Where are the checks and balances?

RP ONLINE Where are the checks and balances? Antje Höning • 3 hours • 2 minutes reading time Donald Trump is establishing an imperial presidency - the judiciary and opposition are in shock, the economy has submitted. Only the Fed remains steadfast. The USA has always excelled at counterweights. Almost every day Trump shocks with new plans. Donald Trump shocks the world almost every day with new twists and turns. Sometimes he lays off thousands of employees overnight, only to find that he still needs many. Then he reaches for Greenland and Panama without any legal basis. The president is particularly raging in foreign policy, where he turns the victim into the perpetrator in Russia's war against Ukraine, calling Ukrainian President Selenskyj a "dictator without elections" and thus effectively handing the country over to the Kremlin. Compared to that, the failures in the economic sector are harmless, but they too have consequences. First he puts his trading partners under pressure with tariffs and jeopardizes free trade. Now he is taking aim at the American Federal Reserve Bank. His chainsaw friend Elon Musk now wants to take a closer look at the Federal Reserve Bank under the guise of reducing bureaucracy. Trump had already called on the Fed to immediately cut interest rates after taking office. The central bank stood firm, as the independence requirement also demands. But in other areas, all resistance and self-respect seems to have broken down. The US Congress let Robert Kennedy pass, thereby making an anti-vaccination activist the Minister of Health. One can only hope that the US citizens do not turn bird flu into a new pandemic. The economy had already submitted early on anyway: as soon as Trump had renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Google politely displayed this on Google Maps. The Facebook group Meta now wants to increasingly forego moderation of its posts - and let fake news run free, which Trump considers to be freedom of expression. Where are the checks and balances, the counterweights to the president's overwhelming power, which have always distinguished the USA? Who will stop Trump, who is ruling his country like an autocrat with "executive orders" instead of seeking democratic majorities? The democratic opposition in the USA seems to have fallen into a state of shock, the wheels of justice - if they are still independent - are grinding slowly. It is in the hands of the Americans to stop Trump's abuse of power and to contain his imperial presidency. It is unthinkable how many other fires the Republicans will set in the world and in the USA itself.