orders. His political appointees will leave federal agencies. His successor will promise restoration, normalcy and national healing.

Then will come the dangerous temptation to believe that replacing Trump is the same as repairing America.

It is not.

The system that existed before Trump helped make him possible. Congress had already surrendered much of its authority. Presidents of both parties had learned to govern through executive orders, emergency declarations, temporary programs and aggressive interpretations of old statutes. Federal agencies had become simultaneously powerful and incapable of performing many basic functions quickly or coherently. Millions of Americans had concluded that government was indifferent to them, incompetent or actively working against them.

Trump did not create every one of these weaknesses.

He recognized them, exploited them and pushed them toward their logical conclusion: a presidency in which personal command increasingly substitutes for legislation, deliberation and institutional expertise.

America cannot simply find its way back. It must build something better than the system Trump inherited.

As an immigration lawyer, I have watched government by presidential improvisation become painfully personal.

A family can follow the law for years only to see its future altered by a proclamation, agency memorandum or abrupt policy announcement. A worker who has been legally employed may suddenly face the loss of work authorization because an administration terminates a temporary immigration program. Employers receive conflicting instructions. Career officials must translate political declarations into operational rules. Courts intervene, sometimes after families have already been separated, jobs lost and lives disrupted.

The Brookings Institution's regulatory tracker illustrates how extensively national policy can now be created, delayed, revoked and recreated through executive action and agency direction rather than durable legislation.

Immigration may provide the most visible example, but the underlying problem reaches far beyond immigration. National policy has become dangerously dependent on the judgment, temperament and attention span of one person.

The first principle of post-Trump reconstruction should therefore be counterintuitive -the next president must give up power.

Trump's successor will face enormous pressure to reverse his actions immediately. Some reversals will be legally and morally necessary. But governing through a new avalanche of executive orders would preserve the central premise of Trumpism - the idea that a president may remake national life without Congress, limited mainly by the courts and the next election.

A benevolent strong presidency remains a strong presidency. Its powers will eventually be inherited by someone less benevolent.

The growth of presidential power did not begin with Trump. As Brookings has observed, decades of congressional delegation have progressively expanded executive authority and made it increasingly difficult for Congress to reclaim its constitutional role.

That reclamation must become a national priority.

Congress needs sufficient staff, expertise and institutional confidence to write legislation, conduct serious oversight and make difficult decisions instead of transferring them to presidents and judges. Lawmakers must resolve questions they have allowed administrations to answer temporarily, including immigration status, emergency authority, federal spending, trade restrictions and the circumstances under which a president may redirect government personnel and money.

Congress should strengthen inspectors general, protect whistleblowers and make its subpoenas meaningful. Emergency declarations should expire unless lawmakers affirmatively renew them. Presidents should not be permitted to avoid Senate confirmation indefinitely by installing successive acting officials. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act already limits temporary service in positions requiring presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, but those restrictions must be enforced rather than treated as procedural inconveniences.

Accountability will also be necessary. But it must be legal, not theatrical.

There should be investigations where the evidence warrants them, public disclosure of misconduct and prosecutions when crimes can be proved. Records must be preserved so Americans can understand what was done in their name.

But the purpose cannot be revenge against an outgoing administration, humiliation of political opponents or punishment of ordinary citizens for voting the wrong way.

The governing principle should be exact:

No Immunity for Lawlessness, No Prosecution for Politics

That distinction will be difficult to maintain in a country where each political faction increasingly describes the other as an existential threat. Yet abandoning it would turn the Justice Department into a weapon transferred between victorious parties. A democracy cannot restore the rule of law by practicing selective vengeance.

The civil service must also be rebuilt - without pretending that the pre-Trump bureaucracy functioned beautifully.

Career expertise is not a conspiracy against elected government. Presidents should establish lawful policy, but scientists, lawyers, physicians, economists, diplomats and administrators are needed to implement it competently. Public employees should not be removed merely because they refuse to reshape facts around a president's preferences.

At the same time, defending public service cannot mean defending every government failure.

Agencies that take years to decide applications, lose documents, issue contradictory instructions or force people through impenetrable procedures help create the anger that demagogues exploit.

Competence Is a Democratic Value

People are more likely to defend institutions that answer the telephone, explain their decisions, meet published deadlines and treat them with dignity. A government that repeatedly fails at ordinary service cannot preserve public loyalty merely by lecturing citizens about democratic norms.

Immigration should become an early test of whether the country has learned anything.

For decades, Congress has avoided comprehensive immigration legislation while presidents stretch aging statutes to address circumstances those laws were never designed to manage. The result is a system that can change dramatically every four years without a major act of Congress.

Serious reform would combine enforceable borders with realistic legal pathways, timely adjudication and meaningful due process. It would give employers reliable rules and prevent lawful workers and longtime residents from having their lives reorganized after every presidential election.

The answer is neither open borders nor Trump policies administered with gentler rhetoric. It is legislation durable enough that immigration law no longer depends primarily on the identity and impulses of a single president.

Finally, national repair must be material as well as constitutional.

Not everyone who supported Trump was demanding authoritarian government. Many were responding - sometimes rationally, sometimes destructively - to communities weakened by industrial decline, unaffordable housing, health care insecurity and the conviction that powerful institutions cared about everyone except them.

None of that excuses cruelty, political violence or attacks on constitutional government.

But democracy cannot survive indefinitely on moral instruction alone. Americans must see that democratic government can build housing, repair communities, control borders, create opportunity and deliver basic public services.

Finding our way after Trump will not mean pretending none of this happened.

It will not mean forgetting abuses in the name of national unity. Nor will it mean taking Trump's instruments of power and placing them in supposedly better hands.

It will require recovering distinctions that Trump has worked relentlessly to erase: the distinction between law and command, loyalty and competence, disagreement and treason, enforcement and cruelty, leadership and domination.

America will not find its way back.

With honesty, accountability, restraint - and a government that actually works - it may finally find its way forward.

Richard T. Herman is a Cleveland-based, nationally recognized immigration attorney and founder of Herman Legal Group. For more than 30 years, he has represented immigrants, employers, health care systems, educational institutions and families throughout the United States. He writes frequently on immigration law and public policy, with a focus on how federal immigration decisions affect state economies, local communities and American competitiveness. He is the co-author of "Immigrant, Inc.: Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy." He can be found here.

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