Politics
Trump cuts chaotic path in first weeks, bucking laws and norms in pursuit of promised agenda
Standing before a mourning nation after a tragic commercial airline crash that killed nearly 70 people in Washington, D.C., President Trump offered his somber condolences and said everyone was “searching for answers.”
He then insinuated, without evidence, that diversity hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration — and the politics of his Democratic predecessors — were to blame.
“I signed something last week that was an executive order, very powerful one, restoring the high standards of air traffic controllers — and others by the way,” Trump said. “We have to have our smartest people. It doesn’t matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are.”
In an instant, Trump had gone from consoling leader to partisan firebrand and turned a national tragedy into one more opportunity to push his favorite political narrative — that diversity-minded, “woke” liberalism is ruining the country and that he alone can end it, namely through unilateral executive orders from the Oval Office.
It was a breach of presidential decorum — and right in line with the rest of his tumultuous first two weeks back in the White House.
In that time, Trump has repeatedly bucked the Constitution and other legal limits on executive power, pursuing a conservative agenda aligned with his own campaign promises but also the Project 2025 blueprint he assiduously distanced himself from in the lead-up to the election.
Among other things, Trump has targeted the rights and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ+ people, fired government watchdogs and other career civil servants he perceived as insufficiently loyal, and tried to freeze an array of federal funding already appropriated by Congress for some of the nation’s — and the world’s — poorest and most vulnerable people.
He also pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people who stormed the U.S. Capitol to hold him illegitimately in power in 2021, joked again about holding on to power into a third term despite being constitutionally precluded from doing so, and announced 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China.
Trump began issuing edicts immediately upon taking office Jan. 20 and has kept up a steady stream since, the result of years of prep work by him and his team — including several architects of Project 2025 — to hit the ground running in his second term, unlike his first.
“They had a very clear plan and they’ve executed on it very quickly,” said Ben Olinsky, senior vice president of structural reform and governance at the liberal Center for American Progress. “They wanted to proceed with the ‘shock and awe’ approach.”
The strategy — outlined in dozens of unilateral executive orders, many with vague parameters and unclear reach — sparked widespread fear, confusion and anger among average Americans, local and state leaders, federal program managers and entire industries and nonprofit networks, leaving chaos in its wake.
In one example, the White House budget office on Tuesday issued a directive purporting to halt federal funding for a slew of government programs nationwide, causing immediate disruptions. States reported being shut out of their Medicaid reimbursement systems and problems with Head Start and child development block grants, among other issues.
The uproar came from red and blue states alike, though Democrats were particularly apoplectic. In a letter to House members, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) dubbed the plan the “Republican Ripoff” and said it was an “unprecedented assault” that would hurt average Americans financially.
“Republicans are ripping off hardworking Americans by stealing taxpayer dollars, grants and financial assistance as part of their corrupt scheme to pay off billionaire donors and wealthy corporations,” Jeffries wrote.
California and other states sued to block the order. The week before, they had sued to block another order purporting to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants — a policy Trump said he had “no apologies” for despite a federal judge declaring it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
On Wednesday, the administration swiftly walked back the funding freeze, issuing a second order rescinding the first. However, the confusion persisted after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that the second order was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze” outlined in the first — just a way to “end any confusion” caused by a court order that nonprofit organizations had won the evening prior to bar the first directive from taking effect.
Attorneys for the coalition of states promptly cited Leavitt’s post to win a second court order temporarily halting the freeze.
The administration also partially walked back a separate order halting foreign aid, after similar uproar mounted overseas, including over the abrupt cancellation of lifesaving HIV treatments for people in developing nations, including children.
Trump has praised his start back in office, claiming to have made swift progress on immigration in particular, which he recently told a meeting of Republicans was his top campaign priority — more so than inflation and the economy. He has also expressed frustration with the Senate’s pace in confirming his Cabinet appointees, and resistance among Democrats to some of his picks.
“We want fast confirmations,” he said Thursday. “They’ve taken too long.”
