These aren’t the happiest days for Democrats, but the impact of so much wild lawlessness by Trump 2.0 should be offset a bit by indications the 47th president and his minions may be a bit over their skis, as I discussed at New York:

During the first month of his second term, Donald Trump’s popularity started out mildly positive but has slowly eroded, according to the FiveThirtyEight averages. As of January 24, his job-approval ratio was 49.7 percent positive and 41.5 percent negative. As of Thursday, it’s 48.7 percent positive and 46.2 percent negative, which means his net approval has slipped from 8.2 percent to 2.5 percent. The very latest surveys show a negative trend, as the Washington Post noted:

“Trump’s approval ratings this week in polls — including the Post-Ipsos poll and others from Reuters, Quinnipiac University, CNN and Gallup — have ranged from 44 to 47 percent. In all of them, more disapprove than approve of him.

“That’s a reversal from the vast majority of previous polls, which showed Trump in net-positive territory.”

Given all the controversy his actions have aroused, that may not be surprising. But he has some vulnerabilities behind the top-line numbers, mostly involving ideas he hasn’t fully implemented yet.

His proposals tend to be popular at a high level of generality but much less popular in some key specifics. For example, a February 9 CBS survey found 54 percent supporting his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but only 14 percent favoring his idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza. Similarly, a February 18 Washington Post–Ipsos poll found 50 percent of respondents approving of his handling of immigration, but only 41 percent supporting the deployment of local law enforcement for mass deportations, and only 39 percent supporting his push to end to birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.

Across a broad range of polls, Elon Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy is relatively unpopular. A February 19 Quinnipiac survey found 55 percent of registered voters believe Musk has too much power. An Emerson poll gave Musk a 41 percent job-approval rating, and an Economist-YouGov poll gave him a 43 percent favorability rating.

But by far Trump’s greatest vulnerability is over his management of an economy where renewed signs of inflation are evident, and where his policies, once implemented, could make conditions worse. Already, his job-approval ratings on managing the economy are slipping a bit, as a February 19 Reuters-Ipsos poll indicated:

“[T]he share of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53% in the latest poll from 43% in the January 24–26 poll. Public approval of Trump’s economic stewardship fell to 39% from 43% in the prior poll …

“Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president.”

And a mid-February Gallup survey found 54 percent of Americans disapproving Trump’s handling of the economy and 53 percent disapproving his handling of foreign trade. More ominous for Trump if the sentiment persists is that negative feelings about current economic conditions are as prominent as they were when they helped lift Trump to the presidency. The WaPo-Ipsos poll noted above found that 73 percent of Americans consider the economy “not so good” or “poor,” with that percentage rising to 76 percent with respect to gasoline and energy prices and 92 percent with respect to food prices.

Republicans and independents will for a time share Trump’s claims that the current economy is still the product of Joe Biden’s policies, but not for more than a few months. A particular controversy to watch is Trump’s tariff wars and their potential impact on consumer prices. As the CBS survey showed, sizable majorities of Americans already oppose new tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and Europe, with tariffs on China being an exception to low levels of support for that key element of Trump’s economic-policy agenda. And the same poll showed 66 percent of respondents agreeing that Trump’s “focus on lowering prices” is “not enough.” He may have forgotten already how he won the 2024 election.

 

There’s nothing that annoys me much more than the lazy habit of justifying bad conduct by the claim that “everybody does it,” particularly when the conduct in question is egregious. That’s why policing political false equivalence claims is important, so I wrote a ticket for John Letterman at New York this week.

One thing most of Donald Trump’s minions and their bitterest Democratic enemies agree about is that a constitutional crisis is brewing as the new administration asserts the right to remake the federal government by executive fiat (either via presidential executive orders or by power delegated to Elon Musk’s DOGE operation) and federal judges begin to push back. Most Democratic politicians, particularly in Congress (which is in danger of losing its control over federal spending priorities entirely), are using pretty stark language about the constitutional implications of Trump 2.0. Here’s Senator Ron Wyden in an interview with my colleague Benjamin Hart:

“The Founding Fathers said, ‘Look, here’s what Congress does. Here’s what the president does.’ This is what we have enjoyed for all of these years, and it has been something that has served us well. And now you have somebody in Elon Musk, who basically paid for an election, coming in and saying he runs everything. If you have unelected individuals breaking the law to take power, that about fits the definition of a coup.”

