The Awful Absurdity of Donald Trump’s First Week Back in Power

The worst part of Donald Trump’s punishing first week back in office? The knowledge that there are more than 200 more of them to come—and that many will be even more appalling.

Not that it will be easy to top inauguration week.

After kicking it off with the blanket pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and a dizzying series of executive orders, Trump headed into the weekend with a late-night purge of inspectors general at more than a dozen agencies, in direct violation of federal law, as California Senator Adam Schiff noted Sunday on Meet the Press.

“It may be the president’s goal here…to remove anyone that’s going to call the public attention to his malfeasance,” Schiff said, as Trump’s allies defended his decision to sack the watchdogs. “I’m not, you know, losing a whole lot of sleep that he wants to change the personnel out,” one such defender, Lindsey Graham, said on the same program.

Then, on Saturday, Trump casually suggested forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, telling reporters on Air Force One that he’d like to “clean out” the wartorn strip: “Over the centuries it’s had many, many conflicts,” the president said. “And I don’t know, something has to happen.” That tossed-off ethnic cleansing proposal threatened to further complicate a volatile situation in the Middle East and was emblematic of the even more aggressively pro-Israel stance Trump has staked out than the preceding administration that supplied Benjamin Netanyahu’s siege the past year and a half.

The remarks thrilled some on the far-right, including the former Netanyahu Cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir: “The Israeli government should implement encouraging emigration now,” he said after Trump’s comments. But the idea was rejected by Egypt and Jordan, the two US allies Trump said should take in displaced Palestinians. And even some of Trump’s domestic allies questioned it: “I don’t see that to be overly practical,” Graham said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

That’s part of the point, of course. It’s all part of Trump’s “madman” approach to foreign affairs, which was also on display this weekend when he threatened a trade war with Colombia on social media and continued to indulge expansionist fantasies of annexing Canada and Greenland. “It’s not for us,” Trump reasoned. “It’s for the free world.”

Meanwhile, at home, the Trump administration began its promised deportation campaign this weekend, with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arresting at least 950 migrants in a nationwide sweep. In Chicago, a sanctuary city that has been an early focus of Trump’s immigration crackdown, border czar Tom Homan and acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove spent Sunday overseeing the operation—accompanied by the television host Dr. Phil, who broadcast the raids, adding a layer of absurdity to the awfulness. “We’re talking about bad actors,” Dr. Phil said of those being targeted by the administration. “It’s not just sweeping neighborhoods.”

But Homan said there may be “collateral” arrests beyond the undocumented criminals he claims to be targeting, and Chicago’s WGN News reported on Sunday that a father with no criminal record was detained on his way to work, with his family only learning of the arrest when he didn’t show up for his shift. “They’re going after people who are law-abiding, who are holding down jobs, who have families here, who may have been here for a decade or two decades, and they’re often our neighbors and our friends,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN.

“They want people to step back,” Pritzker added, “and let them do whatever they want to do.”

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That has seemed to be the case so far. Democrats, with little federal power to wield, are busy looking for a way out of the political wilderness following a bruising 2024 election cycle. The anti-Trump public seems more exhausted than outraged, as they were during much of his first term. And the media is scrambling to keep up with Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy.

“It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much,” the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told the Washington Post on Saturday. “They’re overwhelming the system.”

But Trump’s reelection, decisive as it may have been, was not a mandate for this kind of shock and awe, and allowing him to claim one only makes his job easier. That’s not to suggest a return to the #Resistance era, which only seemed to reinforce Trump’s position at the center of the political universe. But there is a need for genuine—and focused—opposition to his program, the kind that helped rein in the original “madman,” Richard Nixon, half a century ago.

Trump right now is acting like a man who knows he won’t face any kind of pushback. “You don’t pardon 1,600 J6 prisoners,” as one of his allies put it to NBC News, “unless you feel that you won’t get any backlash that you cannot recover from.” And so far, he hasn’t been proven wrong.