Many Republicans have backed Trump through his first weeks, and on some of his more controversial orders — including the funding freeze.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said it was “not unusual for an administration to pause funding and to take a hard look and scrub of how these programs are being spent,” and he gave the administration credit for having “taken certain things off the table” and added “clarity” to their orders as discussions over funding and budget priorities have continued with conservative lawmakers.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called Trump’s freeze “a common application of common sense” and said, “I fully support it.”
Many of Trump’s followers have rejoiced in the changes, too, praising him for making good on his campaign promises. Some reveled online in the fact that Trump’s pronouncements seemed to be overwhelming Democrats, the media and the liberal activist networks that have so often tried to thwart his plans in the past.
Public polling indicated Americans generally have mixed feelings — and “aren’t ideologues,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Rather, they have nuanced thoughts about political issues that don’t always match up perfectly with either of the two major political parties.
Many Americans are in favor of strengthening border security and ramping up immigration enforcement, for example, but majorities opposed Trump’s pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists and his decision to leave the Paris climate accord, recent polling has indicated. Americans support efforts to rein in federal spending, but a majority opposed replacing career civil servants with loyalists, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.
They also believe it’s a bad idea for the president to rely on billionaires for advice.
A danger for Trump is if Americans start to feel that his actions are too extreme, or that he is “overreaching,” Bowman said. At the same time, many Americans “want to get things done” after a decade or more of sluggish legislative progress in Congress, and that could go in his favor as he purports to take bold action, she said.
“Perhaps he’s getting a lot done. Perhaps he’s going too far,” Bowman said. “Its going to take a while to see where things settle — as it always does.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have kept up their attacks. On Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she was pleased the budget freeze had been rescinded — and blocked in court — but that Trump’s raft of other executive orders were still holding up billions in funding for critical infrastructure and other projects.
“There is still far too much chaos on the ground,” she said.
Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), one of Trump’s most vocal critics during his first term, blasted him for his Jan. 6 pardons, said his firing of inspectors general without giving notice to Congress broke the law, and condemned several of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Kash Patel for FBI director and Pam Bondi for attorney general.
After Leavitt’s X post added confusion to the federal funding freeze debate, Schiff said he didn’t know what her post meant and didn’t believe the Trump administration understood, either.
“The chaos isn’t a design flaw — it’s the goal — to sow confusion, and never mind the impact on fire victims, small businesses or seniors,” he said.
California Sen. Adam B. Schiff, shown at a hearing Thursday, says the chaos “is the goal — to sow confusion.”
(Ben Curtis / Associated Press)
Experts in federal governance and constitutional law agreed the swift rollout of so many new policies by the Trump administration was no accident, but in line with a broader strategy to “flood the zone” with many major policy moves at once, in part to spread thin any potential resistance.
Mitchel Sollenberger, a political science professor at University of Michigan-Dearborn and author of several books on executive powers, said Trump’s early wave of executive orders was not an “anomaly” historically, as other presidents have done the same.
However, Sollenberger said he had to “marvel” at the sophistication and sweep of the Trump administration’s approach, which he said advanced old Republican ideas about executive power and even immigration in new and startling ways.
“I don’t think you’ve seen anything this wide-ranging — in terms of the policy areas being touched, and I would say the level of sophistication with the policy objectives trying to be reached here — coming from a president so early in the term,” Sollenberger said.
He said he would be watching closely to see how the courts interpret Trump’s power grabs, and how they view his administration’s framing of immigration as an “invasion” and a national security issue.
Deborah Pearlstein, a professor of constitutional law and director of the Program in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University, said Trump and his team came into the White House with a plan to overwhelm the opposition and seize more power — one “authoritarian regimes all over the world have used.”
“It was clear from everything he said, the campaign said, the campaign documents said, as he was running for office and campaigning for office, that there was a plan or a desire to systematically undo all the checks, legal and otherwise, that exist in the American system to constrain the president,” Pearlstein said.
The administration is trying to “put that plan into effect” now, she said — though they are running into “two giant problems.”
The first, she said, is that they are “trying to do too much too fast with people who don’t have, some of them, a huge amount of expertise or experience with any of this,” which has led to sloppy orders that have confused and riled average Americans.