Meanwhile, Team Trump is arguing it’s the judges that are engaged in an attempted coup, as NPR reports:

“’The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges and liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a briefing on Wednesday.

“Leavitt called the orders that federal judges have made against the administration’s agenda a ‘continuation of the weaponization of justice’ against Trump.”

Musk has called for an “immediate wave of judicial impeachments” to dispose of obstacles to his ongoing rampage through the federal bureaucracy.

But there’s at least one vocal dissenter from this consensus: Wyden’s Democratic colleague John Fetterman, who is basically saying there’s nothing to see here we haven’t seen before, as HuffPost reports:

“’When it was [President] Joe Biden, then you [had] a conservative judge jam it up on him, and now we have liberal judges who are going to stop these things. That’s how the process works,’ Fetterman told HuffPost on Wednesday, referring to nationwide injunctions of Biden’s policies by conservative judges during his presidency.

“The Pennsylvania Democrat called Musk’s actions shutting down agencies and putting thousands of workers on administrative leave without congressional approval ‘provocative’ and said they are ‘certainly a concern.’

“However, the senator rejected claims from others in his party about the country facing a constitutional crisis.

“’There isn’t a constitutional crisis, and all of these things ― it’s just a lot of noise.'”

Fetterman has taken a decidedly cooperative tack toward Trump 2.0 from the get-go, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, joining Truth Social, and making positive noises about DOGE (at least in its pre-inauguration form). But he’s opposed confirmation of Trump’s most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. His latest comment seems to suggest he’s carving out a role for himself as a Democrat who is not at all onboard with what Trump is doing but rejects any hyperventilation about it. At a time when most Democrats are under considerable grassroots and opinion-leader pressure to make more rather than less of what Fetterman calls “noise,” it’s quite the outlier position. Yes, he’s a Democrat who will be running for reelection in 2028 in a state Trump carried in 2024, but given what’s going on in Washington right now, 2028 seems far away and there’s no telling what the people of Pennsylvania will think by then.

From a substantive point of view, Fetterman’s “everybody does it” take on Trump/Musk power grabs isn’t terribly compelling. Yes, the Biden administration criticized the band of right-wing federal judges (mostly in Texas) to which conservatives resorted in battling Democratic legislation and presidential executive orders, and also criticized the conservative majority on the Supreme Court for its ideologically driven decisions, particularly the reversal of Roe v. Wade. There was even talk in Democratic circles of actions to restructure the Supreme Court (inevitably referred to as “court-packing” in an allusion to FDR’s failed 1937 proposal to expand the size of the Court) in various ways. But “court-packing” never got beyond talk, and in any event, Democrats notably did not talk about flat defiance of judicial orders as Musk and J.D. Vance, among others, are doing right now.

There are legitimate differences of opinion about exactly how far Team Trump has progressed down the road to a “constitutional crisis” over the relationship between the executive and legislative branches. Maybe strictly speaking we are dealing with a potential constitutional crisis that will formally begin the minute the administration openly refuses to comply with a judicial order. But where Fetterman is doing a disservice to the truth is in implying that the imminent threat — if not the reality — of an engineered constitutional crisis is just the same-old same-old that every recent administration has pursued. That approach normalizes this self-consciously revolutionary regime and also its worst impulses and excesses.

I’m on record as suggesting that Democrats not waste too much time on recriminations over 2024 while the wolf of Trump 2.0 is at the door. But there are some lessons relevant to the challenges right before them, and I tried to discuss at few at New York:

The ritualistic “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” that ensued after the Republican election victory of 2024 was cut somewhat short by the brutal realities of the real-life consequences of letting Donald Trump regain power with a Republican-controlled Congress and all sorts of ridiculous claims of an absolute mandate to do whatever he wanted. But, in fact, while factional finger-pointing might have been are a self-indulgent luxury an opposition party living under the MAGA gun can’t afford, there are some lessons from the election results that are important to internalize right now. Here are a few.

