The Only Consistent Thread of Trumpism
This administration embodies a new type of conservatism centered on the impulse to destroy.
Nearly three months into the second Trump administration, a few things have become clear.
For one thing, the president aims to push executive power to its absolute limit, with Congress responding passively to the power-grabs and the judiciary standing alone in attempting to prevent the thoroughgoing breakdown of the separation of powers and its replacement by unitary, dictatorial rule by Donald Trump.
For another, Trump himself has established an unprecedented level of personal control over policy. Unlike most previous presidents, he isn’t just setting broad goals (e.g. “make our trade policy more protectionist”) and letting expert advisers figure out the details and present him with several reasonable options from which to choose. Rather, Trump is receiving advice and then making his own judgment calls, often opting for much riskier courses of action and haphazard shifts of direction.
This is clearest when it comes to international trade. Tariffs are imposed, then suspended; tariff rates are set much higher than the president’s staff advised, then dropped when bond-market gyrations provoke fear of a Trump-branded financial crisis; then a long list of exceptions to the tariffs is announced; and so forth. The result is a level of impulsiveness and resulting uncertainty beyond anything previously considered normal.
We see something slightly less egregious, though perhaps equally improvisational, when it comes to immigration policy, where Trump appears to be listening to his most nativist advisers (above all, Stephen Miller) in looking for ways to disregard laws and rules that stymie efforts to deport undocumented immigrants at will and without due process.
But stepping back a bit from the relentless and anarchic daily news cycle to take in the whole of what’s transpired since January 20, something else becomes apparent: The administration is governing in an overwhelmingly negative way. The president and his team are out to destroy, like demolition experts sent into a high-rise housing project to level the buildings, leaving a vast vacant lot.
That’s not what one would expect from a conservative administration. But it is exactly what one gets with a reactionary (or counter-revolutionary) regime that thinks the order of the present has little if anything worth conserving. That has long been what separates conservative from reactionary impulses. The former seeks to slow down or even halt changes out of love for an inheritance from the past and a fear of unintended consequences that threaten to destroy fragile institutions and customs that have been handed down to us. The latter, by contrast, looks around at the present with disgust and seeks to reduce it to rubble in the hope that a vaguely-discerned new beginning might emerge, mysteriously, from the wreckage.
The evidence is overwhelming that the second Trump administration is governing like its leading figures are animated by precisely such an appetite for destruction.
Shredding State Capacity
It began, strangely enough, with USAID. Of all the programs run by the federal government, foreign aid seems like an odd choice to provoke maximal wrath. But whatever Elon Musk’s ultimate motives, one of the administration’s very first acts of destruction was the (largely successful) act of firing almost the entirety of its staff and dismantling the agency itself. (The scraps left over were then folded into the State Department to be overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.)
Then DOGE swiftly fanned out across the executive branch, seeking to fire provisional employees, shut down programs, and gut funding for, well, pretty much anything it could think of. At no point did Musk’s small army of disrupters appear to take into consideration what any of these myriad departments and agencies do—or how sweeping, mindless cuts could undermine American state capacity at home and around the world. The goal was apparently to make cuts for their own sake, undertaken on the assumption that nothing the fired employees might have done in their jobs could possibly have been worthwhile.
This wholly destructive outlook looks likely to animate the administration’s oversight of the executive branch on multiple fronts for the remainder of its time in office. The impulse to destroy is going to be applied to the regulatory state quite broadly, with the president and his team seeking to enact an anarchist-libertarian wet dream that eliminates “rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation, and more.”
This animus against regulations sits uncomfortably alongside Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s concern with identifying environmental sources of troubling medical trends and (presumably) writing regulations to restrict the toxins. Yet that won’t fly with the anti-regulatory priorities of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. And Kennedy’s outlook is so intertwined with conspiracism about vaccines and other forms of medical treatment and research that under his leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services is likely to focus on canceling research grants and spreading unjustified claims about various kinds of medical interventions.
That puts Kennedy in harmony with the administration’s coordinated assault on scientific and medical research more generally. Animated by what The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer aptly describes as the Trump team’s hostility toward the knowledge workers of the professional-managerial class, the president appears to be indifferent to all the positive externalities that have flowed from government support for scientific and medical research since the end of World War II. The United States has become the world leader in technological and medical innovation, while our scientists have pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge in a long list of fields. As a result, American universities have become magnets for talent from around the globe. But the president appears not to care about any of that. Universities also teach the humanities, and humanities departments often skew leftward—and that’s enough to justify an agenda of destruction.
Sand in the Gears of the Economy
Trump has been a protectionist for decades. He believes in protecting American industries (and workers) from foreign competition. One way to achieve such goals is to enact barriers to foreign trade in the form of tariffs on imports. Done carefully, with patience, and when combined with a well-designed and thoughtfully implemented industrial policy, this could potentially yield positive results. That statement should make clear I’m not a doctrinaire free trader. The Biden administration made moves in a more protectionist direction, and it was yielding some positive results, with a modest resurgence in manufacturing over the past few years.