The second problem for the administration — and a good thing for American democracy, Pearlstein said — is that “there are laws and rules and institutions responsible for enforcing them that prohibit some of what they want to do.”
As evidenced by the reaction to the funding freeze, pushback from those institutions — from states, Congress, courts and nonprofit organizations — and from the wider American public has clearly begun and can be effective, she said. But “whether and how those institutions continue to push back is a huge question.”
Pearlstein said she worries the most about moves by Trump to consolidate power, including by pulling the federal purse strings away from Congress and clearing career civil servants out of the government in favor of his own loyalists, and will be watching how the courts handle those issues carefully.
She said the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has an expansive view of executive powers, particularly in foreign affairs and national security, but has not always ruled in Trump’s favor and may still be an important constraint.
She said others must watch for and speak out on oversteps by the Trump administration in their own fields of expertise.
“Every person can’t chase every ball, so you have to find ways of prioritizing and distributing the social democratic work of pushing back,” she said. “That’s where I think civil society can be particularly effective.”
Since taking office last month, Donald Trump has governed like a man with a sledgehammer and a checklist. He’s moving at a breakneck pace — executive orders flying, agencies gutted, norms obliterated. USAID workers? Put on ice. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? Unprotected. Low-flow toilets? Flushed. The Gulf of Mexico? No longer found on Google Maps. And that’s just a brief sampling.
Sure, the courts will put the brakes on some of it, but this is political whack-a-mole at its finest. That’s the genius of it: While first responders are scrambling to stamp out dozens of small fires, who will realize the whole city has burned down around them?
This is a stark contrast to the messier way things started the last time Trump won election. In 2016, he stumbled into the White House like a guy who had somehow wandered into the cockpit of a 747, started pushing buttons, and figured the autopilot would handle the rest. This time, he’s got a plan and a highly motivated flight crew — co-pilot Elon Musk, advisor Stephen Miller, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — and they are shutting down the “deep state” faster than a Georgetown cocktail party when the open bar closes.
Trump and Co. are using two time-tested strategies to pull it off: “flooding the zone” and “expanding the Overton window.” The first overwhelms the opposition with an avalanche of activity, so no single scandal sticks. The second is an old-school haggling trick: Start with something extreme, and when you scale it back just a notch, your new position — although still extreme by the standards of a few moments before — suddenly seems conceivable.
Take Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. The courts will probably bounce it faster than a bad check. But by the time that happens, we’ll all be debating the mechanics of mass deportation as though that were just another line item in the budget. “Should we fix potholes or round up a few million migrants?” That’s how this game works.
But here’s the thing: Throwing a million strings of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is exhausting. Not only for stunned onlookers, but also for the guys doing the throwing.
Think of it like a football team that sprints through their first 15 scripted plays, running a hurry-up offense with precision. Then reality sets in. The defense adjusts. The playbook runs dry. Suddenly, your players are gasping for air, getting sacked at every turn, and hastily throwing interceptions.
Which brings us to Musk’s plan to inject Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos into government.
The problem? When you break things in government, lots of people get hurt — people who did not choose to speculate in tech investments or work at a startup. You can’t just gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency and then reboot it right before hurricane season and expect the federal disaster response to function. You can’t lay off half the FBI and then roll out a “patch” to protect national security as well as those experienced professionals did. And if you’ve decimated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there’s no “undo” button available when the next pandemic hits.
Now, I’m all for cutting waste, streamlining bureaucracy and making the system work better. But any self-respecting conservative (as in “to conserve”) should understand that there’s a difference between fixing a leaky pipe and blowing up the water main.
The problem with the “government should run like a business” mantra is that, in business, when things go south, you can declare bankruptcy, pivot to selling NFTs or just ghost your investors. Last I checked, the United States of America doesn’t have a “going out of business” option built into its framework.
And here’s the real kicker: When you take a sledgehammer (instead of a scalpel) to the government, guess who gets crushed under the debris? Well, everyone. But among the folks down there in the rubble you’ll find the very people who orchestrated the destruction.
