It is humbling to realize, almost a decade into his tenure at the center of American politics and life, that Donald Trump still has the power to surprise us. As recently as inauguration day, the conventional wisdom on Elon Musk’s role in the administration was that he’d been given a meaningless post at a powerless agency whose name itself was a joke. From the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, it was said, Musk would issue easily ignored recommendations the gullible would take as evidence that Trump was streamlining the federal bureaucracy – a promise reliably made and broken by countless presidents. Instead, in a turn of events magazine cover artists have delighted in, Musk as a “special government employee” has seemingly taken the reins of the executive branch – a de facto co-president or perhaps a vice, while JD Vance busies himself with his duties delivering social media clapbacks and jeremiads about wokeness to European leaders.
For weeks now, the Doge’s fleas have been hopping from agency to agency, gaining access to key administrative and financial systems, including databases filled with sensitive information on ordinary Americans and infrastructure at the treasury that disburses trillions in payments across the federal government. One member of the team Musk installed there, Marko Elez, resigned after it was revealed he had written posts supporting, in his words, “Indian hate” and a “eugenic immigration policy” as recently as December. After defenses from Vance and Trump, he was reinstated. Meanwhile, fired leaders across the government are now seeking employment; about 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout from the administration. USAid has been gutted, putting the health and sustenance of countless vulnerable people around the world in immediate jeopardy, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education are now under assault. Words and whole areas of inquiry are being banned for researchers; government-wide, anything that smacks even vaguely of diversity and equity recruitment and training isn’t long for this world. What’s more, all of this comes on the heels of Trump’s extraordinary freeze on federal loans and grants – justified as a step towards rooting out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” in government – which threatened programs like Medicaid, Head Start and even Meals on Wheels before it was blocked in court.
There and elsewhere, those hoping to put the brakes on the administration’s moves are relying on lawfare to restore order. But this blitzkrieg is working anyway – the federal government has been weakened and all Trump and Musk have left standing is being remade in their image. Meanwhile, outside DC, Trump’s deportation campaign has begun with alarming departures even from the barbarism of Trump’s first term, like the provisions being made to house migrants at Guantánamo Bay and to send detainees, perhaps including American citizens, to prison in El Salvador.
It’s on tariffs, though, that Trump’s ambitions seem to have been significantly impeded. When Canada and Mexico struck border security deals to pause the administration’s threatened levies for a month, the White House was quick to frame them as victories for its trade agenda.
But anyone who’s bothered to examine the Canadian and Mexican concessions closely knows that Trump delivered next to nothing – his ploy won a Canadian border plan that had already been announced and a reshuffling of Mexican troops to bolster the 10,000 already stationed at that border to little effect as far as the flow of fentanyl is concerned. Even the 10% tariff on China now in effect is much lower than the 60% levy Trump promised during the campaign.
It will take some time before all the dust settles and the rest of the Trump domestic agenda shapes up. But these early days have given us enough of a glimpse at what will matter most to the administration that we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about. Nearly 10 years have been spent parsing Trump’s policies and rhetoric to identify points of departure from the Republican party of old. In columns and essays, academic symposiums and cable news bull sessions, it’s been argued that Trumpism has less to do with conservatism as we’ve known it than with other more interesting -isms – post-liberalism, post-neoliberalism, populism and, yes, fascism. It ought to be clearer to us now that the reality is much simpler. Donald Trump, a Republican president backed by Republican voters and the Republican party as an institution, is using extralegal means to enact longstanding parts of the Republican agenda and the conservative project – including, chiefly, the crippling of the federal government. The most significant standing policy accomplishment of his first term in office was a large tax cut Republicans are hoping to extend. This Trump administration promises to be more innovative to the same ends. The tasks of deregulation and privatization are themselves being deregulated and privatized – turned over substantially to Musk, who seems willing to shrink and weaken government in ways Republican politicians and bureaucrats in administrations past were unwilling to try themselves, a crusade legal scholars and government officials are calling illegal.
As Musk and conservative movement veterans like office of management and budget director, Russell Vought, work away at all this, Trump’s tariff agenda – long scoffed at by Republican business leaders and donors – is faltering. And on immigration, it bears repeating that Trump’s supposedly distinctive nativism has precedents in Republican politics. The more immigration-friendly George W Bush-era that the Trump years are often unfavorably compared with were preceded by a period in the 1990s when the right, including establishment figures like William F Buckley Jr, strongly backed restrictionism. They were followed, in the years just before Trump fully entered the picture, by a period when candidates like the now-sainted Mitt Romney leaned into restricting immigration so strongly that Republican leaders openly feared they would be permanently uncompetitive with Latino voters.
