A Long Way Down

When Caesar moves fast and breaks things, it's hard to catch up or rebuild

If you close your eyes, you can imagine that what’s blowing through your hair is just a stiff breeze rather than the air rushing by your head as you plummet to the ground.

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Trump’s second term—the boogaloo administration—is delivering upheaval. The January 6 leaders and participants have been pardoned. He mused about conducting an ethnic cleansing—there’s literally no other word—of Gaza. Birthright citizenship—black-letter constitutional law—is under threat. The military deportation flights have started and we’ve already had a three-hour trade war with Colombia over them. Pete Hegseth, manifestly unqualified to run the largest employer in the United States, has got the job anyway. (What do you call someone who gets Senate confirmed by the narrowest of margins? “Mr. Secretary.”) Scientific grants are paused indefinitely; some activities are permitted but the chaotic roll-out of the pause has raised alarm. U.S. foreign aid is on a much harder pause. Leading tech executives and other corporate officials have kissed the ring. Trump launched a transparently corrupt memecoin (sure, technically before he started, but come on). Even Trump’s renaming of Mt. McKinley and the Gulf of America have gotten Google’s seal of approval.

Where is this going?

This is not normal, even though to an alarming degree rather a lot of media coverage really is normalizing it. And it’s all happening, even though we’ve very possibly had more policy movement in the past week than in Biden’s last two years in office. The speed makes it hard to process but doesn’t make it less real.

It’s important to grasp what the second term is not. It is not a set of minor initiatives. It is not “just” ordinary partisan politics. It aims at overthrowing something—even if what it will be replaced by is the subject of significant contestation within Trump’s coalition.

Bottom line up front: I do not think that any of this will end well.

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The aims of the administration—in direction and scale—point not toward the temporary settling of scores against Trump’s enemies and winning skirmishes in culture wars. These really aim at a creation of a neo-Redeemer government—something that goes far beyond the sorts of temporary goals that Internet commenters still seem to think animates Trump.

Domestically, the current administration seeks to overturn many of the advances of the Civil Rights and feminist movements. Executive orders leveraging federal powers over contractors have long been a key part in advancing the goals of those movements, bringing the political ambitions of reformers into every corporate HR department. It’s no surprise from that view that Trump has revoked Executive Order 11246, a tool by which LBJ—and then, yes, Nixon—made affirmative action a quotidian part of U.S. life. By doing so, and in combination with other measures that not only repeal DEI efforts but also will use anti-discrimination law to overturn measures seeking equity in hiring and other aspects of life (like university admissions), Trump has effectively ended affirmative action. Really: it might come back, someday, but what’s dead right now isn’t just the newest phase of DEI—it’s the notions of affirmative action and policies to that end that have been a part of U.S. society since 1965.

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You might be tempted to conclude that the flurry of executive orders about DEI, trans military protections, and so on is just a severe set of culture-war maneuvers. I want to persuade you that perceiving these as superficial understates Trump’s actual policy ambitions. (And, yes, now he has them; he was ruler of the United States for four years—he is not the same person who ran in 2016.)

This is transformational. It is not something that will be easily undone.

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What about the international sphere? On the one hand, I believe that, for Trump, there is no national, or even a partisan, interest: there is Trump’s interest, and any decision with which he bothers to concern himself will be refracted through that lens. On the other hand, the content of his worldview and the interests of his coalition and advisers lend this a focus with actual content.

Internationally, the Trump administration acts as though alliances are opportunities for exploitation rather than assets. Some governments have quickly cottoned on to the idea that U.S. security guarantees may now be pay-for-play, while others, more democratic, are finding it harder to cope with the notion. And it’s understandable. If the previous eighty (80!) years of U.S. foreign policy emphasized shared values and interests with Global North (rich-world) partners, and now Washington is acting like it’s running a protection racket, you can imagine the whiplash is hard to deal with. Again, you might think that I’m exaggerating or succumbing to Trump Derangement Syndrome, but the current targets of Trumpian ire are Canada and Denmark, both of which he is kidding-on-the-square about launching annexationist campaigns toward. This makes sense if you assume Trump thinks only the weak would need alliances—that it is a confession of an inability to go-it-alone rather than an investment in common interests.

Although Trump appears to respect great powers and the strong men who run them more than the democracies under U.S. protection, that does not mean that he is any more likely to avoid conflict with them. His administration is full of China (and Iran) hawks—we’re even back to the lab-leak accusations of 2020 as official policy, which is not a sign of softening on Beijing. He may even—possibly—grasp that Russia’s military and economic position gives Moscow a weaker hand at the bargaining table than Putin would like to project. We’ve moved from settling Ukraine on day one to a lengthier process. And although I have “low confidence” (as they say) in the following supposition, I do wonder if Trump’s drive for viewing dealmaking not in terms of positive-sum outcomes but in terms of symbolic dominance may actually lead him to assert his alpha-ness by taking down the Russian alpha bear at the conference table. At the very least, Trump’s disdain for Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s politics (remember when we had a whole impeachment over this?) may be matched by his personal motivations for engaging in dealmaking.

As important as those details are, though, they should not overlook the fundamental international calculus here: the U.S. government, under Trump, does not believe that either norms or deals binds it. Interest, as perceived by Trump himself, is all that matters. Although there have been untold legions of hypocrises in the management of the “liberal order” by the United States, there is a definite difference between viewing international life as a sphere in which cooperation and consistency are valuable and instead acting in ways to deliberately flout those interests. It is not a return to the world of McKinley (no matter how much Trump invokes him) because U.S. power and interests are too enmeshed with the world to be withdrawn fully. But it is also not a turn toward the conservative internationalism of a Reagan, far less the messianic rightism of a Dubya. This is the instantiation of something that is actually new in the U.S. experience, no matter what your Chomskyist dorm-mate said about U.S. imperialism, man. Mistaking cynicism for wisdom can produce passivity just when we most need action.

We are back to the age of Jackson and Tyler, but with nuclear weapons and a global reserve currency. There is a difference between what’s here and what has been—and what will be coming.

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Domestically and internationally, then, Trump’s policies amount to a sustained attack on the central propositions of the greater liberal project of Wilson, FDR, and LBJ. Rather than embedding liberalism at home and abroad—rather than seeking to make progress toward a world of individual rights and the security of property—we are moving toward a U.S. embrace of walls—or, if you like, moats with drawbridges that can be lowered for a fee.

Success is not guaranteed. This project may come to naught. It might fail of its own internal contradictions even if there is no external resistance; how can the tech bros and the security hawks make peace over selling chips on a global market, and how can either coexist with the Tulsi Gabbards of the Trump coalition? (It’s been somewhat heartening to see the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page lead the charge against RFK, Jr., even if it’s done so on largely pecuniary grounds.)

And there are still some institutional means by which opponents can stall the Trumpdozer, even if they are limited. (Let’s say you’re an optimist about the Constitution and other branches’ willingness to check the White House. If you’re an optimist, you think they’ll halt maybe 35 or 40 percent of these ideas. Still seems like we’re in for a lot of disruption.)

But the prospects that this agenda will fail are not grounds for comfort.

Failed projects, like an exploding rocket, can do a lot of harm. The eggs will still be cracked even if no omelette is made.

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There’s a song that keeps coming to mind this week: Art Blakey’s performance of Wayne Shorter’s “It’s a Long Way Down”. It’s a good song. It’s a comfort to hear art in these times.