Trump's scariest - and least-noticed - moves
Family separation, trade, Israel, and more.
A special welcome to our new readers, of whom there are about 600 since the last edition. Thanks for reading America Explained. This post is free. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which allows you to read every post and access the full archive. Right now we have an Inauguration Week sale, with 20% off until the end of the week. Upgrading to paid enables me to put more time and energy into this newsletter, something that I’m hoping to do in order to cover the new administration more thoroughly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.
It’s the first week of the Trump administration and we’re still in firehose-drinking mode. Trump is at the height of his powers right now and he’s already starting to spend down his political capital. As time goes on, the backlash to his policies will begin, his administration will get bogged down in legal and political challenges, and the toddler-in-chief will start to get cranky.
But for the moment at least, he’s moving fast and breaking things across a range of different areas. So once again I’m adopting a bullet point approach rather than the longer articles which make up a lot of posts from this newsletter. Here are my impressions from the first days of the new administration, with a mixture of things you might not have noticed and my takes on the things that are dominating the news:
I’ve read through all of Trump’s executive orders so far, and most were not that surprising. But one was egregiously cruel: the decision to close down the government task force which was working to reunify families that were torn apart at the border under Trump’s family separation policy. We don’t know for sure, but as many as 1,000 children have still not been reunited with their families, and this drastically reduces the chances that they ever will be. Making immigrant children suffer in order to dissuade their parents from coming over the border was a central plank of Trump’s first-term immigration policy, and it seems to be back.
Some analysts have been cautiously optimistic that Trump’s initial trade moves seem fairly tame. He’s talking about 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada starting February 1st, but not much else at this point. I wouldn’t hold your breath that this means much though. In order to be legal, tariffs have to be the result of a thorough legal and policy review which makes formal findings, for instance that imports of Chinese manufactured goods are harming U.S. national security. These findings can be manipulated and essentially cooked up - but that takes time. And on his very first day, Trump ordered those reviews to begin. So don’t think that a global trade war is off the cards just yet.
In general, we’re seeing a more disciplined approach to policy-making than we saw in Trump 1.0. The first iteration of Trump’s “Muslim ban” in 2017 was written by “the two Steves” - Bannon and Miller - using a template that they found on Google. That’s one reason that it didn’t survive initial court challenges (the other being Trump’s blatantly Islamophobic statements during the campaign). Trump’s new chief of staff Susie Wiles supposedly keeps an iron grip on process in order to make sure things are done the right way and thus will survive court challenges. I’m skeptical about the endurance of that grip - but for now at least, it seems to be holding. And that’s not good news!
Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of pretty much everyone involved in the January 6th insurrection was no surprise to me, but a lot of Republican politicians and commentators are pretending to be surprised. There’s a certain type of Trump launderer who spends so much time spinning and minimizing Trump’s actions and intentions that they end up believing their own bullshit, and this is a clear example of that. Trump has maintained basically since the moment the insurrection was happening that nobody involved in it was doing anything wrong. He was hardly about to turn around now and accept that actually some crimes had occurred and so some people didn’t deserve clemency.
It’s also worth noting that these pardons are unpopular, with 58% of Americans opposed. This is the first unpopular, high-salience thing that Trump has done, and even Republican senators are struggling to defend it. It’ll be interesting to see if it has any impact on Trump’s surprisingly strong approval ratings.
Trump is doing extremely little to vindicate those who somehow thought he might be preferable to the Biden administration when it comes to Israel. He invited extremist Israeli settler leaders to his inauguration and lifted U.S. sanctions on settlers on his first day in the White House. Elise Stefanik, who he has picked as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. I think it’s probably the correct take that Trump doesn’t want the war in Gaza to restart, but Biden didn’t want that either, and I expect Netanyahu to be able to manipulate Trump into going along with pretty much anything he wants.
Trump is violating impoundment law. Here’s a quick primer: if Congress says that the executive branch has to spend money on something, then the executive branch has to spend that money. The president can’t just decide that he doesn’t like some particular program and not implement it by impounding the money. Yet that’s exactly what some of Trump’s initial executive orders seem to do, by freezing foreign aid, spending from Biden’s green energy legislation, and potentially some welfare programs. This will probably eventually lead to a court battle over the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which Congress passed to stop Richard Nixon from pulling the same trick.
Court cases are coming in other areas, too. A host of states and advocacy groups have already sued the administration to stop its blatantly unconstitutional attempt to revoke birthright citizenship. A major early test for the administration is going to be the extent to which it lets these court challenges stop it. Trump could take the attitude of President Andrew Jackson, who famously refused to abide by the Supreme Court’s ruling in an Indian removal case ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). If the administration respects the basic principle of judicial review, we’re still living in a mostly-sane world. If it doesn’t, we’re through the looking glass.
If Trump wants to have his administration to illegal things, he can draw on the powers given to him by the Supreme Court last year, which agreed with Richard Nixon that “if the president does it, then it’s not illegal”. But ignoring wide-ranging court rulings isn’t that simple: Trump would need co-conspirators in the affected agencies who were also willing to expose themselves to legal risks, or who he could pre-emptively pardon en masse. The fact we’re even having to consider scenarios like this suggest a rough ride ahead.
One last thing. A lot of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump’s appointees to the Justice Department or the FBI (new readers: check out my deep dive into the worldview of Kash Patel) will prosecute his political enemies. That’s certainly a risk, but I would say there’s an even bigger one. By having devotees in these positions, Trump is ensuring that nobody who commits an illegal act within his own administration is going to be subject to any legal scrutiny. All across the Trump administration right now, people are committing or gearing up to commit illegal acts - and they’re doing it in the knowledge that nobody is coming to stop them. And that ought to terrify us all.
A special welcome to our new readers, of whom there are about 600 since the last edition. Thanks for reading America Explained. This post is free. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which allows you to read every post and access the full archive. Right now we have an Inauguration Week sale, with 20% off until the end of the week. Upgrading to paid enables me to put more time and energy into this newsletter, something that I’m hoping to do in order to cover the new administration more thoroughly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.
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Good post - I think it's too early to tell on Israel, though. Certainly demanding an end to the war is already causing Bibi some problems. I'm not sure what the practical implications of folk like Stefanik will be when it comes to Saudi normalization, for example. So while Trump does have lots of these Christian Zionist types around him, I don't think he's particularly emotionally committed to their positions. I guess we'll have to wait and see.