Mobilizing the Democratic base isn’t enough to stop Trump

For much of the 2024 campaign, a lot of observers believed that the only way Trump could win was if Democrats failed to mobilize their party base, either out of complacency or because key constituencies were disgruntled with Joe Biden (and, to a lesser extent, with Kamala Harris once she became the presidential nominee). An enormous amount of money, time, and effort went into securing maximum turnout among young, Black, and Latino voters on the theory that if fully engaged, they’d win the day. And in the end, these constituencies did turn out reasonably well (a bit less than in 2020, but more than in 2012 or 2016). Trouble was, too many of them voted for Donald Trump.

No, Trump didn’t win Black, Latino, or under-30 voters overall, but his performance in all those groups improved significantly as compared to 2020. Among Black voters (per AP Votecast, the most reputable exit poll), he doubled his percentage of the vote, from 8 percent to 16 percent. Among Latinos, his percentage rose from 35 percent to 43 percent. And among under-30 voters, his share of the vote jumped from 36 percent to 47 percent. Meanwhile, the GOP advantage in the Donkey Party’s ancient working-class constituency continued to rise, even among non-white voters; overall, Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. The Democratic base fractured more than it faltered. And there were signs (which have persisted into early 2025 polling) that defections have made the GOP the plurality party for the first time in years and one of the few times since the New Deal.

While rebuilding the base (while expanding it) remains a crucial objective for Democrats, just calling it into the streets to defy Trump’s 2025 agenda via a renewed “resistance” isn’t likely to work. Many former and wavering Democrats need to be persuaded to remain in their old party.

Trump really did win the two most essential arguments of the 2024 election, on inflation and immigration

Republicans have massive incentives to pretend that all their messages struck home, giving them an argument that they enjoy a mandate for everything they want to do. But the honest consensus from both sides of the barricade is that demands for change to address inflation and immigration were the critical Trump messages, with doubts about Joe Biden’s capacity to fulfill the office and Kamala Harris’s independence from him exacerbating both.

What we’ve learned in 2025 is that Trump has considerable public backing to do some controversial things on these issues. A 2024 poll from Third Way showed a majority of swing voters agreed that excessive government spending was the principal cause of inflation, a huge blow to Democratic hopes that rising costs could be pinned on corporations, global trends, supply-chain disruptions, or, indeed, the previous Trump administration. But this wasn’t just a campaign issue: Trump took office with some confidence that the public would support serious efforts to reduce federal spending and make government employees accountable. And the fact that (so far) his approval ratings have held up despite the chaotic nature of his efforts to slash federal payrolls is a good indication he has some wind at his back, at least initially.

If that’s true on inflation, it’s even truer on immigration, where solid majorities in multiple polls support (in theory, at least) the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. If the administration was smart enough to limit its deportation campaign to those convicted of violent crimes, it would have overwhelming public support. But Democrats should fully accept they didn’t just lose votes on this issue in 2024: They lost an argument that persists.

That is why it is critical that Democrats point to evidence that Trump’s own agenda (particularly his tariff policies) will revive inflation that had largely been tamed by the end of the Biden administration, while focusing their immigration messaging on vast overreach, inhumane excesses, and ethnic profiling of Latinos by Team Trump in its efforts to deport immigrants.

Swing voters are not moved by constitutional or “threat to democracy” arguments

Joe Biden in his 2024 presidential campaign (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kamala Harris as his successor) put considerable stock in playing on public concerns about the threat to democracy posed by Trump as evidenced by his conduct on January 6, 2021, and his lawless behavior generally. While these arguments found traction among voters already in his corner, there’s little evidence they mattered much at all to the voters who decided the election in Trump’s favor. Indeed, a considerable percentage of voters worried about a broken political system viewed Trump as a potential reformer as much as an insurrectionist or autocrat.

At the moment, most office-holding Democrats and (more quietly) many Republicans are aghast at how Trump has gone about pursuing his agenda early in 2025, with a blizzard of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and a blank check issued to eccentric billionaire Elon Musk to disrupt federal agencies and intimidate federal employees. Again, Trump is drawing on long-standing public hostility toward the federal government and to the size and cost of government as a spur to inflation and a burden on taxpayers. Fighting him with alarms about his violation of legal and constitutional limitations on presidential power is unlikely to work with an electorate unmoved by Trump’s earlier scofflaw attitude. Voters must be convinced in very concrete terms that what he is doing will affect their own lives negatively. As with tariffs and the immigration policy, Trump’s tendency to overreach should provide plenty of ammunition for building a backlash to his policies.

