Week 78: The Week Executive Power Stopped Asking Permission

“`markdown This was a week in which the presidency moved like an institution no longer waiting to be told no. Across seven days, the executive branch expanded military action without new congressional sign-off, converted a routine housing bill into leverage for voting restrictions, watched immigration agents kill three civilians who were not their targets, and closed with a nationally televised speech threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that declined to carry it. Courts, a scattering of Republicans, and journalists pushed back throughout, with results that were real but partial.

The pattern was visible before the weekend had properly started. Trump declined to sign a bipartisan housing bill, letting it become law automatically rather than attaching his name to it—a deliberate inaction meant to pressure the Senate into passing the Save America Act, a mail-in-ballot ban and voter-ID measure that lacked the votes to pass on its own. Around the same time, the administration notified Congress that hostilities with Iran had resumed, asserting a fresh 60-day war-powers clock despite having claimed only weeks earlier that a ceasefire was holding. Neither move asked permission. Both would recur, in variation, all week.

At Camp David, Trump convened a closed session on a reconciliation-based military funding package, inviting only hardline Freedom Caucus members and confiscating attendees’ phones. Moderate Republicans were shut out entirely; one invitee who did attend indicated afterward that she would vote against the resulting package anyway. It was a small episode next to the week’s larger stories, but it set a tone: negotiation narrowed to those already in agreement, dissent filtered out before it could reach the table.

Then came Houston. An ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a business owner and father who was not the agency’s intended target, amid a surge of enforcement activity staffed partly by agents hired without standard vetting. It was the first of three such deaths within the week, each in a different city, each involving someone the government had not set out to arrest. Almost simultaneously, the Justice Department subpoenaed four New York Times reporters to testify before a grand jury over their coverage of Secret Service concerns about the Qatari-donated Air Force One—a subpoena that followed an eight-hour FBI investigation directed from inside the White House. Press freedom and immigration enforcement, two of the week’s defining threads, were both already in motion before Monday arrived.

Monday delivered the week’s clearest instance of judicial pushback holding. Federal Judge Kathleen Williams voided a $10 billion lawsuit Trump had filed against the IRS, finding it had been filed in bad faith to manufacture a fraudulent $1.776 billion settlement that would have shielded Trump, his family, and his associates from tax-crime prosecution. She sanctioned his attorneys and referred some for professional discipline. It was a rare case of a court not merely slowing an executive maneuver but naming it for what it was and unwinding it outright.

The same day brought a second fatal ICE shooting, this one in Maine. Officer David Brouillette, hired despite a documented history of domestic-violence allegations and without standard vetting, killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national authorized to work in the United States, during a vehicle stop with no body camera present. Separately, Trump removed three members of an independent federal commission that works with states on election administration, a move Senate Democrats characterized as interference ahead of the midterms. By proclamation, the administration also shrank the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by roughly 90 percent each, stripping protection from nearly three million acres, disbanding the Bears Ears Commission, and opening the land to mining. And Trump tied renewal of an expired surveillance law to passage of the Save America Act—another unrelated priority pressed into service of the voting-restriction push.

Tuesday brought a third death connected to immigration enforcement: a 28-year-old man fleeing an ICE encounter at a Florida gas station was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer, on the very day border czar Tom Homan announced ICE would pause most vehicle stops to review procedures following the two prior shootings. The timing underscored how far operational pressure had outrun any attempt at reform. The same day, Mahmoud Khalil, detained for 104 days, sued Trump officials and allied groups under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, alleging a coordinated campaign—branded internally as Project Esther—to identify and deport pro-Palestinian activists. A report from Physicians for Human Rights and UC Berkeley documented 203 injuries, including blindings and traumatic brain injuries, from 412 incidents of crowd-control weapon misuse against immigration-enforcement protesters over the preceding year, with federal officials responsible for nearly two-thirds of them; ICE separately pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim during a protest outside a New Jersey detention facility. And Trump removed Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board, the body charged with protecting merit-based civil-service hiring, following reporting that the administration had secretly influenced an earlier MSPB ruling in its own favor.

