Various theories are kicking around to explain the speed and lack of caution surrounding the initial blizzard of executive actions in the second Trump administration. The most conventional is simply that having four years to mull what happened in his first term, Trump and his top advisers came prepared to hit the ground running. That may account for developments like the early start on Cabinet nominations, but there have been plenty of second-term presidencies that did not begin with breaking every norm constraining executive powers, so something else is clearly going on.
One very plausible explanation is that both Trump and Russell Vought, the OMB director at the wheel of the executive branch, are very invested in a tremendous expansion of presidential powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Moving ahead rapidly with executive orders, funding “freezes,” and plans for presidential impoundments made a lot of sense as part of a very deliberate power grab.
Then, even more obviously, there’s the truly unanticipated X-factor in Trump 2.0: Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative, which was apparently put together on the fly at some point between Election Day and Inauguration Day with about as much preparation as might normally be associated with a Tesla joyride in the country. Musk is famously deploying the same shock-and-awe tactics he used in earlier corporate takeovers, based on the Silicon Valley motto of “move fast and break things.” He has indeed done that, with the chortling glee of a toddler overturning a Lego structure. So perhaps he’s running wild, beyond the control of the congressional leaders and the Cabinet whose authority he has usurped. Or maybe Musk and Vought together have joined forces to hit the disruption accelerator.
But at some point it must occur to the more thoughtful minds of Team Trump — Susie Wiles, anybody? — that the politics of this onslaught of chaotic activism is a bit backward. For generations, conservatives have come to Washington, D.C., clutching an agenda of limited government and tax cuts. By and large, the former goal, which requires cuts in highly popular federal programs and deflationary reductions in federal employment and contracting, is tough politically; it’s the broccoli on the plate, allegedly good for you but unpalatable without hollandaise sauce. Tax cuts supply the tasty dessert. Serving up dessert first is the best way to encourage broccoli consumption. That’s the lesson of George W. Bush’s successful push for tax cuts and then budget cuts in the early 2000s. The strategy was known as “starving the beast” (as anti-tax guru Grover Norquist put it): Deny “the welfare state” (the early 2000s term for the “deep state”) the resources to expand its programs and services and budget cuts would flow naturally and with less public angst.
That’s not how Team Trump is proceeding. And in fact, on top of all the pain and paralysis Trump and Musk are causing throughout the federal government, the administration is insisting on moving fast with another unpleasant agenda item: widespread tariffs, which both economists and the public believe will reignite inflation — the very issue that most clearly led to the 2024 election result — and could even induce the ultimate hell of stagflation, a shrinking economy with spiraling prices.
So why is the administration and its party insisting on front-loading so many politically hazardous actions? The most likely answer is that they believe they are living on borrowed time and have to smash the deep state and then grab the tax cuts made possible by budget cuts before the American people react in ways that might quickly reduce their power. For many years now, it’s been clear that an agenda of cutting programs like Medicare and Medicaid (and perhaps even Social Security via the indirect method of disabling its administration) and shutting down major agencies like the Department of Education in order to finance tax cuts for the rich was not a big crowd-pleaser. So upon taking office, the leaders of Trump 2.0 had a distinct choice: Build up their political capital carefully with popular steps that would give them the credibility to take less popular steps later, or move fast and get what they wanted while they can. It does make a certain logic, and not just for political neophytes like Musk or stone anti-government Christian nationalist ideologues like Vought, but for the 78-year-old narcissist serving in his final public-sector job.
In an interview with Ezra Klein, conservative wonk Santi Ruiz explained the psychology as reflected in DOGE’s modus operandi:
“[W]hen you talk to people in and around DOGE, you hear the debt come up over and over again — that if we don’t take this one opportunity now, while the window is open before the midterms, before public opinion naturally swings back and we lose the House, there’s a green field to run into to try and cut, cut, cut. And this will never happen any other time.
“There’s a strong instinct here that this is our one shot. So if we’re going to err on one side, we have to err on the side of cutting too much….
“[T]hat’s very much the instinct: The Dems are going to stop us. They’re going to come in, and we’re going to do crazy oversight in the House in a year and a half. Public opinion will just change over time because cutting things is unpopular.”
From that perspective, which may be shared more broadly within Team Trump than we realize, it doesn’t really matter what the polls show, or how more rational Republican politicians focused on their own futures want, or whether the whole revolution is doomed to eventual defeat. It’s all carpe diem, baby, and let tomorrow take care of itself.