The desire for change in an unhappy country is deep-seated

In 2024, as in 2016, Trump managed to win because unhappy voters who didn’t particularly like or trust either presidential candidate (or their parties) in the end chose to produce a change in party control of the White House and of Congress. In office, Trump and his allies will try to perpetuate as long as they can the illusion that they are still fighting for “change” against powerful interests aligned with the Democratic Party, even though it’s Republicans who control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and also dominate the U.S. Supreme Court. The idea that Team Trump is a brave band of insurgents speaking truth to power is undermined very specifically by the fact that its chief disrupter, Musk, is the richest man in the world and the first among equals of a large band of plutocrats surrounding the president.

As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn observed during the transition to the second Trump administration, many of the same anti-incumbent tendencies that put a thumb on the scale for the GOP in 2024 will now work for the opposition:

“The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since [George W.] Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11 …

“Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?”

Based on his conduct since returning to the White House and his well-known narcissism, it’s not all that clear that the 47th president even cares about building public support as he ends his political career. That may give him the freedom of the true lame duck, but it also means Democrats can batten on his broken promises and the disappointments they will breed. The 2028 presidential candidate who may be in real trouble is the Republican who succeeds the 2024 winner.

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.

I was very closely watching the saga of OMB’s disastrous effort to freeze funding for a vast number of federal programs, and wrote about why it was actually revoked at New York.

This week the Trump administration set off chaos nationwide when it temporarily “paused” all federal grants and loans pending a review of which programs comply with Donald Trump’s policy edicts. The order came down in an unexpected memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget on Monday.

Now OMB has rescinded the memo without comment just as suddenly, less than a day after its implementation was halted by a federal judge. Adding to the pervasive confusion, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately insisted on Wednesday that the funding freeze was still on because Trump’s executive orders on DEI and other prohibited policies remained in place. But there’s no way this actually gets implemented without someone, somewhere, identifying exactly what’s being frozen. So for the moment, it’s safe to say the funding freeze is off.

Why did Team Trump back off this particular initiative so quickly? It’s easy to say the administration was responding to D.C. district judge Loren AliKhan’s injunction halting the freeze. But then again, the administration (and particularly OMB director nominee Russell Vought) has been spoiling for a court fight over the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act that the proposed freeze so obviously violated. Surely something else was wrong with the freeze, aside from the incredible degree of chaos associated with its rollout, requiring multiple clarifications of which agencies and programs it affected (which may have been a feature rather than a bug to the initiative’s government-hating designers). According to the New York Times, the original OMB memo, despite its unprecedented nature and sweeping scope, wasn’t even vetted by senior White House officials like alleged policy overlord Stephen Miller.

Democrats have been quick to claim that they helped generate a public backlash to the funding freeze that forced the administration to reverse direction, as Punchbowl News explained even before the OMB memo was rescinded:

“A Monday night memo from the Office of Management and Budget ordering a freeze in federal grant and loan programs sent congressional Republicans scrambling and helped Democrats rally behind a clear anti-Trump message. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Trump as ‘lawless, destructive, cruel.’

“D.C. senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, warned that thousands of federal programs could be impacted, including veterans, law enforcement and firefighters, suicide hotlines, military aid to foreign allies, and more …

“During a Senate Democratic Caucus lunch on Tuesday, Schumer urged his colleagues to make the freeze “relatable” to their constituents back home, a clear play for the messaging upper hand. Schumer also plans on doing several local TV interviews today.”

In other words, the funding freeze looks like a clear misstep for an administration and a Republican Party that were walking very tall after the 47th president’s first week in office, giving Democrats a rare perceived “win.” More broadly, it suggests that once the real-life implications of Trump’s agenda (including his assaults on federal spending and the “deep state”) are understood, his public support is going to drop like Wile E. Coyote with an anvil in his paws. If that doesn’t bother Trump or his disruptive sidekick, Elon Musk, it could bother some of the GOP members of Congress expected to implement the legislative elements of the MAGA to-do list for 2025.

