“We have two enemies,” Trump declared last October. “We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
Trump’s carefully calculated claim serves to justify his administration’s assault on government, American values and core traditions since he took office on Jan. 20.
Trump’s success in demonizing liberals and Democrats — casting the left as a grave threat to a substantial segment of the electorate — has proved crucial to his decision to turn regulatory and prosecutorial power into an instruments of revenge.
The threat posed by “the enemy from within” has proved to be the key mobilizing concept underpinning the MAGA movement and the intellectual structure that hard-right conservatives have pieced together to provide the means of attack.
The enemy, in this paradigm, is Democrats, liberals and everyone left of center, expanding beyond ideology to encompass huge swaths of the federal government and of the immigrant population, legal and illegal.
The theme of the enemy resonated on the right in the wake of Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Glenn Ellmers, a research fellow at the Claremont Institute, claimed in his March 2021 essay “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough,” that
Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term. I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country are aliens and will probably never assimilate to our language and culture — politically as well as legally. The many native-born people — some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower — may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.
Who are the remaining Americans?
Ellmers:
By and large, I am referring to the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism.
Once one accepts as true the presence of a huge adversary committed to the destruction of American values, Ellmers argues, “the original America is more or less gone,” and real conservatives are left with only one choice: “Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is a sort of counterrevolution, and the sole road forward.”
This view is shared not only by Trump, but by Russell Vought, the newly confirmed director of the Office of Management and Budget, about whom I wrote last week.
In his 2022 essay, “Renewing American Purpose,” Vought contends that
We are in a post constitutional moment in our country. Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement — a new regime if you will — that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.
Vought’s essay, which provides a kind of mental blueprint for a second Trump term, argues that conservatives must “cast ourselves as dissidents of the current regime and to put on our shoulders the full weight of envisioning, articulating, and defending what a Radical Constitutionalism requires in the late hour that our country finds itself in, and then to do it.”
I asked Terry Moe, a Stanford political scientist who has written extensively on the presidency and public bureaucracy, about the Trump-MAGA mind-set and the strategy of the movement.
Moe replied by email:
Trump and his conservative allies regularly label the Democrats as Marxists or communists, but it isn’t even remotely true, and they don’t do it because it’s true. They do it because it is yet another way of demonizing their opponents and using disinformation to energize their base. This is a well-developed conservative strategy, pioneered by Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s, that now lies at the very core of Republican politics.
A big part of this disinformation strategy is to distract from their own anti-democratic behaviors by turning the tables. Trump is engaging in authoritarian power grabs? No, the Democrats are the authoritarians! They are the real threat to democracy! This fact-free turning of the tables is a standard, time-tested rhetorical technique that propagandists of all stripes have routinely employed for the last hundred years. Republicans, since Gingrich, have simply latched onto it. It works.
Dennis Chong, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, expanded on Moe’s analysis, also by email:
Trump’s second term has all the signs of a systematic and detailed plan to carry out his promises of turmoil and revenge. Trump is following the authoritarian playbook of subverting independent institutions, silencing opponents, scapegoating minorities, pardoning those who commit violence on his behalf, using government to settle scores and even suggesting he may stay in power for a third term.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, described Trump’s strategy of invoking a boogeyman — a way-of-life-threatening challenge from the left — in order to win support for a radical, conservative counterattack:
Trump sees the greatest threat to the United States coming from a cabal of “Marxist radicals” and their allies who allegedly champion open borders, D.E.I., transgender rights, and big-spending globalist programs that sap the people’s wealth. This apocalyptic, anti-establishment mode of politics justifies Trump’s extreme, and likely illegal, campaign to gut the federal government.
The goal of this strategy, according to Dallek, is “a deeper agenda: the billionaire duo (Trump and Musk) is using the spear of an all-powerful executive to pierce the very core of modern American liberalism.”
Their targets?
Trump and Musk are eviscerating U.S.A.I.D., a pillar of soft power since it was established under the Kennedy administration. The L.B.J. executive order barring racial discrimination in federal contracts was rescinded as part of Trump’s effort to roll back the 1960s’ civil rights movement’s gains.
The Trump administration seeks to abolish the Department of Education, which was created under Jimmy Carter to advance equality of opportunity in education. Trump and Musk are reinventing the Department of Justice into an instrument of retribution while accusing the Biden administration of having weaponized it against Trump, and they are purging C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents in an apparent effort to recast in Trump’s image Cold War-era national security agencies.
Their attempt to freeze billions in federal funding and their bullying effort to oust from their jobs career civil servants strikes at core expectations of what modern American government ought to do, such as keeping food safe and issuing Social Security payments, norms traceable to at least the 1930s.
Federal judges have begun to intervene, but the Trump-Musk-Vought rampage has already inflicted damage and spread pervasive fear throughout the executive branch. It is not clear whether the six conservatives on the Supreme Court will back the orders and rulings that seek to restrain the Trump administration, almost all of which are temporary or give Trump free rein to continue his assault instead.
Judge Paul A. Engelmayer has temporarily denied Musk access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems amid concerns that such data could be misused. In addition, federal courts have temporarily blocked administration plans to freeze federal spending and to end birthright citizenship
On Feb. 7, Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, issued a temporary restraining order halting the administration’s plan to place 2,200 U.S.A.I.D. workers on leave, while ordering the temporary reinstatement of 500 agency employees already on administrative leave.
