President Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran exemplifies his smash-and-grab approach to governing: acting without apparently considering the lives to be lost, the law or the institutional damage he will leave behind.
Trump seems to have attacked Iran unprepared for the intensity of Iran’s counterattack, the full range of threats posed to Americans in the region, the inflationary effects of sharply rising gas prices and the angry reaction within the MAGA electorate. Somehow the administration’s battle plan resulted in the direct hit of a girls’ elementary school, killing at least 175 people, many if not most of them children.
So far, the war on Iran falls into a larger pattern of Trump policies leaving wanton destruction in their wake.
Perhaps the most devastating of these was the administration’s decision to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development, which, according to estimates produced by Brooke Nichols, an epidemiologist and health economist at Boston University, may have resulted in the deaths of as many as 262,915 adults and 518,428 children over one year.
But it isn’t just in foreign countries. The willingness to adopt policies that will result in increased deaths among Americans, particularly within Trump’s loyal MAGA electorate, pervades administration decision-making, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as I have written in two previous columns, “What Can’t Trump Wreck?” and “The MAHA Pipe Dream Is Going to Hurt MAGA the Most.”
Even so, Trump’s war against Iran stands apart from past policies adopted on impulse. In this case, preliminary developments suggest Trump will pay a political price for his lack of careful planning and impetuous behavior. In fact, he may be forced to take responsibility for lost lives, damage to U.S. facilities and allies’ cities, economic setbacks and the failure to anticipate predictable adverse events.
In many other act-now-worry-later examples — the abrupt cutoff of funds to universities, the imposition of penalties on law firms, the tearing down of the East Wing — Trump’s strategy has paid off in the sense that he got away with inflicting damage so swiftly that his adversaries could not stop him, at least in the short run.
Take his law firm shakedown, which took the form of threatening, by executive order, to bar firms’ access to federal courts and other facilities unless they provided pro bono work for conservative causes.
“The administration could not have launched these orders with any reasonable expectation of winning legal challenges. This outcome was predictable from the beginning,” Bob Bauer, a law professor at N.Y.U. who formerly represented Democratic politicians and committees, wrote at the Executive Functions Substack.
Despite the illegality of his demands, Trump, Bauer wrote, emerged a winner:
Trump presumably got the satisfaction he was after. And more of the firms that were targeted chose to settle rather than sue: nine versus four. The settling firms collectively committed close to $1 billion in pro bono legal services to causes favored by the administration.
In addition, Trump successfully intimidated the broader legal community:
Many firms who were not under attack notably declined to join the defense of the ones who were. News organizations reported a chilling effect on the “big firm” legal profession. The press also indicated that large firms adopted fresh caution in considering taking on cases that could draw Trump’s ire.
In an email, Bauer wrote:
Law has no normative hold on Trump; he does not assign it any content of independent significance. It is just one of the various materials at hand that he might put to use in achieving particular goals, or an irritant along the way that pliant lawyers will help him get past.
Trump, Bauer continued, “can inflict injury and accomplish objectives without troubling with the merits of his legal position. He has a kind of ‘first mover’ advantage.”
The first mover advantage has effectively rewarded Trump for breaking the law.
The same pattern characterizes the administration’s cuts of billions of dollars in grants to universities, based on claims of antisemitism and civil rights violations.
Harvard has challenged the administration in court, and 18 other universities have filed court statements of support for the challenge.
But again, the administration has won some major victories. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and adopted policies on discipline and other matters sought by the Department of Education.
Others followed suit: Cornell University, a $60 million overall settlement; Northwestern University, $75 million; Brown University, $50 million, to mention just a few.
Trump, in effect, cowed some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, including three from the Ivy League. Columbia, Cornell and Brown became trophies Trump could hang on his wall. He also made a deal with the University of Pennsylvania.
“I’ve come to think that Trump actually believes he is a genius whose gut instincts are superior to any evidence-based analysis and that this, and his imagined ‘landslide’ victory, entitles him to do whatever he feels like as president,” Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, wrote in an email. Jacobson added:
Egged on by reactionary ideologues in his administration, Trump has pushed for radical changes in a broad range of national and foreign policies in a “move fast and break things” mode, which also has the advantage of keeping attention focused on him, feeding the rabid narcissism that, for example, has him plastering his name and image all over the place.
He is not constrained by respect for any rule or institution that does not serve his interests and so pushes for as much as he can get away with — norms, laws, the Constitution and basic human decency be damned. He doesn’t care about the consequences except insofar as they threaten his self-image as a strong winner.
“Act now, think later, and try to get away with what you can in the interim” is an apt summary of his approach to governing.
There are some intriguing interconnections in Trump’s thinking.
Trump famously disdains military figures like John McCain who were captured by the enemy, commenting at a 2015 presidential forum in Iowa: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
The consequences of Trump’s willingness to pardon men and women convicted of financial fraud suggests that he has a similar, if not deeper, scorn for those victimized by criminals, con men and their like.