It’s far too early, however, to imagine that the chaos machine humming along at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will fall silent even for a moment. OMB could very well issue a new funding-freeze memo the minute the injunction stopping the original one expires next week. If that doesn’t happen, there could be new presidential executive orders (like the ones that suspended certain foreign-aid programs and energy subsidies) and, eventually, congressional legislation. Democrats and Trump-skeptical Republicans will need to stay on their toes to keep up with this administration’s schemes and its willingness to shatter norms.

It’s true, nonetheless, that the electorate that lifted Trump to the White House for the second time almost surely wasn’t voting to sharply cut, if not terminate, the host of popular federal programs that appeared to be under the gun when OMB issued its funding freeze memo. Sooner or later the malice and the fiscal math that led to this and other efforts to destroy big areas of domestic governance will become hard to deny and impossible to rescind.

With all Republicans and even many Democrats complaining about the size, cost and effectiveness of the federal bureaucracy, I offered at New York a contrarian take based on the need for some stability in an era of constantly changing party control of government.

Of all the audacious tasks the new Trump administration and its congressional allies have taken on, perhaps the most intense and far-reaching are their efforts to go after the so-called deep state of executive branch and independent agency bureaucrats. It’s a three-pronged attack at present. First, an ongoing wave of executive orders is paring back civil-service protections for federal employees. Second, the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation bill that congressional Republicans are slowly but surely assembling to enact Donald Trump’s legislative agenda will unquestionably include major reductions in federal spending that supports hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of federal employees. And third, there’s the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), operating out of the White House, that aims at a massive overhaul and reduction in federal operations. Conservatives in the judiciary have chipped in, too, notably through the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 decision revoking traditional deference to federal agency interpretations of congressional mandates.

Republicans have varying (but often overlapping) reasons for going after the “deep state.” Trump and his immediate circle pretty clearly just want to demolish anyone and anything that stands in the way of the immediate and complete implementation of his agenda while also providing some juicy patronage plums for MAGA loyalists. Many conservatives desperately want to reduce the size and power of the federal government based on the theory that Washington’s hirelings unduly restrict private enterprise, redistribute wealth, and pursue progressive policy goals they consider illegitimate or even evil. And all sorts of right-of-center folks want to reduce federal spending to pay for their own policy goals, including the white whale of high-end tax cuts. But as knives are sharpened to carve up the bureaucracy, we are also hearing some Democratic voices echoing the need for improvements in government efficiency and a tighter rein on agency discretion. It turns out nobody really likes faceless bureaucrats.

While there’s nothing wrong with “reinventing government” by examining how government policies are enforced and services are delivered, this may be a particularly bad time to turn the bureaucracy upside down and remake the federal public sector into a lean-and-mean instrument for the current controlling party’s governing vision and patronage needs. The “deep state” may be a crucial source of stability in an era during which the electorate keeps delivering and then denying power to one of two major political parties that agree on very little other than the wickedness of their opponents. In other countries with parliamentary systems and multiple political parties, coalition governments are a way around the problem of unstable majorities. Our winner-take-all system makes that impossible, and when someone like Trump comes along who wants to test the boundaries of power in every direction, any sense of continuity goes out the window.

In much of the 20th century, bipartisanship (along with ideological diversity within the two major parties) smoothed the rough edges of transitions in presidential and congressional power. Yes, there were major moments of single-party power, some of which arguably extended for decades, but it’s sometimes forgotten that even highly ideological regimes like Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Ronald Reagan’s relied on minority-party support and produced bipartisan policy legacies. But the 21st century has featured unusually short stretches of party power combined with deep partisan polarization, producing an ever-worsening sense of whiplash and instability in governance. A pattern has developed of partisan breakthroughs giving one party enormous power, followed quickly by gridlock and then reversal of party control. In 1992, 2000, 2008, 2016, 2020, and 2024, party control of the White House changed and the new boss enjoyed trifecta control of Congress. With the exception of George W. Bush (whose unified control ended in 2001 due to a senator switching parties), all these presidents lost their trifecta in their first midterm election, leading to sluggish periods of gridlock and then eventually defeat by the opposing party.

