Since the courts are pretty much the only avenue of relevance in the current battle over executive expansion given that Republicans control Congress and don’t seem to care all that much about it (they are chipping away at their pet issues ofc), I do think it is a little ironic that the Republican judicial strategy is something Trump 1.0 had the least input on. He really didn’t care, best I can tell whatever justices the hardline Republicans put in front of him he said “great” and signed off on them. There was not, in fact, an attempt to put “lackeys” on the bench, and the Trump Triple are on average actually more independent than Alito or Thomas.
Which was a pretty unforced error! Like so many “norms”, the idea that Republicans would have somehow balked at voting in underqualified partisans is a figment of the median voter’s imagination; if the admin went to the mat on this Congress would have probably folded at least partially. And meanwhile the entire MO for the Trump administration 2.0 is depending quite heavily on how legal cases come out. They won’t be the be-all-end-all of things ofc, but right now “they are probably going to lose most of these cases” is the biggest barrier their approach is facing. And the same guy probably could have flipped that outcome if he had thought about it.
Failure to get injunctions in these cases would be bad for the country, but would it be good for Trump? Without injunctions, it’s more likely that there would be disruptions in government services, and I don’t think that’s good for Trump.
That depends on what you think Trump’s goals are. I am not team “Trump is too stupid to function”, I think the evidence for that is very minimal (The space for being a dumbass without that is so, so vast). They know this is going to disrupt services! They definitely know because they are intentionally maximizing that disruption. If you are asking “will this or won’t this hurt his ’re-election’ chances” (something he probably will never have) then sure, it hurts him. But I can think of a lot of other goals where that is a price he is happy to pay.
(Related, I also do not buy the “Trump has no political goals and just likes being in the limelight”. Obviously he loves the latter but he almost certainly has the former too, his behavior is inexplicable without it)
I don’t know what his medium-term goals are, but I honestly don’t see how any sort of durable policy change could be accomplished this way. Anything substantive he could do this way could be rolled back by the next president and presumably would be if it was unpopular (if he wasn’t forced to roll it back sooner as part of, eg, a budget deal). He could destroy a lot of institutional expertise, but I don’t think “wreck the federal civil service” is a likely policy goal for him.
My working theories are
- Musk, backed by Trump, honestly believes that he can fix everything and if it gets done fast enough he can present a fiat accompli that’s sufficiently popular and robust to mostly not get rolled back. Possibly they’re moving this fast because they want that fiat accompli for the March 14 budget deadline (or possibly just because of hubris). This is the plan that could plausibly be helped by pliant judges, but in order for this plan to succeed, the process has to work; if services get disrupted (services people care about, not USAID), it probably won’t be “sufficiently popular and robust”.
- Losing in court was always the plan (after all, it was obvious they would do so), so there’s minimal actual disruption, and either (a) Trump positions himself as a fighter who’s being stymied by activist judges and the deep state, and leverages that reputation to negotiate for the powers/policy that he actually wants, or (b) everyone is busy fighting about the obviously illegal stuff and he “gets away” with the stuff he actually can do by executive fiat (notably, immigration and tariffs, two of his apparently durable policy goals, would probably fall in this category).
I certainly don’t think I have the Hot Goss pinned down on this, so I am not super-confident in this to caveat, but anyway:
but I honestly don’t see how any sort of durable policy change could be accomplished this way. Anything substantive he could do this way could be rolled back by the next president and presumably would be if it was unpopular
This is imo a sketchy model to project onto politicians - everything they do can be rolled back by the next administration. You can’t escape that so it doesn’t shape you all that much. And meanwhile “what is popular and unpopular in levels that are relevant” is quite opaque, certainly 4 years away from the election. Most administrations structurally understand that they are going to do some mix of “appeasing the voters” and “pursuing their agenda” and future predictions just aren’t gonna be solid on any of it. This is why you see massive attacks on USAID (something with minimal domestic constituencies) but Trump emphasizing no cuts to Medicare. That is the “play” they are making.
From that I think the Trump admin is not only willing to eat some heat from voters for priority goals, I think almost all admins are. Additionally, you don’t need much to get “their electoral victory has made the Trump Team overly hubristic when it comes to electoral success and they are drinking their own kool-aid on how polling is useless”, that is an error too common to mention.
He could destroy a lot of institutional expertise, but I don’t think “wreck the federal civil service” is a likely policy goal for him.
On this I agree in a general sense. He isn’t a libertarian after all, Trump generally wants to expand the government. Though I do think there are coalitional things at play where X% of this is some form of “wreck the government/own the libs”, but we can set that aside.
Re: the two plans, for the first one that loops back to “what is success”, so to tackle the second there is maybe an X% truth here but I am skeptical it is much because like it just isn’t gonna work right? Judges don’t “get distracted” they have dockets for a reason, Congress is eye-rolling a lot of this right now, and Trump is getting dinged in the polls over this stuff. It is just a lot of work for a purely symbolic branding exercise that doesn’t have a lot of payoff.
So I think that loops back to the first one, where “success” is not some mythical reductions in waste spending to close the deficit. That is obvious fiction and I do not believe enough of the admin is that stupid. I also don’t think that federal staffing levels will move that much, because these guys again aren’t libertarians and don’t want a smaller government and seem to be putting very little work into actual mass-scale deregulatory measures (ofc you will get the typical Republican shifts). Particularly once you use the real numbers of federal staffers that includes all the contractors, because at this point the federal government outsources half of its workload and a government job doesn’t mythically go away because a private company is signing the W-2’s.
Instead my current working model is that this is just a good old-fashioned purge? If you get a ton of federal workers to quit or fire them, you can replace them with your own people. That is why they are trying to make as many jobs political appointees as possible, and get people “out the door” very quickly consensually (a court can’t compel someone to take a job after all), and all that. They want it for a lot of reasons - corruption, for one - but a big one is that they do actually believe all that Deep State stuff, because when you strip away the emotional baggage “the federal workforce is hostile to the goals of the Trump Admin and the wider New Right” is completely true. I won’t go deeper on this sort of “democratic vs technocratic government” topic here, but this seems like a perfectly coherent goal - reshape the permanent civil service and replace it with political appointees, aligned contractors, and a new crop of core servants on your team.
And it is a goal that courts will interfere with, if they were more aligned they absolutely would be able to reshape it more!
I think the goal is pretty simple: find enemies to attack. Trump feels stronger when he is attacking an enemy, so he needs to create enemies to go after. This feeds his ego, and satisfies the right-wing need for focusing their anger on something. Who’s the enemy? That’s where Musk and the Heritage Foundation come in! They have a ready-made list of enemies whom they’ve hated for quite some time now (they’ve told us all about it) so just attack DEI, foreign aid, deep-state operatives, the administrative state, whatever. If someone opposes the attack, they get added to the list! Medium-term goal is to get all of their destructive acts legitimized, but they haven’t reached the limits of their short-term goals yet so they will keep up the current attacks until they stop benefitting from them.
I do think there is a pop theory of presidential power in which they can do Cool Stuff but only if they are sufficiently Tough and Manly, so so that ends up being the main differentiating factor between presidents as perceived by the common moron aka swing voter, who really does believe that there is a big lever for setting gas prices in the oval office but most presidents are too scared to pull it.