At a time when questions about the rule of law are in the air, it is important to remember that Donald Trump hasn’t overturned Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, which rules Washington, D.C. just as powerfully as it rules physical phenomena.
As applied to politics the way it is to physics, Newton’s third law reminds us that every action in the capital produces an equal and opposite reaction. The effect of Newton’s law is what the White House has been living on. It also should be what it is thinking — and worrying — about.
If Trump and his acolytes believe — this is a credible notion — that the actions of the Barack Obama presidency (a massive overhaul of the health care system) produced the reaction of the first Trump administration and if they believe that the actions of the Joe Biden presidency (major offensives in the environment and on diversity) produced the reaction of the second Trump administration, then there should be concern about what Isaac Newton would predict for the next Democratic presidency.
Trump’s administration in recent days unilaterally stripped environmental policy. The administration of someone like Gretchen Whitmer could cite the Trump precedent and unilaterally impose even stricter environmental policies. Trump and his team have summarily fired many top government administrators despite the fact that these agencies were created by Congress. President Josh Shapiro could just as summarily fire the Trump people. Trump has used executive orders with promiscuous repetitiveness. Can you doubt for a moment that President Gavin Newsom would do the same?
The Supreme Court, which is supposed to take a long view — both backward, to history and to precedent, and forward, to how its rulings affect the future — has given the presidency unusual power and unusually impervious immunity from legal challenge. Liberals who decry Trump’s air of criminal immunity may be pleased when President JB Pritzker acts with impunity while conservatives of a MAGA stripe are outraged.
But put aside for a moment — it is difficult in this hyperpartisan age to do this — whether one side or the other gets to use powers that betes noires like Andrew Johnson or Richard Nixon never dreamed of employing. Consider instead whether this back-and-forth, a politics of punch and counterpunch that pushes both parties to extremes even as figures from the extremes gain fresh prominence, is a healthy way to conduct the public’s business.
Wasn’t it better when Harry Truman, who didn’t like Dwight Eisenhower, nonetheless passed the presidency on to his successor without the slightest worry that the World War II hero would warp or wreck the country? Wasn’t it better when Eisenhower, who thought John F. Kennedy too callow and too jejune to lead what was then called the “free world,” passed presidential powers and prerogatives (and the nuclear football) to JFK without worrying whether the Constitution was safe under the keeping of the former senator from Massachusetts, even though it was an Army veteran giving way to a Navy man?
To ask those questions is to answer them. Of course it was better then.
It meant that precedence mattered to the presidency. It meant that the governing assumptions of decades — that just as politics ends at the water’s edge in foreign policy, politics ends at the strictures of the separation and balance of powers in domestic affairs. Even the passage of power from Nixon to Gerald Ford, albeit within the Republican Party, was less jarring than what we have experienced in 2017, 2021 and especially 2025.
Certainly the rotation in office from Ford to Jimmy Carter, two men who initially loathed each other so much that they could not spare a private civil word during an agonizing 27 minutes when their debate was disrupted, was more civil than anything
Americans have witnessed in more than a decade. Never mind that Carter thanked Ford in the first 21 words of his presidency (“For myself and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land”) and that the two, like most former chief executives, became friends in their post presidency.
It is impossible to imagine Trump inviting Biden for an afternoon of beach repose in Florida in 2029, and not for the reasons that wise-guy readers of this column might suggest.
Then there is another aspect of Newton’s third law that bears consideration.
It comes into relief in the sharp eye of a top Republican strategist, Alex Castellanos, whose GOP resume includes the presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, the three Republican presidential nominees before Trump. Even Trump, who distrusts anyone with the whiff of a Dole, Bush or Romney scent, shouldn’t dismiss Castellanos.
“Why would anyone still need to vote for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections?” he asked on X. “When we’ve driven in all the nails, what is left for a hammer to do? Even Winston Churchill, two months after winning World War II, was tossed from power. Why? Because no one needed a wartime leader after the war.”
It’s clear the Trump team is well on its way to achieving all its principal goals — tax cuts, budget cuts, immigration cuts, along with higher tariffs, higher rates of military spending by American allies and higher level of anxieties among university presidents. What’s the MAGA agenda for the future?
The danger for the Trump Republicans isn’t that their goals aren’t being achieved. It’s that they soon will run out of goals.
That will not be a Democratic problem. None of their goals are being met.
In fact, quite the opposite — and if they are not so lost in the wilderness that they have no goals beyond survival, they would be crafting goals right now. Some of them inevitably will be prosecuting the equal reaction that Isaac Newton identified. But that won’t be enough.
One other action/reaction element: After two Trump terms, the GOP may be running out of top personnel to staff the executive branch. That surely would be the case if JD Vance wins a single term in 2028. Policy and personnel droughts can happen. Who, for example, was left among Republican thinkers for years at the end of the GOP ascendancy that accounted for the administrations of two Ronald Reagan and one George H.W. Bush presidencies?
Donald Trump is today’s action. Tomorrow’s reaction is unknown. But it is inevitable.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