We’ve seen the oscillation accelerate since 2016, even as partisan divisions have deepened to an unprecedented degree. Trump took office determined to reverse Barack Obama’s policies root and branch via executive action and by two huge packages of legislation (one on taxes enacted, one on health care defeated through intraparty divisions). Then Republicans lost the House in 2018 and the ability to do big things died. Joe Biden took office in 2021 similarly determined to remake the federal government via executive orders and by two huge packages of legislation (both enacted, though the second took a long while and had to be pared back). Then Democrats lost the House in 2022 and things came to a halt. Now Trump 2.0 is in the process of more aggressively reversing its predecessor’s policies than any new administration perhaps since FDR in 1933, knowing full well that the window of legislative opportunity is due to close in 2026 when the GOP’s tiny margin of control of the House makes a Democratic flip extremely likely.

This patten of brief power followed by gridlock and then eviction from power shows no sign of ending any time soon in our closely and deeply divided country. As a result, the inherently disorderly process of changing policies and personnel in the executive branch is made even more chaotic as the power configuration changes every two years. To be sure, MAGA types purport to favor “disruption” of the status quo as an end in itself, but at some point, the federal government needs to settle into a governing groove. All the destructive thrashing around that Trump 2.0 is attempting may simply make a functional executive branch in the next (and quite possibly Democratic) administration unnecessarily difficult. And if that’s the whole nihilistic idea, anyone in either party who truly believes in government efficiency and responsiveness should be horrified.

So whether you favor or oppose the policy direction of the Trump administration, it should not be accompanied by an assault on the “deep state.” We need people to provide some semblance of continuity until such time as the electorate chooses to give elephants or donkeys management of the zoo for an extended period.

As someone ever-attentive to the intersection of political and religion, it wasn’t so much Trump’s explosion at the Bishop of Washington but the follow-on by his clerical allies that struck me, as I explained at New York:

Everything about the Washington National Cathedral, from its vast Gothic architecture to its clergy’s vestments, suggests to the politicians who sometimes grace its pews that they are small players in the grand drama of human events shaped by an omnipotent God. But the most important pol in attendance at this week’s National Prayer Service, right there in the front row, was a newly re-inaugurated president for whom humility and self-restraint are alien concepts, and who has boldly asserted that God prevented his assassination in order to return him to power. So understandably, the clerical leader of the Cathedral, Bishop Mariann Budde, felt constrained in her sermon to beg Donald Trump for some Christian forbearance in how he carried out his vengeful mandate. She begged rather than commanded, using the time-honored language of Jesus Christ by way of enjoining compassion for the poor, the stranger, and those living in fear of state power:

“’Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and, as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.’

“‘There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They … may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.'”

It was also understandable that Trump was annoyed by Budde’s plea, along with the underlying suggestion that he does not personify God’s will for America in 2024. He was undoubtedly aware that the bishop had criticized him during his first term for using one of the churches of her diocese, the White House–adjacent St. John’s, for a photo op in which he held up a Bible in righteous justification for his hard line on Black Lives Matters protesters. And here she was almost literally raining on his inaugural parade.

But when he lashed out at her on Truth Social as a “so-called bishop,” a “radical left hard line Trump hater,” whose sermon was “nasty in tone and not compelling or smart,” he unleashed a lot of MAGA rage aimed not just at Budde but at those liberal Christians who similarly reject a reactionary, Trump-o-centric version of the faith. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias hit the nail on the head in depicting the outburst against Budde as representing a submerged iceberg rising to the surface:

“For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.”

The National Prayer Service incident gave license to a lot of Trump’s clerical allies to deny the legitimacy of any form of Christianity that does not comport with their culturally conservative views. Several uttered their condemnations in interviews with the conservative Washington Examiner:

“’For the past four years, the Left has vilified biblically sound pastors for teaching what Scripture says about marriage, gender, and sexuality — accusing them of preaching politics from the pulpit. Yet, on the very first day of Trump’s return to the White House, a woke clergy member hijacks a church service to promote partisan rhetoric, personally attacks the President of the United States, and distorts the truth about illegal immigration,’ said pastor Lucas Miles, senior director of TPUSA Faith.

“Pastor John Amanchukwu, who has been vocal in his support for Trump in the past, took a harsher tone.