The folks who slashed FEMA? They’ll be the ones on TV explaining to incredulous Trump voters why no one showed up to offer relief after the next Category 5 hurricane. The guys who gutted the FBI will be shocked — shocked! — when a major terrorist attack “somehow” slipped through the cracks. And the ones who slashed National Institutes of Health funding will fumble their way through a public apology when the next mystery virus starts making the rounds.
I know what you’re thinking: Trump has a remarkable talent for dodging responsibility, always finding someone else to blame. Whether it’s Musk or a Biden administration DEI hire — just as he did after the recent midair collision near Washington, D.C. — he’ll find a scapegoat. But at some point, the “You break it, you buy it” rule kicks in, and the buck stops with the president. Trump’s failure to respond adequately to COVID-19 likely cost him the 2020 election. In that moment, at least, he was held accountable. It could happen again.
Then again, it’s possible the next four years will pass without some major test or system failure that would spark a backlash. Maybe the rules don’t apply to Trump and everything will work out fine. Maybe he’s magic, in which case he is about to redefine everything we think we know about American politics. Again.
Regardless of how this all shakes out, one thing’s for sure: Trump’s back. And this time, he’s not just pushing random buttons — he’s got a plan. Or at least a crumpled cocktail napkin with a zillion half-baked ideas scribbled on it.
And at the top, in all caps? “SHOCK AND AWE.”
Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”
President Donald Trump secured two more Cabinet confirmations on Thursday, including his pick to lead the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Brooke Rollins.
Rollins was easily confirmed by the Senate shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Trump’s Health secretary.
Most recently, Rollins has served as president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) think tank, which she co-founded after Trump’s first term.
In Trump’s first administration, she was his director of the Office of American Innovation and acting director of the Domestic Policy Council.
TULSI GABBARD SWORN IN AT WHITE HOUSE HOURS AFTER SENATE CONFIRMATION
Brooke Rollins, U.S. President Trump’s nominee to be secretary of agriculture, testifies before a Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 23, 2025. (Kaylee Greenlee Beal/Reuters)
The newly elected president announced his selection of Rollins for USDA chief in November, recalling she did “an incredible job” during his first term.
“Brooke’s commitment to support the American Farmer, defense of American Food Self-Sufficiency, and the restoration of Agriculture-dependent American Small Towns is second to none,” he said.
DOGE ‘PLAYBOOK’ UNVEILED BY GOP SENATOR AS MUSK-LED AGENCY SHAKES UP FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
A side-by-side image of President Trump and the United States Department of Agriculture (Getty Images)
“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country. Congratulations Brooke!”
The USDA nominee had a hearing before the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee last month, before advancing past the key hurdle.
DEM LOOKS TO CODIFY NEW AG BONDI’S DESIRED CRACKDOWN ON ‘ZOMBIE DRUG’ XYLAZINE
Brooke Rollins is sworn-in for a Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee hearing on her nomination for Secretary of Agriculture, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025, in Washington. (Getty Images | iStock)
The committee decision to move her nomination forward was unanimous, giving her bipartisan backing going into her confirmation vote.
Rollins is now the 16th Cabinet official confirmed to serve in Trump’s new administration. With the help of the Republican-led Senate, Trump has managed to confirm his picks at a pace far ahead of either his first administration or former President Joe Biden’s.
TRUMP LANDS KEY TULSI GABBARD CONFIRMATION FOLLOWING UPHILL SENATE BATTLE
Biden and Trump during his first term lagged behind with confirmations. (Left: Pete Marovich/Getty Images; Right: Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
At the same point in his first term, Trump only had 11 confirmations and Biden had seven. Neither had 16 confirmed until March during their respective administrations.
One reason American voters handed the country’s reins back to President Trump was the extreme inflation in housing prices that took place under his predecessor. The federal government has less influence over this issue than, say, California mayors and legislators — but whoever is in the White House can take certain steps to push prices down. The federal government can lower construction material costs, release more land for homebuilding and ensure that federal grants are used efficiently.