That never came to pass for reasons the 2024 election underscored clearly – many Americans, of all ethnicities, are plainly through with politics as usual. Decades of rhetoric from mainstream politicians about how Washington is broken and in need of candidates willing to bust things up and Get Stuff Done, whatever the Stuff may be, have culminated in the re-election, by a genuine plurality, of a candidate willing to abrogate the constitution to that end – one who has also promised to finally deliver on another standard bit of political pablum, the idea of “running the government like a business”. This is essentially what Musk has been brought on to do. The move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley is breaking the federal infrastructure; whether they recognize it or not, workers across many industries have faced the very same situation federal workers do now, with their agency and very livelihoods being sacrificed on the altar of supposed efficiency.
The Democrats who have been roused to action on their behalf – feebly and belatedly, per usual – have centered the argument that Trump’s and Musk’s rampage through the federal government is unlawful and unconstitutional. “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” the Virginia congressman Don Beyer said at a rally outside USAid’s offices earlier this month.
“USAid was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress. Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.” Republicans, wouldn’t you know it, have gotten rather blase about the whole constitution thing in response. Last week, John Kennedy, the Oxford-educated senator from Louisiana who does a mean Foghorn Leghorn impression for his constituents and the press, defended the constitutionality of Musk’s activities immediately before dismissing the idea that their constitutionality mattered at all. “[T]he issue, anyway, is not process,” he said. “The issue is substance. Did they find wasteful spending, or not?” The North Carolina senator Thom Tillis was more direct – while Musk’s attack on Congress-approved spending “runs afoul of the constitution in the strictest sense”, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”
Just how much bellyaching about the constitution should Democrats actually be doing? All that’s happening now is happening in large part because the men who wrote the constitution more than two centuries ago failed to anticipate anything like contemporary political parties, much less parties that would adopt the ironic disposition towards the document that Republicans now have. Its checks and balances simply weren’t designed to withstand the skulduggery of organized political factions willing to sacralize the document instrumentally and disregard it as necessary. It should never be forgotten that Trump was brought to power by an ugly mutant of the founders’ electoral college to begin with. The longstanding Republican structural advantage in the Senate and constitution’s supermajoritarian threshold for an impeachment conviction allowed Republicans to defend him from the consequences of his actions twice – the second time despite a simple majority of senators voting to convict in the wake of his scheme to steal the 2020 election and the resulting attack on Congress.
In November, voters either enthralled by his seeming invincibility or resigned to it sent him back to the White House. And the major legal challenges to all he’s done and will do this time around will inevitably wind their way to a supreme court dominated by conservatives Trump himself and the Republican party successfully installed, in full keeping with the constitution’s rules, to give themselves their best possible odds of winning their policy fights and hobbling Democratic governance. Topping it all off, Musk’s seat at the heart of the federal government has been handed to him as a reward for the more than $250m – a mere sliver of his wealth – that he contributed to Trump’s re-election effort, a sum only made possible by the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, which allowed donors, corporations and interest groups to raise and spend unlimited amounts on elections through Super Pacs.
By now, it should be clear to all who don’t have an emotional, political or professional investment in believing or pretending to believe otherwise that the American constitutional order has developed a kind of autoimmune disease. The very mechanisms the founders crafted to protect the republic are now an existential threat to it; in their greed and determination to implement the conservative agenda, Trump, Musk and Republicans empowered by those mechanisms are happily ignoring or working to override the parts of the constitution that don’t advantage them or suit their ends. As a matter of substance, this is a system that needs to be dramatically reformed or reimagined rather than rescued; as a matter of politics, one of the central lessons of this past election is that critical constituencies Democrats need to improve with in order to stay competitive federally care far less about protecting our sickly institutions than they care about a great many other things that they hoped Donald Trump would accomplish. As of now, even amid the mess in Washington, voters aren’t giving him marks that are all that terrible – a recent CBS poll found solid majorities of Americans describing his leadership so far as “tough”, “energetic”, “focused” and “effective”.
The legal fights against the administration being waged on constitutional grounds should obviously continue; like Republicans, liberal lawyers seeking liberal ends should avail themselves of whatever arguments stand the best chance of prevailing in the courts. Politically though, Democrats need to refocus. If appeals to our norms and constitution were politically potent enough on their own to work against Trump, he wouldn’t be in the Oval Office waging war against the administrative state today. Put more simply, no one watches a game for the referees.
Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America’s institutions but as the defenders of the American people’s concrete interests – showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them. The perversity of a man getting to rework their government purely because he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and financially backed Trump’s campaign should, of course, also be underscored.
The especially ambitious might even try arguing to the American people that all the goings-on in Washington illustrate the danger of having so much wealth accumulate in the hands of a few in the first place. Elon Musk is gliding towards becoming the planet’s very first trillionaire. His access to the levers and gears of the federal government now could help him along in myriad ways. Even an improved political system would struggle to constrain the amount of power he possessed as a private citizen and has now leveraged into a public office; democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up. Right now, that project is succeeding.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
