WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad. He likes the ring of calling himself king.
No one can absorb it all. By the time you try to process one big thing — he covets Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza; he turns away from historic alliancesand Ukraine; fires many thousands of federal workers, then brings some right back; raises doubts whether he will obey laws he doesn’t like; orders an about-face in the missions of department after department; declares there are only two genders, which federal documents will henceforth call sexes; announces heavy tariffs, suspends them, then imposes some — three more big things have happened.
Trump’s core supporters are thrilled with what they see. Those who don’t like him watch in horror. The nation is far from any consensus on what makes America great and what may make it sink.
What’s undeniable is that Trump has ushered in the sharpest change of direction for the country at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. But the long-term implications of Trump’s national reset, and by extension his own legacy, cannot yet be determined.
“Make American Great Again” figure Steve Bannon calls all this action “muzzle velocity” — firing every way at once to confuse the enemy. The barrage has left a variety of foreign leaders and many public servants picking figurative buckshot out of their backsides.
Paul Light, an expert on the workings of government and the civil service, reaches for another analogy: “It’s the never-ending volcano. It just doesn’t stop, and it’s hot.”
Says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service: “We’re essentially playing Russian roulette and they just added a bunch more bullets to the chamber.”
Or is it instead a “controlled burn,” as Kevin Roberts, an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, puts it? “A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish,” he asserts. Project 2025 offered Trump a preelection blueprint for some of what is happening now.
Some 75,000 federal workers accepted the new administration’s “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, and tens of thousands more have been laid off or are in line to be, out of a civilian federal workforce of about 2.4 million, excluding postal workers.
Democrats, the minority in Congress, and the broader political opposition are mulling which fights are worth fighting and which are not, out of so many to choose from. “Democrats,” said one of them, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, “are not going to engage in the outrage Olympics.”
At the moment, polls suggest slightly less than half of U.S. adults like the Republican president’s handling of his job, a tick better than Democrat Joe Biden’s approval when he left office in January. That sentiment could shift for the better or worse in an hour, after the next big things.
He brings Russia in from the cold
In his first month, Trump performed a pirouette in foreign policy, disavowing the age-old commitment to defend fellow NATO members if they are attacked, reaching out to Russia and suspending most U.S. foreign aid. Washington, Ukraine’s steadfast and potent wartime supporter for three years, has suddenly become its scold.
At home, Trump’s explosion of executive orders and marching orders reaches beyond the workings of government and into the culture.
Corporate boardrooms as well as government itself are shedding their diversity, equity and inclusion programs in alignment with the nascent new order, though a judge on Friday largely blocked Trump’s mandate. Institutions are also being pressed to abandon any recognition of or accommodations for transgender people, at risk of losing federal money if they don’t.
How much all of this sticks will largely depend on courts, which appear to be the only check on Trump’s expansive use of executive power. The Republican-controlled Congress has been compliant as Trump pursues his ends by executive action instead of legislation.
Trump “has issued about a squillion executive orders,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said a while back. “I’m still trying to read them.”
Longtime Republican articles of faith such as support for free trade and strong U.S.-led security guarantees against foreign adversaries have been lost in the din, if not discarded.
‘Long live the king’
Republicans have historically preached the virtues of letting state and local governments make decisions about their communities without the federal government calling the shots. But the Trump administration did just that this past week, halting New York City’s new commuter tolls for driving into Manhattan. Trump was quick to take credit.
“Long live the king,” he posted in all-caps, meaning himself. The White House circulated an image of him wearing a crown.
In the civil service upheaval, a blanket staff reduction, largely of thousands of newer employees with fewer job protections, has been combined with the targeted firing of senior officials deemed disloyal to Trump or otherwise an impediment. Multitudes of nonpolitical public servants, normally left in place when new presidents come in, are out.
Senior officials responsible for keeping agencies honest and accountable were among those purged. Nearly 20 departmental inspectors general were fired late one night without the legally required 30 days notice. Trump also dismissed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, an agency that protects government whistleblowers; the Supreme Court on Friday temporarily kept the official on the job.
Trump terminated a dozen federal career prosecutors who had worked on criminal cases brought against him, striking at the heart of what he calls the “deep state.”
‘We are in a dangerous place’
Congress, which holds the power of the purse, is letting the president exercise it instead, so far leaving federal judges to decide when to rein him in. The early result has been massive cuts or freezes in grants and other spending that Congress approved in law, but Trump is stopping on his own, if courts let him.
“The last month has been entirely distinctive in American history,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University. “We have never had an American president who moved this decisively in the face of the law and the Constitution. We are in a dangerous place.”
Jillson and other historians say such tumult in the machinery of government has only come in reaction to dire emergencies: states leaving the union before the Civil War, FDR’s New Deal thrust in the depths of the Great Depression, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society burst of programs when taking office after John Kennedy’s assassination.
No catastrophes of such magnitude greeted Trump. Illegal border crossings that had surged during the Biden administration, for example, subsided before Biden left office. Even so, Trump let loose in all the ways he telegraphed, and in most cases promised, in the campaign.
To Trump and Elon Musk, though, a challenge to democracy comes not from their efforts to upend the bureaucracy but from the bureaucracy itself — the unelected officials who resist the agenda of a duly elected president.
“There’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the the president and the Cabinet,” Musk told “Hannity” on Fox News Channel this past week in an interview joined by Trump. Musk, the Tesla, SpaceX and X titan, is leading Trump’s scouring of the civil service.
“If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented,” Musk said. “And that means we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy.”
Chaos is a feature, not a bug
Light, author of several dozen books on the workings of government, said times like these can yield positive results. “Every once in a while you have to scrub down the operation.”
But this chaos, he said, is both intentional and corrosive, exposing the country to the inadequacy of a hollowed-out civil service when the next crisis comes, whether it’s a pandemic, a hurricane, a war or a massive IT attack.
“That’s Trump’s basic MO — keep people jumping,” he said. Trump “really doesn’t know anything except breaking things.”
Some polls done this month carry warning signs for Trump as he pursues his audacious course. More than half of adults in a Washington Post/Ipsos survey (57%) said he has exceeded his authority since taking office. More than half in a CNN/SSRS poll (55%) said he hasn’t paid attention to the most pressing problems.
In essence, though, this is a half-and-half country that Trump is responsible for leading the whole of. For vast numbers of Americans, he can do no wrong, or no right, depending which side you are on.
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Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.
