Donald Trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party. There's less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump's marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump's first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO....
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