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.

 

In trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in news from Washington, I pointed out some issues in the Trump transition that ought to encourage Democrats, and wrote about them at New York:

Even before Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, we were being assured — or in some cases warned — that Trump 2.0 would be a lean, mean MAGA machine in sharp contrast to its chaotic predecessor regime. There were an immense number of predictions that the 47th president would “hit the ground running” the very moment he was inaugurated, having gotten a head start with an unusually early roster of major appointments and enjoying total power over a Republican Party in which pre-Trump habits have been hunted to extinction. He claimed a historic mandate to do whatever he wanted, and the only big doubt was whether the revolution he promised in American life and government would be most rapidly promoted by his lapdog Congress or via his own lordly exercises of executive power.

In an interview with Politico, longtime Trump intimate Steve Bannon thought it important to rebrand the transition in order to capture the breathtaking speed with which everything would happen:

““I tell people, “shock and awe was a ’17 concept.” ‘Days of thunder,’ I think are gonna be the concepts starting next Monday,’ Bannon said. ‘And I think these days of thunder starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.'”

Despite all the hype, as Inauguration Day approaches, there are signs that Trump 2.0 may actually be off schedule in important respects. The only major nominee who is likely to be confirmed by the Senate on Day One is the least controversial, Marco Rubio as secretary of State. Trump’s fantasy of getting the entire Cabinet instantly approved, which appears to have driven his timetable of appointments, is dissipating rapidly. There’s still considerable uncertainty over the scope of initial executive orders and pardons. But most importantly, the administration’s loyal troops in Congress are still in disarray over their basic legislative strategy for implementing the 47th president’s agenda — disarray that extends to many important details.

In 2017, prior to Trump taking the oath of office, congressional Republicans quickly agreed on a two-stage legislative strategy for the year, with one filibuster-proof budget-reconciliation bill being devoted to the repeal of Obamacare and other spending measures and another designed to enact tax cuts. They enacted a budget resolution to set up all this legislation a week before Inauguration Day (Democrats did the same prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021). But House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have yet to agree on the most basic blueprint for 2025: the number and scope of budget-reconciliation bills, which in turn will determine how rapidly they can move to implement the Trump agenda, as Politico reports:

“Under the best-case scenario laid out by Johnson this week, it will be late February before Republicans find themselves similarly situated this time — and even then, the one-bill-versus-two-bill question might not be settled.

“The inability to answer central strategic questions now foreshadows much bigger problems ahead.”

Even if Johnson bends the knee and agrees to a two-bill strategy enabling an initial budget-reconciliation bill on border security and energy as Thune prefers, it won’t come with the speed that made this strategy compelling to senators in the first place. It appears, for example, that the administration won’t have the money to really get mass deportation rolling immediately, as they wished. And despite the pleas from both chambers that Trump resolve the strategic deadlock between House and Senate, the president-elect has refused to play referee, all but saying out loud that it’s not his job. Beyond the one-bill/two-bill dispute, GOP members of Congress are quietly begging Trump to delete items from his executive-order blitz that they might need legislatively to generate budget savings to pay for border spending and tax cuts. There’s zero clarity about how Elon Musk’s DOGE will enter into the equation, beyond the scary recognition that he commands a gigantic troll army that will order Republicans in Congress to massively cut spending wherever and whenever he and his unpaid tech bros suggest. And there’s no consensus at all as to how Congress will satisfy Trump’s demand for a debt-limit increase, which most Republicans hate like sin itself.

Perhaps the administration’s and Congress’s plans will all come together even as the new president appraises the crowd size at his second inaugural event, but it’s increasingly clear that all the MAGA cackling over the incredible efficiency and harmony underlying Trump 2.0 has been grossly premature. The problems may simply reflect the stubborn resilience of objective reality: It’s really not very easy to remake American government while cutting taxes and deporting millions of immigrants and somehow not denying Americans the benefits and services they want and think they deserve. You can’t “hit the ground running” unless you have a clear idea of where you are going, a realistic sense of feasible outcomes, and a strategy for keeping 77 million Trump voters onboard despite their hallucinatory expectations that he’ll lower grocery prices while ushering in world peace.

Watching Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9 was a sad and sometimes inspiring experience. But given what’s about to happen on January 20, it also served as a reminder about presidential conduct, as I explained at New York:

The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama amiably chitchatting with Donald Trump as they sat next to each other in the pews. Among the many eulogies to the Georgian, one that definitely stood out was one written before his own death by the 38th president, Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent in 1976, who wrote movingly of the partnership and friendship the two men formed during their long post–White House years. It was both sad and touching that the current chief executive, Joe Biden, reached back nearly a half-century to his own endorsement of Carter’s presidential candidacy in the year he defeated Ford.

But it was impossible to forget for a moment that the solemn event that brought this disparate audience together was occurring just 11 days before the re-inauguration of Donal Trump. The incoming president differs in so many respects from Jimmy Carter, and his return to power is a living repudiation of so much of what Carter believed in.

In his own view, Carter’s inveterate truthfulness was his most important personal virtue; “I’ll never lie to you,” he often said when running for president in a country anguished by Tricky Dick Nixon’s administration. Whether or not Carter was able to live up to this lofty commitment to honesty, it contrasts dramatically with Trump’s extremely flexible attitude toward facts and refusal to take personal responsibility for the consequences of his sins (on one infamous occasion, he could not come up with a single thing he had ever done that required divine forgiveness).

