Flattery, Power, and Erased History: Trump’s Second Term

On May 25, 2026, three separate stories emerged that collectively paint a striking portrait of President Donald Trump’s second term. The New York Times published a data-driven analysis of cabinet meeting flattery, a constitutional law feature on the founding document’s blind spot regarding executive power, and the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department had scrubbed its website of hundreds of press releases related to January 6 prosecutions. Taken together, these developments illuminate an administration that is simultaneously cultivating a personality cult, testing constitutional limits, and rewriting historical accountability.

The Cabinet as Echo Chamber

The New York Times reviewed over a dozen hours of televised cabinet meetings from Trump’s second term — 10 sessions held between February 2025 and March 2026 — and found that flattery has become a central feature of the proceedings. On average, at least one of every six sentences spoken by cabinet officials either flattered the president, gave him credit, or criticized his political opponents.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio both spoke and flattered the president the most, frequently declaring that Trump is “the only leader in the world” capable of resolving conflicts from Ukraine to Sudan. Vice President JD Vance took a different approach, insulting political opponents at a rate of one in six sentences — the highest of any official. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Trump he had “saved this country by making it the best place in the world to do business again,” while EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin repeatedly said Trump was “willing to take a bullet” for the nation.

Compared with Trump’s first term — when the Times analyzed 22 meetings from June 2017 to May 2020 — officials have complimented the president far more in the second term. This reflects a deliberate shift: Trump has emphasized the importance of loyalty in his second administration, unlike his first term when some aides occasionally pushed back against his impulses. Yet flattery alone offers no job security — four cabinet officials have been fired or resigned in 2026, and Trump may be considering removing more.

The Constitution’s Blind Spot

In a separate analysis, the New York Times’ Adam Liptak examined a growing debate among constitutional scholars: did the framers create a presidency with insufficient checks on executive power?

Scholars interviewed for the piece argue that the Constitution has a “blind spot” that Trump is making visible. The framers believed impeachment would serve as the decisive check against a demagogue, but they failed to anticipate the rise of political parties that would make conviction — requiring a two-thirds Senate majority — politically improbable. As Harvard Law Professor Michael J. Klarman put it, “They tried to create a system that was resistant to populist influence. When they talked about what populist interests could produce, they actually described a kind of demagogic authoritarian like Trump.”

A key academic reference underpinning this argument is “Separation of Parties, Not Powers” (2006) by Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes, which contends that political parties, not branches of government, have become the primary axis of political competition. When the same party controls both the presidency and Congress, the traditional checks and balances envisioned by the framers can break down.

Saikrishna Prakash of the University of Virginia Law School said the framers “would be astonished, not merely by Trump, but by the breadth of the executive power in the modern era.” The Constitution, now approaching its 250th anniversary, remains the oldest written national constitution still in force — but scholars increasingly question whether its 18th-century design is adequate for 21st-century governance.

Erasing January 6 From the Official Record

The third story, reported by the Associated Press, reveals that the Justice Department has removed hundreds of press releases from its website documenting criminal charges, convictions, and sentencings related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The DOJ’s official “rapid response” account on X described the information as “partisan propaganda” and said the department was “proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration.”

Among the deleted materials were press releases concerning seditious conspiracy cases against members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — far-right extremist groups whose leaders had been convicted of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power. On May 22, a federal appeals court granted the DOJ’s unopposed motion to vacate those convictions, and the following day the department moved to dismiss the cases entirely.

This purge is the latest step in a systematic effort by the Trump administration to erase the legal consequences of January 6. Trump had already pardoned or commuted sentences for all 1,500-plus defendants on his first day back in office in January 2025. The DOJ has also announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” — the number referencing the year of America’s founding — to compensate Trump allies who claim they were unjustly investigated. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has not ruled out that violent rioters could be eligible for payouts, prompting bipartisan anger in Congress.

The Interconnected Picture

These three stories, published on the same day, are not isolated events. They are interconnected expressions of the same political dynamic.

The cabinet’s relentless flattery — the repeated insistence that Trump is the “only” leader capable of solving any problem — creates the public narrative of indispensability that justifies expansive executive power. The constitutional blind spot identified by scholars — the erosion of checks and balances by partisan polarization — is the same mechanism that enables both the sycophancy in cabinet meetings and the DOJ’s rewriting of January 6 history. And the systematic erasure of the legal record of the Capitol attack represents the executive branch’s own accounting of an event that, in the administration’s telling, never warranted prosecution in the first place.

As the nation approaches the 2026 midterm elections, the question of whether the Constitution’s checks and balances can still function — or whether they have been hollowed out by the very partisan dynamics the framers failed to anticipate — has never been more urgent. The answer may determine not just the trajectory of Trump’s second term, but the durability of American democratic institutions themselves.