“’Many fear a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but there is nothing worse than a wolf in Bishop garments. She’s heretical, diabolical, and should have NEVER had the opportunity to minister in the presence of President Donald J. Trump,” Amanchukwu said.”

Franklin Graham, who delivered one of the two official invocations at Trump’s inauguration, was equally harsh:

“‘She is a socialist, activist, LGBTQ+ agenda, and that’s, you know, so she’s just wrong,’ he continued. ‘So these are activists, and no question, they hate Trump. I don’t know why they hate Trump. Trump stands for truth.”

So denying that “Trump stands for truth” is apparently grounds for excommunication from the broader community of Jesus Christ. That’s certainly what the extremely influential Pentecostal preacher and musician Sean Feucht suggested from right there in the Cathedral: “This is not a church and she is not a pastor. Time to ditch this tradition of attending this place during the inauguration.”

Maybe these holy warriors will calm down. But for the moment, it’s clear that their relationship with Donald Trump, the most powerful person on the planet, is fully transactional. He’s using them to herd their flocks into the voting booth to back him despite occasional suspicions that he’s more interested in self-promotion and worldly wealth than in doing God’s will. And they are using his authority to monopolize their own power within Christianity, by insisting that the only real Christians are MAGA Christians. These politicized right-wing believers bared their teeth in the reaction to Budde’s decidedly Jesus-oriented plea to Trump for mercy. But their ultimate objective could well be to reduce the influence of liberal Christianity until it’s small enough to be drowned in a baptismal font, leaving loud-and-proud Christian nationalists as the monopoly proprietors of America’s largest religious tradition.

Nothing bugs me quite as much as false equivalence, and I’ve been seeing quite a bit of it comparing Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons and those Donald Trump issued the moment he took office. So I compared them and wrote about it at New York:

In trying to sort through all the momentous events marking the transition from the 46th presidency to the 47th, it’s tempting to turn the actions of Joe Biden and Donald Trump into matched sets. In some cases, that’s justifiable; Biden reversed quite a few Trump policies by executive order when he took office in 2017, and in some cases Trump is reversing the reversals right now (e.g., on withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords). But sometimes the comparisons are of apples and oranges at best. Some commentators lumped together Biden’s and Trump’s transition-week pardons as two sides of the same dubious coin of sovereign clemency powers. Here’s Politico Playbook’s take, from its new British editor Jack Blanchard:

“The biggest story of the night … was Trump’s extraordinary tidal wave of clemency, with the new president issuing pardons or commutations for nearly every person convicted of crimes — including serious violence — in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. This was big — about as big as Trump could possibly go. Only hours earlier Biden, of course, had issued his own shocking flurry of preemptive pardons for friends, family, and associates during his final morning — his final moments — in power. It probably shouldn’t take a Brit to tell you that none of this is remotely normal. At all.”

So Biden’s “shocking flurry” of pardons was matched by Trump’s “extraordinary tidal wave.” Thrust, then counter-thrust, an action with a reaction, right? No, actually, that’s wrong.

Biden’s last-minute pardons were legally controversial in that they were preemptive, offering protection to potential Trump-administration targets who have not been indicted, much less convicted, of criminal wrongdoing, as CNN reports:

“Clemency for General Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members of Congress who served on the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, was announced early Monday morning. Later, minutes before Trump was to be inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president, Biden also issued pardons for members of his family: his brothers James and Frank, his sister Valerie, and their respective spouses.

“The pardons, coming in the final hours of Biden’s presidency, amount to a stunning flex of presidential power that is unprecedented in recent presidential history. They serve to protect several outspoken critics of the incoming president, including former Republican representative Liz Cheney, whom Trump has vowed retribution against.”

Trump, by contrast, moved to protect over 1,500 people who most definitely have been indicted, tried, and convicted of criminal wrongdoing in connection with the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the Associated Press reported:

“President Donald Trump has pardoned, commuted the prison sentences, or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, using his clemency powers on his first day back in office to undo the massive prosecution of the unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.

“Trump’s action, just hours after his return to the White House on Monday, paves the way for the release from prison of people found guilty of violent attacks on police, as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of failed plots to keep the Republican in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.”

There was a preemptive aspect to Trump’s exercise in clemency, too: “Trump also ordered the attorney general to seek the dismissal of roughly 450 cases that are pending before judges stemming from the largest investigation in Justice Department history.”

