Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Constitution Is Passing the Trump Stress Test

Congress and the courts are doing their jobs so far to pull back the president from his worst threats.

September 20, 2017 at 3:33 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Holding up pretty well.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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As Donald Trump’s administration enters its ninth month, it’s worth considering a surprising possibility: Things have never been better in the turbulent period since the president took office.

Trump’s most blatantly unconstitutional actions, like the travel ban on immigrants from a number of majority Muslim nations, have been blocked by the courts. Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn and Sebastian Gorka are out of power. The reasonable generals (John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis) are in. The repeal of the Affordable Care Act has failed (so far). A deal with Democrats on DACA, the policy allowing undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to stay, is in the offing. There will be no wall, paid for by Mexico or otherwise, on the southern border. Dangerously extreme tax reform seems unlikely to pass.