Powering Toward Regal Status
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 7, 2025
If Week One of his presidency was about Donald Trump moving quickly to awe a divided Congress into submission and Week Two to launch the major MAGA campaigns like deportations, Week Three is turning out to be seeking power for its own sake, democracy and rule of law be damned.
Trump is daring anyone to say no, reflecting a callous imperialism that wants to eliminate any opposition — even spawning talk about what happens if a court declares one of the many lines that the administration has crossed to be officially illegal. Will Team Trump obey a court order? Would he call a court’s bluff and say, go ahead, try to enforce your ruling? Will you speak up if you will face a government-backed power play against you, your group, your company?
There are only rumblings rather than a resistance, but unhappiness with the daily spray of executives has half the country angered and more wondering whether these are the results for which they voted.
With the ever-present spotlight to rewrite history and redesignate everything that happens in personal political terms, Trump is thumbing his nose at any limits posed by checks and balances, protocols, even law. In his drive to oust a “deep state,” Trump is seeking to undercut basic tenets of government and governing.
He is replacing the people who decide what is law and what is a target of investigation and prosecution. He is eliminating enough and moving so quickly as to create oceans of confusion that amplify his own voice and decisions — even if they are overturned in a day, like announced tariffs. On her first day, Attorney General Pam Bondi blew through sworn confirmation hearing testimony and ordered reviews of all charges and civil trials against Trump and threatened prosecutors who veer from Trump administration defenses laid out for them.
Trump has been relying on his ability to recast wildfires in Los Angeles, air crashes, a zany future for Gaza as a “Riviera for the Middle East”, budget questions and the fate of the “deep state” as ridicule for the Biden years and promotion of his own cruel, nationalistic vision of freeing White men and wealthy Americans from rules. He is doing it all in a way that spews distrust and promotes a thinly veiled racist future for a country that should shuck democracy for Trump adoration.
The Patterns
The details pile on by the day, much of it following the roadmap set by the very Heritage Foundation Project 2025 documents about which Trump claimed to know nothing. At least 40 of the executive orders and memos have come straight from that playbook, though the major themes of his campaign remain dominant in setting policies to alter this country.
Still, nothing has prepared us for outlandish claims to swallow acquisition of Greenland, a takeover with long-term troop commitments to expel Palestinians in Gaza, starting and abruptly halting global trade wars and more.
Together, they are creating an unease and uncertainty that is well beyond the impact of already consequential attacks on undocumented migrants or abandonment of climate or fears about health policies that look to create dangers ahead. The edginess that comes with uncertainty for anyone, but the hardcore MAGA fan is reverberating in daily conversations, in workplaces where job security is suddenly at risk for opinions, in the financial markets.
Pace aside, sorting them feels a useful chore towards understanding and tracking. There are several patterns developing that describe his many, hasty announced policies:
— The Contentious. Trump is delivering on the kind of proposals promised that we always knew would build on divisiveness and that target opponents based on beliefs and attitudes. What we may not have understood is that in his haste and disorganization, we have gotten a lot of confusion about how these programs are supposed to work and what the specific goals are.
The mass deportations are underway with aggressive speed. But the only clarity is that while Trump repeats that he is pursuing those with criminal records, ICE is arresting and deporting lots of people who have done nothing legally questionable beyond being in this country. Questions about legality and arrangements abound, and for all the talk of “transparency,” the deportation issue is a good case to show we have little idea about what is happening on the ground.
Much the same can be said about how the administration is attacking diversity and inclusion and culture war policies, federal-state responsibilities, the role of agency decision making as opposed to White House direction for even personnel decisions, abortion and the fight over eliminating political bias in Justice by pardons, firings and early threats of investigations that are based on the opposite political bias.
— The Vague Proposals. Trump has issued executive orders that so vague or overreaching, including those that abridge laws about process, that run amok when left to interpretations by interim team members in budget and personnel roles. That has proved especially true for those orders that Elon Musk and unknown, unnamed computer teams are taking on as the province of his non-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency.”
These are the policies that are going after early and widespread dismissals of employees, apparently unfettered access to personal information available through the Treasury and agency personnel files. Hearing that Musk, not Trump, has ordered two million federal workers, including FBI and CIA agents, to quit, based on no process review, is more than destabilizing. It puts government services, contracts, grants and the research or aid they are meant to deliver at risk,
The one-day tariffs threat against Mexico and Canada that disappeared when those two countries basically reaffirmed programs that they already had launched spoke volumes not about border enforcement, but rather about how Trump has no measures for any specific goals that he wants to achieve through even heavy-handed negotiation. The result is unnecessarily chaotic.
The over-interpretation by those in Team Trump who want to impress the boss are raising unneeded confusion about the Education Department, budget authority, foreign aid, the availability of scientific and medical data on government websites and lots more in question.
— Off the charts proposals. These are proposals no one foresaw, not part of any campaign. They include the announced takeover of Gaza that runs against layers of reality, law, morality or the interests of anyone beyond Donald Trump’s hopes for a Nobel Prize. What we see developing is that anything that gets said, positive or negative, is reinterpreted as a “win” for America and Trump, though the Danes have no intention of selling Greenland, nor Panama give up control of the Canal.
Trump’s Cabinet choices have fallen into this category as well. He and we are wasting time, effort and losing sleep over the craziest ideas from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about childhood vaccines, or Kash Patel’s blatant lies about protecting FBI agents even as they are being lined up for punishment for having taken part in investigations arising from Jan. 6 or from classified documents cases involving Trump. We are getting a national intelligence director whom our foes regard as sympathetic, an attorney general who believes Trump won the 2020 election, an EPA administrator who doesn’t believe in environmental law.
— The Just-Say-No Proposals. With so much attention on other executive orders, there hardly has been bandwidth to assess the policies aimed simply at stopping whatever Biden did about climate, international relationship, participation in the United Nations, overturning mileage goals for automakers and a long list of other targets. Announcing that the federal government will withhold money from hospitals that offer certain trans treatments or from schools that allow trans athletes does not translate into a program; it’s just a tool to say they don’t exist,
Coping with all of it is exhausting. In Congress, the sides seem to simply stay in their corners, voting in partisan ways for or against Trump, no matter the issue. The courts await their test, since there already are dozens of lawsuits from these first three weeks. Many have turned away from the news, because it is seen alternately as inadequate to explain or to raise the most important questions.
We do recognize that together these proposals are about gathering power and diminishing critics, about attacking diversity in a way that would seem to promote hiring and promotion of White men over policies recognizing a much more pluralistic society, about choosing pursuit of profit over caring for those more vulnerable.
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