Subtlety is not their agenda
I’ve long described the right-wing policy ratchet this way: Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push them back. No pushback, or if it fails? New line. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
That was timorous, beta pre-Trumpism. The authoritarian goal today is no line at all.
David Graham describes Trump 2.0’s stumble over pausing funding already allocated by Congress as more than ineptitude. “It’s part of a carefully thought-out program of grabbing power for the executive branch,” and not simply chaos, but “a battle over priorities within the Republican Party.”
They may mismanage business, but they still mean business:
“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people,” Trump’s nominee to head the OMB, Russell Vought, wrote in Project 2025, the blueprint for a conservative administration created by the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-aligned right-wing think tank. The strategy is to seize power and dare both Congress and the courts to stop it. This tactic is unpredictable, as this week’s misadventures show, but it’s also relatively low-risk. The ideologues inside the administration want to see what they can get away with, and if it doesn’t work, so be it.
Find the line. Step over it. Dare anyone to push you back.
Returning power “to the American people” is a cruel conceit. That’s the last thing Trump and his backers intend. Trump’s motto may be “L’État, c’est moi,” but lackeys like Vought mean to use him as a front for their own power grab, starting with challenging the Impoundment Control Act Vought refused to commit to following during his confirmation hearings.
Trump simply might have asked Congress to claw back the funds instead of issuing his failed edict. He has the support there to pull it off, writes Graham. But seizing executive power is the real objective.
Graham concludes:
Because this effort is core to the ideological agenda of Project 2025 principals such as Vought, the revocation of this executive order likely won’t be the last effort we see along these lines. And having to back down for political reasons tends to make the internal battles only fiercer. Trump’s attempts to decimate the civil service and clear out career bureaucrats are well known, but Project 2025’s authors reserved special animus for those they expected to be on their side during the first Trump administration.
“I had a front-row seat on many of these issues and importantly [saw] how bad thinking would end up preventing what we were trying to accomplish, from less-than-vigorous political appointees who refused to occupy the moral high ground, particularly in the first two years of the president’s administration,” Vought said in a 2023 speech. He has no intention of letting that happen again.
We’re not in Kansas anymore. Brace yourselves for a particularly Orwellian period in which the cure for bad thinking is right-thinking, as with fringe ideologues it always is. Occupying “the moral high ground” transmits a darker, dog-whistle meaning most Americans will not catch. Its meaning has nothing to do with preserving the republic for which the flag stands, or did, any more than a MAGA hat means “patriot.”
The civil war of which the right has long dreamt and for which cosplaying militiamen have long armed themselves is here. But it is a cold one not fought with AR-15s but with a string of proxy battles and political power plays meant to whittle away at the republic from the edges, Ho Chi Minh-style.
A smaht, I say, a smaht chicken would be more subtle so as not to be so obvious in Washington. But these amped-up testosterone junkies are mini-Lokis not interested in subterfuge. They want conquest and want to be seen doing it.
Tony Stark: Yeah, divide and conquer is great, but he knows he has to take us out to win, right? THAT’S what he wants. He wants to beat us, he wants to be seen doing it. He wants an audience.
Steve Rogers: Right. I caught his act at Stuttgart.
Tony Stark: Yeah, that was just previews. This is – this is opening night. And Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva, right? He wants flowers, he wants parades. He wants a monument built to the skies with his name plastered…
[Stark pauses; he and Rogers look at each other knowingly]
Tony Stark: Sonofabitch!