One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.
The targets of Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.
J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before
been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been “destructive,” let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.
Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.
Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.
“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”
I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”
I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique with respect to his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:
There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in, and the scope of Trump et al’s. intentions.
Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?
Wilentz’s reply:
Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.
I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts the answer is already distressingly permanent.”
From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:
The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long-lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of non-politicization in government service have taken a huge hit.
I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:
The “comp” that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.
Another question: How much is Trump’s second term agenda the invention of conservative elites and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?
“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”
In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025
was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump, or even Trumpism.
The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.
In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,
It has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.
One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged American’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.
Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:
The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king, and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.
Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security, and the foundation for our democracy.
Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman’s view,
but among the top four in U.S. News rankings (Buchanan, Pierce, Andrew Johnson), Trump was the only one not associated with the civil war. He is proving to be superlative within that small club and may yet overtake his historical competition for the top ranking.
Trump’s second term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven:
There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., social security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.
Ideological loyalists such as Stephen Miller and Project 2025’s primary pen, Russell Vought, now O.M.B. director, seized a longstanding agenda and have the skills to implement it, Vought particularly so; recall pre-election when Vought boasted of inflicting maximum trauma on career civil servants.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment:
What will be hard to fix from all of this is a substantial undermining of trust in American government that created important alliances and a strong economy. The poster child of ruined trust is Canada.
Canadians have been dependable allies and economic partners for decades, but President Trump’s preposterous ideas about taking over Canada have angered Canadians to a point of at least difficult return. Trust in relationships is easily lost and hard to regain.
Similarly, Cain continued,
The war on academic research will have long lasting implications for technical innovation in America. Scientists who cannot support their labs while President Trump holds their funds hostage for the sake of MAGA theater over the next four years will take their labs elsewhere.
China will be a winner in this. Uncertainty about government commitments will make it harder for investors to take basic and applied research in universities and move it to market. The longer the time horizon for investments, the more trust and stability matter. In the end, disrupters like Trump and Musk leave us with a much bigger legacy of doubt and uncertainty than achievement.
Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Donald Trump.
Destruction has a role in both business and government. The creative disruption of technological innovation can destroy some businesses and elevate better ones. Similarly, political destruction such as democracy revolutions have dramatically improved the form and function of government.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are disrupters from the economic realm who have migrated into the political realm. The migration has been rocky for both.
Musk and Trump, in Cain’s view, “are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.” They
may make enough money out of their deals to do well for themselves. The same cannot be said for the Republican Party. If things get bad enough, we could be looking at 1974 all over again.
In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email:
Will the Trump presidency be as destructive as James Buchanan’s presidency, which led directly to the Civil War?
What I think we can say with confidence is that no president in living memory has attacked the sources of American strength and dynamism in the way that Trump already has done. In particular, his withdrawal from American global leadership and his sabotage of American scientific and technological pre-eminence — at precisely the moment we are vying with China for superiority in those areas — has no parallel.
Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he fears that
The damage is permanent. Not because it cannot be fixed — it can be with effort. But rather because nobody will ever trust the United States again that something Trump like won’t recur. Would you as a young person take a federal job today? Would you as a foreign student trust that you could attend university in the United States safely? Would you as a European government trust the United States to maintain the security of your secrets?
Rosenzweig believes that
Trump was elected to enrich and protect Trump. That was his only motivation. On issues of direct concern (e.g., getting a plane as a gift from Qatar or profiting off crypto currency), he has views. Otherwise he is an empty vessel.
I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States.
Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email:
I previously felt that the predictions of authoritarian government in the United States were exaggerated. The pace and scope of actions in the early months of Trump 2 have changed my assessment.
The levels of open corruption, the direct challenges to the rule of law, the assaults on institutions have been larger and more consequential than I expected. We are in a period of grave political peril.
From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzgerald, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine “whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.”
Such evaluations
strip these individuals from their historical moment and context in ways that suggest they lived in similar times. “Most corrupt” and “most destructive” are hard to assess when we look at someone like Buchanan whose presided over the near sundering of the union in the pre-Civil War era and the fractious and dangerous political moment we are living through today.
Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that “it’s fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there’s no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.”
“The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early twentieth century,” Fitzpatrick wrote, and “the rhetoric abroad in the land today”:
is a shocking reminder of the distance the nation traveled over the course of the twentieth century and how quickly those gains are being recklessly swept away. To see the effort to dismantle what was achieved with great difficulty in the realm of civil and voting rights in the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and subsequent administrations is appalling.
Some of those I questioned argued that Trump’s assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters.
Russell Riley, professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda:
Any president seeking fundamental changes in our political system needs to be empowered by the American people to take on that challenge. This typically comes from two principal factors historically: (1) A resounding electoral victory based on (2) a clear program openly taken to the voters.
Trump, in contrast, “barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed as a candidate Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.”
Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means
that the president is obligated to run that policy through the usual constitutional policy mills, respectful of the prerogatives of the legislature and the courts. That is not being done. A reliance on exceptional powers requires exceptional authorization. Normally a president may not mandate his own leadership.
The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth.
Where will this frightening development take us?
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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