I think it’s a bad framing to treat “unprecedented moves to expand executive power” and “natural extension of existing trends” as the same mental bucket. The two are not the same. A key problem in the US is that the existing trends over the last two decades have been bad when it comes to expanding executive power.
I’m confused about what you mean here, the specific existing trend I was imagining was “unprecedented moves to expand executive power.” Which look different if they are on a steady trend, vs one guy radically doing much worse than trend.
If you take for example the Obama administration before the first Trump administration, it had the claim of the president being able to order an assassination of an US citizen away from the battlefield without any need to justify that assassination in a court of law. That was an unprecedented move to expand executive power.
The steady trend is that these kinds of moves to expand executive power are regularly made. Each administration takes the powers that their predecessors won for granted and seeks to expand them.
I’m confused about what you mean here, the specific existing trend I was imagining was “unprecedented moves to expand executive power.” Which look different if they are on a steady trend, vs one guy radically doing much worse than trend.
If you take for example the Obama administration before the first Trump administration, it had the claim of the president being able to order an assassination of an US citizen away from the battlefield without any need to justify that assassination in a court of law. That was an unprecedented move to expand executive power.
The steady trend is that these kinds of moves to expand executive power are regularly made. Each administration takes the powers that their predecessors won for granted and seeks to expand them.