By Wednesday, the one-day-old ICE vehicle-stop pause was gone. Trump personally insisted the stops continue as a "Crime Fighting tool," and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin fell in line, even as the department separately offered undocumented immigrants $2,600 to leave voluntarily. The reversal came less than 24 hours after the policy had been announced, and days after it had followed two fatal shootings of non-targets. Elsewhere, Senate Democrats under Chuck Schumer denied the $1.15 trillion defense authorization bill the votes needed to advance, citing ongoing military exchanges with Iran despite a war-powers resolution passed the previous month—a concrete assertion of congressional leverage against unauthorized warmaking. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Brazil, timed to coincide with an election pitting Lula against Jair Bolsonaro’s son, despite a documented U.S. trade surplus with Brazil that undercut the administration’s stated rationale. And Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney and acting attorney general, began a contentious confirmation hearing in which he was pressed on both his role in the voided IRS settlement and his handling of redacted Epstein files.

Thursday was the week’s loudest day. In a primetime address, Trump revived claims that China had accessed 2020 voter data and that the CIA had covered it up, directed federal agencies to investigate and potentially prosecute officials over the alleged coverup, and called for revoking the broadcast licenses of NBC and ABC after they declined to air the speech live—an escalation FCC Chair Brendan Carr had already signaled he might support. Within hours, the claims collapsed under their own weight. CNN and Senator Mark Warner publicly debunked the specifics; Representative Thomas Massie contradicted the voter-data framing; and John Solomon, the White House’s own hired analyst behind the underlying report, admitted on camera that "the intel community has zero evidence" of vote-flipping in 2020, 2022, or 2024. The speech’s central claim was dismantled not by adversaries but by the man commissioned to support it.

The same day, the House passed the Save America Act 217–209 along party lines, attaching it to a State Department spending bill destined for a Senate filibuster—the culmination of a week spent tying the measure to unrelated legislation. A House vote to cut $3.3 billion in Israel military aid failed 314–104, but more than 100 Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Whip Katherine Clark, broke with leadership to support it, exposing a generational split inside the party. And FBI Director Kash Patel and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles personally ran a White House-directed leak investigation into the Air Force One reporting, confiscating officials’ phones, while Stephen Miller delivered a speech describing political opponents in dehumanizing terms and launching a rhetorical campaign against what he called "radical left terrorism."

Friday closed the loop on several of the week’s threads. DHS Secretary Mullin warned state election officials they would be treated as investigative priorities if they refused to run voter rolls through a federal matching tool that courts have blocked sixteen times, while Trump separately ordered DHS to direct states to deem noncitizens ineligible to vote using that same disputed tool. The FBI notified staff it would no longer independently investigate violent encounters involving ICE agents—removing, by week’s end, the oversight mechanism that had previously produced evidence used to prosecute agents in such cases. A panel of federal judges unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington; Trump fired him about an hour after he took the oath. And despite testimony from a former DOJ pardon attorney alleging retaliatory firing, and judicial criticism over the voided IRS settlement, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general.

The week did not end only in executive consolidation. Over 600 communities began a weekend of voter registration drives, teach-ins, and vigils honoring the late Representative John Lewis, alongside a bipartisan petition against a border-wall project and continued protests near ICE facilities—among them a shooting of a protester by an off-duty detention-center employee. The civic response ran on its own track, parallel to the week’s official actions rather than growing out of them.

Taken together, the week showed an executive branch testing boundaries on several fronts simultaneously rather than one at a time: war powers, voting rules, press oversight, civil-service protections, and lethal force in immigration enforcement all moved in the same seven days, each reinforcing the others. Institutional resistance was neither absent nor sufficient—a federal judge voided a fraudulent settlement and sanctioned the lawyers who built it, a Senate majority leader denied a defense bill its votes, a hired analyst contradicted his own commissioned report, and hundreds of communities organized in the streets. But a safety pause ordered after two deaths lasted barely a day, an oversight body lost its members, an independently appointed prosecutor lost his job within the hour, and a Cabinet confirmation proceeded despite documented concerns about its nominee’s fitness. The ledger from this week will not be settled by any single verdict; it will be read, instead, in which of these countervailing forces proves durable once the next week begins. “`