Round-up: MAGA comes for State. Public rejects Trump's abuses of power. The injunction malfunction.

Analysis of the week's events

Thanks for reading America Explained. Next Monday 28th at 12:30pm - 13:30pm UK time, I’m going to be participating in a panel with Courtney Radsch from the Center for Journalism & Liberty and Prashant Rao from Semafor to discuss Trump’s first 100 days (yep, it’s only been that long). You can register for the event here. The event is organized by the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank in London who do great work which you can access here.

MAGA comes for State

When governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott were squaring up to try to become the Republican candidate for president in 2024, I used to make a fairly lame joke that residents of Florida and Texas must hate being ruled not by conservatism or liberalism but rather by primary-winning-ism.

And as I look at the actions of a lot of members of Trump’s Cabinet, I feel the same way. They are trying to position themselves to be Trump’s successor by taking actions not based on what their departments really need, but what they think will best appeal to the Republican primary electorate of 2028. J.D. Vance is doing it, of course, when he tries to be more Trumpy than Trump. And now Marco Rubio is having a go too.

Rubio faces a huge disadvantage in any future Republican primary because although he has bent his knee to MAGA as much as possible since 2017, no-one really forgets that he used to be a neocon who lobbed schoolyard insults at Trump. Nor is being Secretary of State necessarily a great selling point for Republicans, who typically disdain the State Department.

And so out Rubio comes with his big plan to MAGA-ify the State Department, which he announced this week had become “beholden to radical political ideology” and contained at least one division which is “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary, and Brazil and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes.”

In order to address these problems, the department will be reducing its staff by 15%, closing a lot of offices, and ceasing any work deemed too “woke”, which apparently includes offices focused on women’s issues and (checks notes) post-conflict stabilization.

The idea that the State Department is a useless bureaucracy staffed by political radicals dates back a long time. It was a key plank of Joseph McCarthy’s politics in the 1950s (he also said that it was full of traitorous homosexuals). The department has been a punching bag for the GOP ever since, and the post-9/11 militarization of U.S. foreign policy has sidelined the department while placing more and more key government positions in the hands of the military.

But slimming down the State Department and lessening its engagement with the world can only be bad for America. It seems that a large part of the motivation for this reorganization is to find a new place for whatever programs are left over after the destruction of USAID, which itself represents another big step back from the world. In the grand scheme of the federal budget, both USAID and State are peanuts - but they fund programs that are vital to U.S. global influence.

It has become a bit of a cliche to respond to any U.S. government cutback by saying “China is thrilled!”, but it’s true. The U.S. pulling back from the world just creates another opportunity for Beijing. But MAGA doesn’t really care, because it doesn’t really care about America or its global standing. It just cares about its own cultural and ideological grievances.

Public rejects Trump’s abuses of power

Let’s zoom out for a minute.

Trump has been in power for nearly three months, and he has been aggressively using presidential power on a range of fronts. Congress has bent a knee and other institutions have also been cowed into submission. In the last few weeks, Trump has started to flirt with the idea of directly rejecting direct orders from the Supreme Court. Some would argue he has already done it.

Many observers of the situation are asking what, if anything, might stop Trump. The markets seem to be one factor. Trump backed off the worst of some of his tariff policy when the bond markets started sending worrying signals. But large elements of that policy are still in place and represent a disaster for the U.S. economy. And in many areas of national life, there is no direct feedback mechanism analogous to markets which might force Trump into a reversal.

But there has been one heartening development this week, and that is the public’s fairly uniform rejection of Trump’s abuses of power.

In a Reuters poll, Trump’s approval rating is the lowest of any president ever at this point in the presidency, with the exception of Trump 1.0. And many respondents specifically rejected Trump’s abuses of power. A whopping 83% of adults and 73% of Republicans think that Trump should obey court orders. Majorities also disapprove of his attacks on universities and attempt to take control of cultural institutions.

Unfortunately, these figures don’t force Trump to immediately change course. But they do indicate that the public is leery of his authoritarianism. They are likely to become even more so as the economic costs of his policies become clear. Voters might forgive Trump his vendettas if he was presiding over a strong economy, but they won’t if he craters it. And the public currently disfavors Trump to handle the cost of living by a whopping 21%. He is even underwater of his handling of immigration, his signature issue.

Democrats need to respond to this smartly. For a long time there was a consensus that voters don’t care about democracy and the rule of law in an abstract sense and that it was best for the party to avoid talking about it. But when a wannabe dictator is crashing the economy through possibly illegal uses of presidential power, it shouldn’t be hard to make the case that democracy and the rule of law are directly related to kitchen table issues.

And I predict that’s what the smart messaging from Democrats in the coming months will focus on.

The injunction malfunction

When the president orders something illegal - like, say, when Trump recently tried to end birthright citizenship - and the courts get involved, it usually goes down like this:

1. President does illegal thing.

2. Court steps in and issues an injunction, stopping the thing temporarily.

3. The issue gets fully litigated in court and hopefully ruled to be illegal, and stops.

Step two is really important, because step three can take a long time. Lawyers have to prepare arguments, hearings have to be held, and time for deliberation has to pass. If the president could continue doing the illegal thing while all of that was happening, he could get away with a lot - say, by shipping his political enemies to prisons in El Salvador.

Unfortunately, in a new case before the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is trying to end the practice of nationwide injunctions.