But Trump has been doing nothing remotely like what Biden attempted. His implementation of tariffs has been impulsive, extreme, and inconsistent. The result has been the equivalent of pouring sand in the gears of the American (and global) economy. Consumers will be hurt by higher prices. Industries (including manufacturers) will be hurt by increased costs for foreign-made parts and retaliatory restrictions on American-made goods in foreign markets. Investors (wealthy individuals as well as people saving for retirement) will be hurt by falling stock prices. And workers will be hurt by layoffs that are likely to take place once all of the above begins to dampen economic growth.
More fundamentally, Trump’s incoherence and incontinence have taken a serious toll on perceptions of the United States and our currency. The American dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the end of World War II in large part because investors and governments around the world have considered our country the safest and most dynamic place in the world to do business. But that has been changing, with investors selling shares of American companies and U.S. Treasuries in response to the president’s wildly erratic decisions.
Some defenders of the Trump administration have tried to portray this as something intentional—a deliberate attempt at “de-dollarization” that will encourage global sales of suddenly cheaper American goods and investment by foreign companies drawn to opportunities for profits made possible by a weaker dollar. But how likely is such behavior? Since it assumes the capital flight driving down the dollar will be accompanied or immediately followed by new forms of economic engagement with and commitment to the United States, I think it’s not especially likely at all.
To get a sense of what the future holds, consider what’s happening to tourism. Trump is convincing world travelers to avoid the United States. They find its president morally loathsome, and his border policies—which have led to well-publicized stories of visitors being detained, harassed, and expelled upon arrival—a source of acute anxiety. So people are choosing en masse to stay away. That points to a future in which de-dollarization results in little economic benefit, while also undercutting the purchasing power of American consumers, at least for products manufactured abroad.
Then there are the potentially ruinous consequences for public budgeting of surging U.S. Treasury yields. Trump can yell at the Fed Chair all he wants, but if people around the world sell T-bills, interest rates will continue to rise, markedly increasing our debt burden with every new Treasury auction. That’s another thing toward which the administration appears to be oblivious: the extent to which our standard of living and ability to run budget deficits (that is, our freedom as a society to avoid raising revenue to cover our expenses) has been facilitated by good will and admiration around the world that Donald Trump is torching with every insulting and reckless statement and decision.
Foreign Policy Folly
Nowhere is this clearer than in foreign policy, where the administration is acting like its primary motive is to liberate itself from obligations to everyone and anyone. Deep, long-lasting, and incredibly beneficial institutional and interpersonal relationships built up over 80 years are being treated by the president and his advisers like exploitative constraints from which they are eager to break free.
That will almost certainly take the form of the United States backing away from NATO—something telegraphed by the administration’s vocal contempt for Ukraine, its dismissive and condescending attitudes toward European leaders, and the president’s repeated threats to annex Greenland, a territory of NATO-member Denmark.
It could also team up with Israel to bomb Iran—or not.
Or it could take the form of challenging China in East Asia—though doing so will surely be more difficult now than it seemed to be three months ago, before Trump slapped painful tariffs on many of the countries we will need as allies in making moves to counter Beijing.
Or it could take the form of America primarily withdrawing to our sides of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as Trump seeks to build a foreign policy around a revived and updated Monroe Doctrine that has us primarily meddling in the affairs of countries in our hemisphere like Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland, El Salvador, and Venezuela.
Those are a lot of mutually exclusive possibilities, and the lack of any discernible grand strategy behind them points to just how unsettled policymaking has become since Trump returned to the White House. That’s how it is when an administration puts destruction at the center of its worldview and has no positive vision beyond the president’s commitment to a zero-sum view of the world. Insisting at all times that each nation’s gain must entail another’s loss and that any effort to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes amounts to an expression of muddle-headed sentimentality is bound to have destabilizing consequences for world order.
As in so many other areas, the second Trump administration appears to be placing absolute faith in the improvisational powers of the president himself as he dances amidst the ruins he and his party have already managed to make.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
This piece was cross-posted today in Notes from the Middleground.
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Would we have been better off if the democrats had won the election and Kamala was in charge? “Seeking asylum” is in effect open borders since it overwhelms “due process.” Democrats say all migrants, not only gang members, must have due process but there is no way we can give due process to 12 million migrants who came here during Biden’s term. This then is a deadlocked and impossible situation. I voted for Trump 3 times but now agree that he’s a disaster but would the democrats have been any better? Both sides seem intent on destroying the country although I still prefer the republicans since at least they want borders, meritocracy and don’t consider me racist white trash for being white, working class and conservative.
Since all that is not submissive to Trump can only be an enemy of Trump, all that is not submissive to Trump must be destroyed in "self-defense".