This time around, Trump is all business—and his singular mission is to overturn the basic canons of constitutional self-government.
Donald Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday, January 27, 2025. (Will Oliver / EPA /Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The initial days of Donald Trump’s first presidential term were mostly taken up by buffoonery—notably Trump’s determination to depict a middling inauguration turnout as a Woodstock-scale gathering and his never-fulfilled pledge to build a wall along the country’s southern border.
The initial days of Trump’s second term have had an altogether different, and more disturbing, tenor. This time, the White House is light on showboating and bluster. Ten days into Trump 2.0, it’s frightfully clear that Trump and his inner circle of true-believing adjutants are all business—and that their singular mission is to overturn the basic canons of constitutional self-government.
Trump’s splashiest show of authoritarian executive strength was the suspension of federal grant spending—a flagrantly illegal usurpation of power by the Oval Office that violated both the core constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers and the 1974 Impoundment Control Act. Matthew J. Vaeth, Trump’s acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a memo that the spending halt was temporary. After a DC federal judge blocked enforcement of the OMB order, Vaeth issued a follow-up memo rescinding it, though the White House then confusingly declared that the freeze was still in place. Whatever winds up happening, this battle is not going away.
One thing is clear amid all the chaos. Just like Trump’s barrage of bullshit emergency executive orders—which attacked everything from trans rights to immigration to DEI programs to America’s international environmental obligations—the throttling of federal spending authorized by Congress is a dictatorial power grab, plain and simple It’s also straight out of the Project 2025 putsch agenda that Trump dishonestly claimed had nothing to do with his plan for government. Indeed, the meta-data from Vaeth’s memo indicates that its two principal authors are Noah Peters and James Sherk, who boast credentials from both Project 2025 and its think-tank sponsor, the Heritage Foundation. “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo asserts in a classic flourish of demented Project 2025 culture-war boilerplate.
This unprecedented and unfounded shutdown of basic government operations caps a dizzying series of tyrannical actions during the Trump administration’s first 10 days.
The tenor of MAGA impunity was enshrined at the outset, with Trump’s sweeping pardon of all 1600 January 6 rioters—an announcement that the effort to undermine elections and unilaterally claim the presidency via violent vigilantism was something that entailed no serious legal consequences. Combined with the withdrawal of security protection from Trump’s perceived enemies such as Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo, it was an incitement to further mob violence in service of MAGA objectives.
Trump also moved swiftly to revive a stymied initiative from his first term: stripping basic employment protections from most federal government employees. To drive home the real meaning of this move, Trump functionaries promptly fanned out to federal agencies to administer de facto loyalty oaths and to document MAGA conversion testimonials. This drive goes hand in glove with the grant shutdown; both radical moves seek to convert federal agencies into obliging outlets of MAGA agitprop, at the expense of basic income supports, emergency assistance, and social safety net spending.
Other abuses of power authored by Trump in the first 10 days serve the same core directive of maximum MAGA fealty. That’s why Trump’s acting attorney general cashiered the legal team that had worked on special prosecutor Jack Smith’s cases against Trump, and why Trump dismissed 17 inspector generals without cause, again in brazen defiance of the separation of powers. In this Trump White House, government officials possessing any modicum of independent oversight and judgment are to be ushered to the exits with all deliberate speed, since they are first-order obstacles to the Trumpian model of governance, which operates on the interlocking mandates of cronyism, corruption, and ideological obeisance.
This revolutionary vision of executive branch impunity comes largely from the man for whom Vaeth is keeping the director’s seat warm at OMB: Russell Vought, the self-professed Christian nationalist who ran the agency during Trump’s first term. Vought was the operational director of Project 2025, and in the chapter he contributed to the document, he declared war on a “sprawling federal bureaucracy” that, he claimed, “is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly ‘woke’ faction of the country.”
To face down this threat, Vought took the bogus right-wing theory of the “unitary executive”–a quasi-monarchial presidency granted unilateral power to reshape government operations in its own preferred image—to extremes that would make even Dick Cheney blush. Like Trump, Vought fashioned a make-believe emergency to justify this power grab. “The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair,” he wrote. “Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.” Under Trump, Vought declared, a chief directive of the OMB would be to shut down federal agencies “that attempt to protect their own institutional interests and foreclose certain avenues based on the mere assertion (and not proof) that the law disallows it or that, conversely, attempt to disregard the clear statutory commands of Congress.”
The overriding goal of reinventing American governance as an executive plaything rests, unsurprisingly, on a brand of Christian nationalist hero worship, with Donald Trump in the starring role. The presidential task at hand, Vought wrote, “will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”
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Half that prophecy is now coming to pass: Trump is bending and breaking the federal workforce and basic government operations to suit his authoritarian whim. There is, however, no corresponding transfer of power and resources to smaller-scale units of governance in the offing. Federal grants account for 36 percent of state government budgets in the United States. Add in basic healthcare subventions and income supports such as Medicaid, and Trump’s unforced government shutdown is a staggering blow to the working-class constituency that MAGA plays at protecting.
But none of that matters in a second Trump term, unshackled from the need to court support for a reelection campaign. The Trump White House is essentially engineering a version of the capital strike in Ayn Rand’s unhinged plutocrats’ fable Atlas Shrugged—only instead of rallying notional wealth creators to the vanguard, it has mobilized Christian nationalist thugs and shameless MAGA enforcers to the front ranks of a nihilist exercise in revenge, self-dealing, and oligarchic wish-fulfillment fantasy. John Galt is mutating into the Joker before our eyes, and militant evangelical apparatchiks like Russell Vought are dead set on giving him all the power they can.
Chris LehmannTwitterChris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).