Carter’s great legacy in international affairs was his effort to anchor U.S. foreign policy in universal human rights. Trump rejects any standard for foreign policy other than the most naked national self-interest and has gone out of his way to dismiss global standards banning the torture of prisoners of war and military strikes on civilian populations.

Carter had a wonk’s passion for tinkering with government operations to make them more efficient and responsive. Trump is indifferent to the minutiae of governing, and his big reform initiative is to give tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy license to blow up whole agencies and radically reduce spending as ends in themselves.

In the long arc of political history, Carter is renowned for leading his own southern region out of the darkness of Jim Crow and building a mind-blowing coalition of civil-rights activists and ex-segregationists. Even if you believe Trump is without personal prejudice, he has very clearly made politics safe for a resurgence of racism and has made the pursuit of racial justice and equality a target of legal action and mockery.

As every eulogist at Carter’s funeral emphasized, he was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith, teaching Sunday school back in Plains for many decades. He wasn’t transactional in his religiosity; he took positions on social and cultural issues that led his fellow evangelical Protestants to abandon him and his party, and he led his own congregation out of its traditional denomination when that larger church refused to treat women equally. If Trump has any personal religious convictions, they are largely a secret, and he has formed a highly transactional relationship with conservative Christians, who are forever rationalizing his manifest impiety. Until his wife’s death, Jimmy Carter closed every day reading the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn. Trump’s relationship with Holy Scripture (other than misquoting it) is mostly limited to hustling expensive Bibles to his devoted followers.

The American presidency is a collection of men with all sorts of varying personalities and backgrounds, and it’s entirely possible someone wildly different from Jimmy Carter is what this country needs. But it’s hard to undertake comparisons of the ex-president who just died and the ex-president who is about to re-enter the White House and see anything other than a devolution in integrity, fidelity to civic and religious traditions, and willingness to work with others peacefully. As Biden succinctly said in his eulogy, Carter’s “enduring attribute” was “character. Character. Character.” What sort of character is Donald Trump?

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Donald Trump’s grip on political history is slippery at best. But at New York I went to the trouble of demolishing his claim that the Panama Canal Treaty cost Jimmy Carter the presidency:

In his rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Donald Trump said some very curious things, to put it mildly. One claim about Jimmy Carter is just wrong. Following up on his recent threats to retake control of the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower shipping fees and eliminate any Chinese involvement in managing the passageway, the president-elect twice asserted that Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980 primarily due to his sponsorship of the treaty that returned the canal to Panama.

I have no idea where Trump got this idea, but it makes little sense. The Panama Canal Treaty, initially negotiated by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was signed and ushered through the Senate by Carter in April 1978. It was ratified by a 68 to 32 margin, with Republican Senate leader Howard Baker playing a key role (conservative icon William F. Buckley was another key backer of the treaty). Yes, the treaty was initially unpopular, but it became less so after its ratification. And while Ronald Reagan opposed the treaty, and made it a campaign issue against incumbent Republican Ford during the 1978 GOP primaries, it wasn’t a big deal at all by 1980, as Ron Elving recently observed at NPR:

“Reagan remained opposed to the Panama deal but ‘noticeably muted his rhetoric in 1977 when the treaties were finally signed by President Jimmy Carter,’ according to Lou Cannon, the reporter and biographer who covered Reagan more closely and for longer than anyone. In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon reports that ‘Reagan’s interest in the Panama Canal declined after the issue had served its political purpose.’ Cannon has written that Reagan’s pollster told him the issue was primarily of interest to hard-core conservatives. By 1980, Reagan had that category locked up.”

If the treaty had been calamitous for Carter, you’d think he would have paid a big price during the 1978 midterm elections that immediately followed the Senate debate on the subject, but in fact, Republican gains in those midterms were modest, despite a lot of other issues bedeviling Democrats, along with a historic realignment that was already underway in Carter’s home region. Indeed, contra Trump’s assumption that foreign policy cost Carter the White House in 1980, there were plenty of more prominent reasons for the outcome aside from the much-discussed and deeply embarrassing hostage crisis. The economy was in terrible shape in 1980, with an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, an average inflation rate of 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates of 13.74 percent. That alone almost certainly doomed Carter’s reelection. But aside from that, he had to weather a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy; a third-party candidacy from ex-Republican John Anderson that wound up taking away more votes from the incumbent than from the challenger; and an inevitable loss of support in southern-inflected parts of the country following his precedent-breaking win in 1976.

Subsequently Reagan did nothing to unravel the Panama Canal Treaty, and by the time the canal was fully turned over to Panama at the end of 1999 (with Carter present), it was a largely noncontroversial event.

For his own mysterious reasons, Trump clearly wants to inflate the significance in American politics of the Panama Canal issue, past and present. Unfortunately, the main participants in the debate over the Canal Treaty aren’t around to dispute his claims. It’s a shame that Trump has chosen to cast a shadow on Carter’s state funeral later this week by mischaracterizing one of his key accomplishments as a career-ending disaster.