There is a growing body of evidence, however, that the Trump administration plans to defy the courts and argue that the judiciary has to step back and give Trump a free hand.
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Hannah Natanson and Jonathan O’Connell reported on Feb. 8 that the goal of the Trump administration continues to be
to gut the civilian work force, assert power over the vast federal bureaucracy and shrink it to levels unseen in at least 20 years. The aim is a diminished government that exerts less oversight over private business, delivers fewer services and comprises a smaller share of the U.S. economy — but is far more responsive to the directives of the president.
While Trump and Musk have received the most attention, Vought is the key architect of the strategy to give Trump unequaled power by treating the president as if he were the chief executive of a private sector corporation, as opposed to a public figure limited by the checks and balances of the tripartite executive, judicial and congressional branches.
Vought is a proponent of the “unitary” theory of the presidency under which the chief executive may consider all federal workers as employees required to follow the agenda of the president.
The clear implication of Vought’s overall argument is that federal workers’ first allegiance must be to Trump and not to the letter of the law.
Peter Shane, professor emeritus of law at Ohio State and currently a scholar in residence at N.Y.U., flatly rejected Trump’s claim that extreme policies are needed to counter the threat of a “Marxist power-grabbing Democratic left.” Shane replied to my inquiry by email:
That claim is doubly wrong. First, I do not know of anything that the federal government does that could credibly be called Marxist; it’s just a scare word that some smart marketing expert realized would animate the MAGA base.
Second, progressive presidents — calling Biden, Obama, or Clinton leftist is likewise a bit of a stretch — are able to do what they do because of discretion vested in the executive branch by statute.
One goal underlies the Trump agenda, Shane wrote:
Putting into the president’s personal control all levers of government power — the power to make and enforce policy, decisions on where and how much to spend money, the ability to deploy force to impose the president’s agenda.
The Trump administration is drawn to this approach toward governing, Shane continued, in response to underlying political trends:
Because of polarization in Congress and MAGA’s unwillingness to compromise, right-wing presidents need to lean in to claims of inherent constitutional power in order to hollow out the administrative state without regard to legislative limits.
I asked Shane what he believes are Trump’s most egregious abuses of power so far. Shane replied with a list:
The scariest move (because most obscure and potentially difficult to unwind) is the letting loose of Musk and his minions to storm through federal information systems with a kind of “shoot now, aim later” approach.
The most egregious from the point of view of incipient authoritarianism is the attempt to rework the civil service system so that anyone doing policy-relevant work is fireable at will by the President (the Schedule F idea).
The most threatening to Congress as an institution are the cutting off of program funding — Vought has made clear that Trump will challenge laws intended to compel the executive branch to spend appropriated funds — and the firing of administrators, such as N.L.R.B. or FEC members, protected by statute from discharge at will.
In terms of individual rights, the attempt to limit birthright citizenship and the purging of all D.E.I. activity within and beyond the government top the list.
In terms of outright killing people, even the temporary cessation of U.S.A.I.D. funding is likely to have that effect. And all of this is a package that makes a mockery of Trump’s oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
While acknowledging that in part they are speculating, Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard who served in the George W. Bush administration, and Bob Bauer, who served in the Obama administration and now teaches at N.Y.U., believe that the trio of Trump, Musk and Vought have a radical plan based in large part on the Trump administration’s belief that it is battling an enemy within.
In their essay “The Trump Executive Orders as ‘Radical Constitutionalism,’ ” Goldsmith and Bauer ask, “Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence?”
Goldsmith and Bauer suggest “a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.”
What is this change?
The constitutionally and lawfully questionable executive orders Trump has issued, Goldsmith and Bauer write, “seem more like pieces of a program, in the form of law defiance, for a mini-constitutional convention to ‘amend’ Article II (defining the scope and limits of Presidential power) across a broad front.”
The goal of this program, they argue, is to impose on the body politic Vought’s “radical constitutionalism,” a movement in which “the Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years.”
Vought, according to Goldsmith and Bauer, ‘strongly implied that an element of radical constitutionalism is to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.”
If that is the case, the flood of legally questionable executive orders, in Goldsmith and Bauer’s view,
Are not merely setting up Supreme Court test cases. They are, rather, bombarding the Court with a wave of legal challenges about the proper scope of Article II with the aim of provoking a confrontation over the legitimacy of the existing legal order, at least with regard to Article II, and perhaps more broadly.
In other words, what we have seen during the first three weeks of the Trump presidency may be the precursor to an even more radical assertion of presidential authority unconstrained by either Congress or the courts.
Over the past weekend, evidence began to emerge that Goldsmith and Bauer might be right.
For example, on Feb. 9, Vice President JD Vance posted the following on X:
If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.
On the same day, also in a posting on X, Musk denounced the judge who blocked Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!”
Trump and his allies have a grand strategy: first, assert unprecedented control over the executive branch; second, force the judiciary into submission and disregard its rulings; finally, reward allies, punish adversaries and rule without constraint.
What could go wrong with that?
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