The last several episodes of the Ezra Klein Show podcast have been some of the most thoughtful analyses of the early days of the second Trump administration that I’ve come across. Two in particular.
The February 2 episode, “Don’t Believe Him,” sets the stage.
Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.
The February 5 discussion with Yuval Levin, “The Breaking of the Constitutional Order,” expands on this theme.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Markets reacted with shock. We were really doing this? Didn’t Trump’s Wall Street backers tell us those were just negotiating ploys?
But then Mexico announced that it was adding 10,000 troops to the border and Canada said it would appoint a fentanyl czar, and noted some efforts it was already making on the border; and Trump delayed the tariffs by a month in both cases. So did Trump back down in the face of market turmoil? Did he get what he wanted, even though it wasn’t much? Are we going to have this happen again in a month, and maybe every month after that? I don’t think anybody actually knows, including Trump.
What seems clear is that Trump likes tariffs, but he dislikes political pain. He wants to be seen as in control. He wants the world bending to his will. But the stock market plummeting does not make it look like the world is bending to his will. The stock market plummeting threatens his control. So when other countries see that, their strategy is going to become clearer. The more Trump bullies other nations, the more they are going to band together in retaliation, and the more that will batter markets. The world does not want to be endlessly pushed around by Donald Trump. So Trump has the power to impose tariffs, but he does not have the power to impose them without paying a price. And so far, at least, he does not seem to want to pay that price.
[…]
Trump does not have many of the powers he is asserting. So when he acts lawlessly and unconstitutionally, those acts should be treated as what they are: something in between power grabs and crimes. All of it right now is provisional. We have watched Trump back down on much already, from tariffs to spending freezes, and if the consequences become too painful, he will back down on yet more. And so the consequences should be painful. What he is doing should be described clearly, and other parts of the political system should respond.
[…]
I think that some of what Trump is doing will prove to be illegal. But courts work slowly. The way our political system is supposed to work is that the check is supposed to come from, first and foremost, Congress. Congress controls spending, even though Trump is trying to take that power for himself. Congress can impeach. Democrats don’t have much power in Congress now. But they have the power to disrupt and obstruct. And so they will. Trump will have to pay a price for his power grab. But how large a price does he want to pay?
Levin provides this perspective:
And one thing you learn over that time is that the first few weeks of a new administration are really surreal.
They’re very different from the rest of the time, because the administration controls the agenda. And that isn’t really the case most of the time. But in the first few weeks, they’ve made plans. And you don’t know those plans, generally. They do, and they’re rolling them out at a certain pace and in a certain way. And it just feels like they are in command of the world.
So I think that it’s natural in that period to think: Wow, these people are really in control. The opposition is totally on the ground. They don’t know how to respond to this.
That’s always what it feels like. That happened with Bush. It happened with Obama. It has happened with Trump. It even happened with Biden, if we can remember four years ago.
And it doesn’t take very long for that to break. The opposition is back and organized pretty quickly — that takes a couple of weeks, maybe. And the world comes back at you, too.
And the rest of the time, presidents spend a lot of their energy just responding to the world and what it throws at them. And they’re judged by how they do that. That’s definitely going on here. So it’s very hard, still, to judge what we’re looking at.
I think a lot of people have come in with a very strong prejudice — that this time, the Trump team is much more competent. They have a much better idea of not only what they want to do but how.
And a lot of what we’ve seen is actually a lot like what the first term’s first few weeks felt like. There’s a lot of ambition; there’s a lot of action. There’s more than there was the first time, but there’s also a kind of inclination to chaos that I think is actually intentional. That’s part of what they’re trying to do. It didn’t really work all that well the first time, and I’m not sure it’s working all that well this time.
Both episodes are worth listening to or reading in full but the main takeaway is the disconnect between perception and reality. That Elon Musk and his band of merry misfits are running rampant in the human resources and technical systems of the Federal government is doing real, permanent damage. Certainly, they’re creating a lot of anguish for those affected—Federal employees, undocumented immigrants, the transgender community, and others. But most of the declared actions are likely to be illusory.
For example, USAID and the Department of Education have been declared closed. A federal judge—a Trump appointee, no less—has already issued a restraining order to prevent the former and there hasn’t been time to react to the latter.
Most of the Day 1 Executive Orders are likely to be struck down or at least seriously curtailed. They simply fall outside of presidential authority.
It’s possible, I suppose, that Klein is wrong here. Maybe Trump will start defying court orders. But it’s worth noting that he didn’t do so in the first term and has not done so thus far in the second.
It’s also possible that the Supreme Court will back Trump, putting the Unitary Executive Theory into law. But the implications of that are so dire that it’s hard to see Chief Justice Roberts, in particular, going along with it. After all, the next Democratic President would have the same ability to ignore Acts of Congress, too.
Again, the pain in the interim is real. Administrators in the federal government, including the military, and in various institutions that rely heavily on federal money are already taking actions in accordance with Trump’s orders. It’s going to take time for the legal system to push back.
