On Thursday, February 20, 2025, President Donald Trump addresses the Republican Governors Association conference at the National Building Museum in Washington.AP
Washington President Donald Trump is using force and lightning speed to upend the status quo and transform America both domestically and internationally. The ring of declaring himself king appeals to him.
Nobody is able to take it all in. By the time you try to process one major event, he has already coveted Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and Gaza; he has turned away from Ukraine and historic alliances; he has fired thousands of federal employees and brought some back; he has ordered a reversal of departmental missions; he has declared that there are only two genders, which federal documents will now refer to as sexes; he has announced high tariffs, suspended them, and then imposed three more significant events.
Trump’s loyalists are ecstatic about the situation. His detractors look on in terror. There is a great deal of disagreement in the country about what makes America great and what could bring it down.
Unquestionably, Trump has brought about the most significant shift in the nation’s course since Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. However, it is currently impossible to predict the long-term effects of Trump’s national reset and, consequently, his legacy.
Make America Great Again For the sake of confusing the opponent, Steve Bannon terms all of this action muzzle velocity shooting in all directions at once. Numerous public servants and international leaders have been left picking metaphorical buckshot out of their ass because to the onslaught.
Another analogy is reached for by Paul Light, a specialist in the operations of the government and civil service: It’s the endless volcano. It’s hot, and it just keeps going.
According to the Partnership for Public Service’s president and CEO, Max Stier: They simply inserted a number of additional bullets into the chamber, and we are effectively playing Russian roulette.
Or, in the words of Kevin Roberts, an architect for the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, is it a controlled burn? According to him, a controlled burn eliminates the hazardous deadwood, allowing the entire forest to thrive. Trump was given a preelection roadmap for some of the current events by Project 2025.
Out of the approximately 2.4 million civilian government employees (not including postal workers), 75,000 accepted the new administration’s invitation for deferred resignation in exchange for financial incentives, and tens of thousands more have been laid off or are scheduled to be laid off.
With so many fights to pick from, Democrats, the congressional minority, and the larger political opposition are debating which ones are worthwhile. Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, a Democrat, stated that he would not participate in the Outrage Olympics.
According to current polls, just fewer than half of American adults approve of the Republican president’s performance in office, which is somewhat better than the approval given to Democrat Joe Biden when he stepped down in January. After the next major events in an hour, that mood can change for the better or worse.
He brings Russia in from the cold
During his first month in office, Trump made a U-turn on foreign policy by contacting Russia, suspending the majority of U.S. aid, and rejecting the long-standing pledge to defend fellow NATO members in the event of an attack. Washington, Ukraine’s staunch and powerful wartime ally for three years, has abruptly turned against it.
Trump’s flurry of executive orders and marching orders at home has an impact on culture as much as how the government operates.
Although a judge on Friday partially halted Trump’s directive, government agencies and corporate boardrooms are abandoning their diversity, equity, and inclusion plans in accordance with the new order. Additionally, organizations are under pressure to stop recognizing or accommodating transgender individuals, or fear losing federal funding if they don’t.
The courts, which seem to be the main restraint on Trump’s sweeping use of executive power, will play a major role in determining how much of this holds up. As Trump uses executive action rather than legislation to further his goals, the Republican-controlled Congress has complied.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., stated some time ago that Trump has signed roughly a squillion executive orders. My efforts to read them are still ongoing.
Longstanding Republican tenets like strong U.S.-led security assurances against foreign foes and support for free trade have been overshadowed, if not abandoned, in the commotion.
Long live the king
Republicans have long espoused the benefits of delegating decision-making authority to state and local governments rather than the federal government. This past week, however, the Trump administration stopped the new commuter tolls for driving into Manhattan in New York City. Trump took credit without hesitation.
He wrote “long live the king” in all caps, referring to himself. A picture of him with a crown was circulated by the White House.
The civil service upheaval has been the targeted termination of senior officials who are thought to be disloyal to Trump or to constitute an obstacle, together with a general staff reduction that primarily consists of thousands of newer personnel with fewer employment protections. When new presidents take office, a large number of public employees who are not politically active are fired.
Among those expelled were senior officials in charge of maintaining the integrity and accountability of agencies. Late one night, nearly 20 departmental inspectors general were let go without giving the minimum 30 days’ notice under the law. Trump also fired the head of the government whistleblower protection organization, the Office of Government Ethics; the Supreme Court on Friday temporarily retained the official in his position.
Trump struck at the core of what he refers to as the “deep state” when he fired a dozen federal career prosecutors who had worked on criminal charges against him.
We are in a dangerous place
Federal judges are currently in charge of determining whether to restrain the president because Congress, which controls the purse, is allowing him to use it instead. Massive cuts or freezes in grants and other expenditures that Congress authorized in law have been the first outcome, but Trump is suspending on his own initiative, if the courts allow it.
According to Southern Methodist University constitutional and presidential scholar Cal Jillson, the past month has been completely unique in American history. No American president has ever taken such a strong stand against the Constitution and the law. We are in a hazardous situation.
According to Jillson and other historians, such disruptions in the government apparatus have only occurred in response to severe crises, such as states seceding from the union prior to the Civil War, FDR’s New Deal plunging the country into the Great Depression, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society explosion of initiatives upon assuming office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Trump was greeted by no such disasters. For instance, before Biden left office, the number of illegal border crossings that had increased throughout his administration began to decline. Nevertheless, Trump renounced all of the tactics he had hinted at and, for the most part, pledged during the campaign.
But according to Trump and Elon Musk, the bureaucracy itself—the unelected officials who oppose the goals of a lawfully elected president—is the threat to democracy, not their attempts to overthrow it.
In an interview with Trump on Fox News Channel this past week, Musk told Hannity that there is a large government bureaucracy that is adamantly against the president and the Cabinet. Musk, the titan of SpaceX, Tesla, and X, is spearheading Trump’s purging of the government.
According to Musk, the people’s will is not being carried out if the president’s will is not carried out, even though the president is the representative of the people. Consequently, we do not live in a democracy. Our society is bureaucratic.
Chaos is a feature, not a bug
Times like these can have a positive impact, according to Light, author of several dozen books on the operation of government. You have to clean up the operation every now and then.
However, he claimed that this disorder is deliberate and destructive, exposing the nation to the insufficiency of a depleted civil service in the event of a pandemic, disaster, war, or significant cyberattack.
Trump claimed that keeping people leaping was his main strategy. Trump truly knows nothing but how to break things.
Some polls done this month carry warning signs for Trump as he pursues his audacious course. In a Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 57% of Americans believed he has overreached himself since assuming office. In a CNN/SSRS survey, more than half (55%) claimed he hasn’t focused on the most important issues.
Essentially, however, Trump is in charge of overseeing the entirety of this half-and-half nation. Depending on your stance, he can do no right or no wrong in the eyes of a great percentage of Americans.
Written by Associated Press’s CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.