Unlike American manufacturing, residential construction has missed out on productivity improvements for decades. One reason is that building code updates, which are written by an industry group, increase costs more often than they decrease them. As a result, cost-conscious states usually stick with older, cheaper building codes. But that means they miss out on productive innovations. The Trump administration could start by creating a building code innovation module, consisting only of cost-decreasing updates, which states and cities could then adopt.
U.S. building codes have fallen behind peer countries in construction techniques for mid-rise buildings, which provide important, dense housing supply using little land. The administration could help California, Tennessee and several other states already in the process of identifying safety standards for the construction of four- to six-story buildings with a single staircase. A related innovation would adopt lower-cost elevator standards for small buildings, which would enable cost-effective accessibility in more new construction.
As the new administration sets tariff rates, it should balance construction costs among its priorities. The Biden administration doubled Trump’s original tariff on Canadian lumber, adding thousands to the cost of each new house. Cutting that tariff to its 2020 rate — or better yet, eliminating it and aiming tariffs at strategic opponents instead of America’s strongest ally — would bring immediate relief to builders and buyers. Instead, in his first few weeks back in office, Trump has scheduled higher tariffs on Canadian goods, including lumber, and added a 25% global steel tariff, which will make it much more expensive to build the next Trump Tower.
In addition to material costs, another factor that has driven up home prices and limited inventory is a chronic scarcity of construction workers, and the federal government has more control over this labor supply than states and cities do. Through immigration policy, the Trump administration could either aggravate the shortage or ease it, which would either raise or lower housing costs.
In land use, as in construction productivity, the federal government plays a quietly influential role. Trump has proposed building new “freedom cities” on federally owned land across the country. That’s one of several ways that huge federal landholdings could be opened for housing and jobs relatively free of local politics and NIMBYism.
Another idea is to expand nationwide the successful Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which allows the sale of federal land to support suburban growth. So far it has been limited to the Las Vegas area, where it has been successful and has generated funding to conserve and improve other valuable public land.
Other regulations and agencies influence the use of privately owned land. For instance, federal rules on storm water drainage are not only strict, but also complex and scattered. A first step would be to unify those rules in a single place. Once unified, they can be analyzed and streamlined as appropriate.
Some agencies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Defense, quietly influence local land use. An administration-wide directive could nudge them to affirm more homebuilding where appropriate rather than reflexively blocking it.
Yet the federal government’s most immediate connection to cities is through grant-making for a range of purposes. Many federal regulations require grantees to undergo expensive planning exercises to qualify for funding. Experience shows that the plans usually have no influence on subsequent actions. The new administration must ensure that money is used well by emphasizing outcome-based reporting for federal grantees instead.
Some grants are openly ill-spent. Several states waste federal funding for removing lead paint hazards by preventing out-of-state workers from contributing to that work. And some of the richest cities skirt the rules of the Community Development Block Grant program, using funds in ways that make housing more expensive, not more attainable. Federal agencies can easily curtail these inefficiencies.
Even better, the Department of Housing and Urban Development should find funding to offer technical assistance to small cities and towns that want to allow more housing. When I advised Auburn, Maine, on its nation-leading reforms, the limiting factor was local staff time. For municipalities that share Auburn’s goals, HUD can be a valuable resource.
Regulators at the Federal Housing Finance Agency have an outsize role in determining who gets a mortgage and why. The agency should seriously investigate the possibility that its own well-intended regulations have cut off mortgage lending to working-class families. My colleague Kevin Erdmann argues that unreasonably strict credit standards have eliminated most buyers for lower-cost homes and created a new constituency for single-family rentals. They would rather buy, if anyone would give them a mortgage.
Despite these many touchpoints, Americans should remember that the fault is not in our presidents, but in ourselves, that we are underbuilding. In California, for example, obstacles to construction include strict local zoning, NIMBY resistance and laws that require builders to pay above-market wages and force landlords to collect below-market rents. Such factors have aggravated a housing shortage and contributed to outmigration, homelessness and even more deferred dreams. Federal innovation and efficiency can support local efforts but cannot replace them.
Salim Furth is a senior research fellow and director of the urbanity project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
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