President Trump knows how to pick his political targets.
He has run his Republican enemies out of his party. He has spurred a swift corporate reversal on D.E.I. And he has so profoundly reshaped the nation’s immigration debate that dozens of Democrats supported the Laken Riley Act, a bill making it easier to deport unauthorized migrants accused of certain crimes, which he signed into law this afternoon.
Next up: the government itself.
In offering buyouts to roughly two million federal workers, trying and failing this week to freeze federal grants and loans, and openly challenging Congress’s role as an equal governing partner by ignoring laws it has passed, Trump has made a show of taking on the bureaucracy he runs. It’s generated unified pushback from Democrats, but the president believes he has public sentiment on his side.
He’s betting that Americans won’t care that he’s upending institutions most have lost faith in — and that, despite a rocky rollout of the funding freeze, they’ll reward him for seemingly trying to do something to change them.
Giving voters what they asked for
Trump has plenty of evidence on his side. Voters across the political spectrum are disillusioned with a government that has become synonymous with “Groundhog Day”-esque spending battles, slow public works projects and political gridlock.
In 2022, a New York Times poll found that a majority of American voters believed the system of government did not work — a deep sense of dissatisfaction that Trump has used to his advantage. This month, polling from The Times found that 59 percent of adults, including 57 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans, believed the nation’s political system had been broken for decades.
And by last year, public trust in government overall was near historic lows, according to the Pew Research Center.
This may partially explain why Republican lawmakers are watching Trump’s moves with glee.
Senate Republicans are largely standing by as Trump usurps their power of the purse. The same is true in the House, my colleague Annie Karni wrote this week, where Speaker Mike Johnson has been acting more like a junior partner to Trump than the leader of an equally powerful branch of government.
All of these legislators are betting that the image of a powerful president shaking up Washington will serve them at a time when the public holds Congress — and government writ large — in such low esteem.
“He ran on controlling spending and watching the money,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a staunch Trump ally, told me yesterday. “So I think it’s what the public asked for.”
The politics of the attempted freeze are still playing out. On Wednesday night, my colleagues reported that Trump was angered by coverage of the order and its aftershocks.
Democrats on defense
Democrats quickly seized on the chaos and confusion that followed the freeze this week. But as they face down Trump’s broader assault on the federal government’s norms and laws, they are finding themselves in the difficult position of defending the status quo.
Democrats responded in part by warning that the president is infringing on the constitutional separation of powers.
“We are in the midst of a sweeping authoritarian power grab that has never been witnessed in the lifetime of anyone standing here right now,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said during a news conference yesterday.
Arguments about the health of democracy did not exactly help Democrats fend off Trump in November. But Democrats believe that, by gumming up the gears of government, Trump might inadvertently show the public what was working well, and reveal the tangible value of programs many people took for granted.
“If they get kicked out of their drug trial, they can’t get their help through Medicaid, they can’t get service through the V.A.” said Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. “It’s a pretty easy case to make.”
The perception of government chaos can be genuinely damaging. Just ask Trump himself, who lost re-election in 2020 in part because he was perceived to have mishandled the coronavirus pandemic.
How Silicon Valley workers are quietly protesting tech’s rightward shift
When President Trump ordered an immigration ban from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries in 2017, Silicon Valley workers held protests and pushed executives to denounce the president. Now, they’re putting tampons in men’s bathrooms. Here’s more from my colleagues in San Francisco:
Quietly but unmistakably, the tampons, liners and pads reappeared in many of the men’s bathrooms at Meta’s offices.
Days earlier, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, had made a series of changes at his company, aligning with President Trump’s new administration. As part of the moves, Zuckerberg eliminated diversity initiatives in the workplace — something that Trump had criticized — and removed sanitary products from the men’s bathrooms, which had been provided for transgender and nonbinary employees who may have required them.
To protest Zuckerberg’s actions, some Meta workers soon brought their own tampons, pads and liners to the men’s bathrooms, five people with knowledge of the effort said. A group of employees also circulated a petition to save the tampons.
The sanitary products were emblematic of the quiet rebellions that Silicon Valley workers have staged as they grapple with the rightward shift of their bosses. In a major departure for a tech industry that has typically leaned left and liberal, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, the Apple chief Tim Cook and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin have embraced Trump, including by appearing at his inauguration last week.
Their support for Trump has caused consternation across tech work forces, which have generally been pro-immigration and supportive of diversity and inclusion efforts. Yet rather than make loud, public protests to oppose the shift, many tech employees have instead carried out more subtle acts of defiance.
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