I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.
But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.
The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.
Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.
Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
What was it Trump said about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, during his first term in office? “Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said in 2018. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
He wants his people to do the same.
What I Wrote
My column this week was on the importance of political leadership and political ambition in challenging tyranny.
For as much as Trump tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth is that he is as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it might have looked at first glance.
Now Reading
Catherine Rampell on Trump’s war on America’s children, for The Washington Post.
It’s been largely lost in the cacophony over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and vendettas against universities, but administration officials have been gutting services that keep children alive and well. These include programs that feed kids, teach them the alphabet, provide them medical care, guarantee their rights and shield them from abuse.
Derek Guy on the evolution of the alpha male aesthetic, for Bloomberg.
This new wave of hypercurated masculinity is a backlash against a cultural landscape shaped by gender fluidity, body positivity and an ongoing renegotiation of gender roles. As celebrities like Harry Styles and Lil Nas X pose in dresses and blur the traditional lines between masculine and feminine, another current rushes in to reassert the old order. It pulls from earlier models: The mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tightfitting clothes once labeled metrosexual. Today’s fixation on muscularity, discipline and traditional masculine aesthetics feels like a new chapter in that same historical cycle.
David Cole on Harvard’s defiance of Trump, for The New York Review of Books.
Had Harvard acceded to those demands, it would have given up not just its autonomy but the most fundamental principle of academic freedom. Instead Harvard chose to fight for that principle. As Garber put it on Monday in his letter announcing the school’s decision, “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The outcome of the university’s struggle with a sitting president is likely to determine the future of academic freedom in the United States.
Adam Serwer on the present crisis, for The Atlantic.
The Trump administration is defying a Supreme Court order to retrieve a man it marooned in a gulag abroad, while pretending to comply with it. What it could do to him, it could do to anyone. More significantly, if the Trump administration can defy court orders with impunity, and Congress is unwilling to act, there is no reason for it to respect the constitutional rights of American citizens either. The Roberts court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.
Moira Donegan on right-wing natalism, for The Guardian:
It is not interested in making pregnancy safer, or in making child rearing less damaging to women’s careers. It is not interested in these because all of these pursuits are in fact antithetical to the movement’s real agenda, which is to encourage primarily white births, to enforce regressive, highly hierarchal and stratified social roles, to push women out of the public sphere and to narrow women’s prospects for social, professional and intellectual life to little more than pregnancy, childbirth, child rearing and housekeeping — or, as the Collinses might put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.”
Photo of the Week
The post office building in downtown Chattanooga, Tenn.
Now Eating: Chickpeas With Baby Spinach
I made a variation on this recipe for lunch this week, and it was great with toasted bread and a quick yogurt sauce. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.
Ingredients
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1 tablespoon olive oil
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1 medium onion, chopped
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2 garlic cloves, minced
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1 teaspoon cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
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Salt, preferably kosher salt
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Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
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1 tablespoon tomato paste
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1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
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1 cup chicken or vegetable stock or water
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Cayenne, to taste
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1 (6-ounce) bag baby spinach
Directions
Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan over medium heat and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until tender, about five minutes. Add the garlic, cumin, tomato paste and ½ teaspoon salt. Cook, stirring for one to two minutes, until fragrant and the tomato paste has turned a darker color. Add the chickpeas, the stock or water and the cayenne and bring to a simmer. Cover, reduce the heat and simmer 10 minutes.
Stir in the spinach, a handful at a time, stirring until each addition of spinach wilts. Add salt to taste and simmer uncovered, stirring often, for 5 minutes. Add lots of freshly ground pepper, taste and adjust salt and cayenne and serve.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
The post Trump Doesn’t Want to Govern appeared first on New York Times.