A report issued last June by the Democratic side of the House Judiciary Committee documents how, in the words of Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat,
when President Trump issued a mass blanket pardon to 1,500 Jan. 6 felons and dozens of mostly white-collar criminals, he wiped out $1.3 billion in restitution payments and fines they owed directly to their victims and to American taxpayers. While prior presidents overwhelmingly reserved pardons for those who accepted responsibility for their crimes, made full restitution to their victims and paid all their legal fines, Trump uses pardons not only to shorten the sentences of his political friends but to wipe out the debt they owe to their victims and to our society.
The history of Trump’s involvement in schemes profiting from the gullibility or special pleading of others — from Trump University to the sale of Trump’s meme coin, the value of which nose-dived this year — reveals not just contempt for victims but also a belief that they provide opportunities to make a buck.
All of which, again, fits into a larger pattern, reflected in Trump’s aversion to visiting a French cemetery filled with American soldiers killed in World War II because the dead were “suckers” and “losers.”
For Trump, the defrauded men and women are forgettable losers in the process of exercising executive power.
Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, described in an email his view of Trump’s thinking:
It’s clear from the way Trump has operated from the beginning politically that he is not grand strategist or long-term thinker. He is the Great Disrupter. He wants to shake up and destroy the existing institutional arrangements at home and abroad, and he wants to amass power, resources and glory (for himself and, globally, for the U.S.) at home and abroad.
This is the common thread behind his attack on established elites of both parties, on prestigious established institutions, from Harvard and Columbia to CNN and The N.Y. Times, to the white-shoe law firms, to the career civil service and Foreign Service, and to institutions like U.S.A.I.D.
Diamond wrote that he “once heard someone describe Putin as an opportunistic aggressor, like a thief who goes down the hallway of a hotel looking for rooms that are unlocked. But I think that applies better to Trump.”
Trump, Diamond continued,
wants Venezuela’s oil. He wants Greenland’s mineral wealth and strategic position. He is an opportunist, looking to see where resistance is weak and what he can get away with. He is looking for weakness to dominate. This is why Europe was smart to find its backbone on Greenland and say, No! It is why Mark Carney’s speech at Davos resonated so widely.
Trump has, however, used his predatory instincts to probe the weaknesses in the American judicial and constitutional order that have allowed him to elide the law.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, wrote by email:
Judges appointed by presidents in both parties are doing heroic work at the case level in trying to uphold the law, but the system is not built to address the scope of the lawlessness that we now face.
Trump is always challenging the boundaries of his powers and authority. He has a bully’s instinct for identifying weakness and pulling back when he encounters resistance.
Those hoping for a decisive Supreme Court intervention may be counting on a chimera, Nyhan said:
People are waiting for a dramatic moment in which Trump openly defies an order from the Supreme Court, but that is a misunderstanding of the situation. In situations of democratic erosion, authoritarian leaders chip away at mechanisms for accountability and opposition from within rather than taking over the government at the point of a gun.
In situations like these, the government continues to engage in a kind of compliance theater while frequently failing to comply with the spirit of the orders that judges issue.
Compliance with court orders, Nyhan wrote, is
difficult for judges to monitor and not self-enforcing. That’s why an administration like this is so dangerous. Judges are often unwilling to hold the government in contempt or face obstacles in demanding compliance given appeals to circuit courts or the Supreme Court.
The irony, if that is the appropriate word, is that Trump’s impulsive destruction has so far stumped the 250-year-old system of democracy and constitutional government in this country.
Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, stressed Trump’s almost childish impetuousness in his emailed response to my inquiries:
A through line of Trump’s actions is that they are impulsive, with little consideration of the constraints or consequences. We clearly see this with Iran, where the president has shown little interest in the future of Iran beyond immediately decimating its military capacity.
On some days, he talks about the Iranian public taking control and overturning a brutal regime; on other days he washes his hands of the outcome. We’ve gone from Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule that he articulated to President Bush, “you break it, you’ve bought it,” to “you break it, they own it.”
Moynihan agreed that “there are significant strategic motivations for the U.S. military action” against Iran. But for Trump, “the key point seems to be the impulsiveness, the arrogance, the lack of public and interparty consultation.”
There are other parallels, Moynihan argued:
What was DOGE at the start of the second administration? Smash and terminate. Break things and move fast, but without a plan for what follows.
It seems pretty clear that they are making it up as they go — in Venezuela, in Iran, in dealing with Europe over Greenland, in tariff levels. This is all smash and grab, see what works.
If ICE goes too far, then fire the homeland security secretary and move on to the next opportunity to punish and dominate. If you can’t indict Comey, move on to Schiff, or Senator Kelly. Keep up the pressure and punishment. See what works. Keep them constantly under pressure and off guard. Show you are powerful and can do anything at any time.
I leave it to Moynihan to conclude on a note that will have to pass for optimism right now:
I think we are going to pay a large price globally and domestically for this rashness, arrogance and destructive incompetence. But in one sense we are fortunate.
Imagine how much more threatened our democracy would be if we had a president with the same authoritarian intent and ambition, but much greater patience, strategic savvy, planning, intellect and skill. It is not only his overreach and greed that will be his undoing, but his incompetence.
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