In general, though, Biden pardoned people who as far as we know haven’t committed crimes (in this last-minute wave, that is; an earlier pardon for convicted felon Hunter Biden is a different matter). Biden’s list was comprised of people Trump targeted by name for investigation and prosecution during his 2024 campaign. Meanwhile, Trump opened the prison doors and expunged the record for insurrectionists who (whatever you think of them and their actions) did enjoy due process in facing accountability for the events of January 6 (unlike Trump himself, who was protected from prosecution by the U.S. Supreme Court).

The 47th president may understandably rage that the 46th has kept him from embarking on the full vengeance tour he seemed to contemplate in calling for a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family, and in describing members of the January 6 investigative committee as traitors. But the idea that Biden’s pardons were as audacious as Trump’s is itself pretty audacious.

In thinking about the choices any new presidential administration faces, something occurred to me about Donald Trump that may be worth considering by Democrats trying to cope with him, so I wrote about it at New York:

Having never lacked faith in himself, Donald Trump probably feels completely entitled to his 2024 election win, the governing trifecta it created, and the relatively high levels of popularity (for him, anyway) that made it all possible. But the odds are very high that between the weighty national problems he inherits and the controversial nature of some of the things he wants to do, he’s probably at the summit of his popularity. As Ross Barkan recently argued at New York, there may be nowhere to go but down:

“Now are the days of wine and roses for MAGA because Joe Biden is still president and Trump’s reign remains hypothetical. On January 20, the script flips: The inflation and affordability crises are Trump’s problems. So is governing, which he has never excelled at. While Trump’s second term may promise, in theory, less chaos than his first, there isn’t much evidence that his White House will evince the grim, rapacious discipline of the Bush-Cheney years, when Republicans actually dominated all policymaking at home and abroad.”

Trump does, however, have some control over how much popularity he is willing to lose. Like anyone who becomes president with some political capital and the ready means to use it (i.e., controlling Congress as well as the White House, and having a lot of friends on the U.S. Supreme Court too), the 47th president will have to decide whether to take some risks on policies that are very likely to reduce his popularity or, instead, play to the galleries. To put it even more simply, he can cash in some chips on stuff he wants to do that could offend or even shock some of the people who voted for him or keep building his stash for the future. Given Trump’s almost unlimited control over his troops in Washington, he can probably go in either direction, but that choice of direction could have an enormous impact on those of us who would greatly prefer a less ambitious MAGA agenda.

There are a lot of reasons Trump may not care if he remains popular while fulfilling his presidential goals. This is the final presidential term of a 78-year-old man; for him, the future really is right now. Yes, forcing unpopular measures through Congress might endanger the fragile Republican control of the House in the 2026 midterms. But history indicates it’s very likely Democrats will flip the House no matter what Republicans do, and let’s face it: The long-range future of the Republican Party may not be of great interest to the president-elect. Even after being nominated as its presidential candidate three straight times while gradually grinding down intraparty opposition to a fine dust, Trump still acts suspiciously toward his party’s Establishment and clearly views it as a vehicle rather than a cause. This is more speculative, but given his personality profile the 47th president may even prefer, or at least not mind, a falloff in the GOP’s electoral performance once he’s gone.

Add in Trump’s impulsiveness, which doesn’t suggest someone for whom delay of gratification comes naturally, and it seems a “go big, then be gone” attitude is likely. Beyond that, it’s unclear how sensitive this man is to changes in popularity: He’s never been in an election he didn’t think he’d won, and he has a tendency to ignore the polls that give him news he doesn’t want in favor of the one or two that show support for his agenda and message always remaining sky-high. If he did something that made his popularity crash, would he even notice it, and if not, would any of the sycophants around him break the bad — and possibly fake — news?

All in all, the best bet is that Donald Trump will pursue his maximum agenda with little regard to how anyone feels about it so long as he’s getting it done. Perhaps Republican officeholders (e.g., his vice-president) who have plans beyond 2028 can talk him into more prudent conduct; but in case you haven’t noticed, he’s stubborn, and it will probably take a lot of blatant, in-your-face adversity to change his course. Democrats can supply some of that, of course, but a stronger than usual popular backlash could matter most.