It’s hard to see in a blizzard. When so much is coming at you, one thing after another, it becomes impossible to discern anything but a blur. You become disoriented and lose your balance. If that was the aim of Donald Trump’s first 100 hours in office, it’s definitely working.
The bombardment of executive orders, decisions and declarations has been unrelenting, a shock-and-awe display of presidential action that has left its targets reeling. Consider what Trump has done this week alone.
He has withdrawn the US from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization. He has pardoned not just some, as promised, of those convicted for their role in attempting to overturn a democratic election on 6 January 2021, but all 1,500, including those guilty of violence, much of it directed at police officers. He has sought to end the right, enshrined in the constitution, to automatic citizenship of those born in the US.
He has reversed measures to address the climate crisis, ending incentives to buy electric vehicles and pausing all leases for offshore windfarms. He has sent thousands of US troops to the southern border, as he prepares for mass deportations of immigrants without documents. If local officials try to stand in the way of the dawn raids and roundups, he has ordered federal prosecutors to subject them to criminal investigation.
Trump has proposed a new mechanism, the External Revenue Service, to impose tariffs on goods imported from abroad, thereby imperilling the system of global trade on which the world economy depends. He has said he will seize an asset, the Panama Canal, that is part of the sovereign territory of an ally, Panama. Meanwhile, his most powerful lieutenant greeted an inauguration crowd with what looked unmistakably like two Sieg Heil salutes, as if hailing the dawn of a new age of fascism.
That list is far from exhaustive. Doubtless it will be longer by the time you read this, and longer still by tomorrow. And yet all the items on it would have dominated the news for a week had they occurred on their own. Instead they have come in a blizzard and the media, both conventional and social, cannot keep up. It simply doesn’t have the bandwidth. It means voters can barely absorb, let alone scrutinise, what’s being done.
All this suits Trump well: potential opponents are still getting to grips with item one when he’s already moved on to item four, leaving them no time or space to mount any kind of challenge. But that’s not the only thing hobbling the opposition’s ability to react.
There is also the refusal to admit that what is happening is happening. Note the response of Trump’s choice for US ambassador to the UN, Elise Stefanik, when asked about the X owner’s straight-arm gestures. “No, Elon Musk did not do those salutes,” she replied. You did not see what you saw.
Still, the problem does not lie only with the Trumpians and their gaslighting, nor even with the hardcore Maga supporters who tell themselves that uncomfortable facts – such as Trump’s pardoning of thugs who attacked the police – are the inventions of a biased media. It also lies with Democrats, liberals and others who are not sure how to deal with Trump the second time around.
Most are unwilling to repeat the “resistance” talk of early in his first term. It clearly didn’t work, if only in the sense that Trump is back. They are conscious, too, that Trump won a mandate in November, fretting that to oppose a president who won the popular vote is to tell the American people they got it wrong. They also worry about seeming hysterical, of appearing to have succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome. And they don’t want to be gullible, taking the culture war bait and fighting the very battles Trump has picked for them, battles that usually put them on the wrong side of the electorate.
All those dangers are real, but there is a greater danger still, and its name is Donald Trump. This past week has confirmed the nature of the threat and why it has to be confronted. The first step is to try to peer through the blizzard and see what’s going on, understanding how it will affect the world’s most powerful democracy and, therefore, the rest of us.
For what we are witnessing is an assertion of raw power and an attempt to exercise it without limit. That, surely, is the way to understand his attempt to revoke birthright citizenship. In part, it is the perennial move of all ultranationalists – seeking to define who belongs to the nation and who is shut out, in this case the children of new, unapproved arrivals – but it is also about flexing muscle. Team Trump knows that the 14th amendment to the US constitution says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States,” and that the supreme court is duty bound to strike down any measure that contradicts that principle. But he’s doing it anyway.
Some suggest it’s because he relishes the prospect of a long legal battle, in which he can play the anti-immigration warrior against the system. But just as plausible is that he thinks a supreme court shaped in his image, with three of the nine judges appointed by him, will not refuse him entirely, that it will meet him halfway. And if it doesn’t, maybe he’ll just defy it. (JD Vance has already made noises in that direction.) That would be to upend the entire US system of government, to turn America from a constitutional democracy into an autocracy. As the columnist Ezra Klein puts it, the question Donald Trump is asking is: “How much can he be king?”
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Similar thinking surely motivates the sweeping pardon for the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021, those Trump unforgivably refers to as “the J6 hostages”. By that move, he has essentially licensed political violence, so long as it is committed in support of him. Those released will now “stand by”, as he once requested of the far-right Proud Boys, eager to serve as a well-armed praetorian guard ready to do whatever the leader tells them needs to be done.
That mass pardon has set a precedent that does not merely undermine the rule of law, it suspends it: any Trumpist moved to attack the police could be similarly exempted from legal consequences, if the king so wishes. Democrats will struggle to press this case given Joe Biden’s parting pardons to his family, but Trump now wields a tool that, in effect, extends the blanket immunity granted to him by the supreme court to his supporters.
This is the picture that emerges from this week’s Washington snowstorm of activity. Of a president and his ruling circle asserting their power and, in so doing, exposing the weakness, or absence, of anybody willing and able to curb them. Musk’s Nazi-style salute and the craven response to it – with much of the media tongue-tied and even the Anti-Defamation League unable to call it anything worse than “an awkward gesture” – have revealed the extent to which Trump world has shaken off all restraint. The loudest howl of protest this week came from the still, small voice of an Episcopal bishop.
Whether it’s the obvious abuse of power involved in stripping a former adviser and ally of personal security because he dared criticise Trump or in profiting from high office by issuing a cryptocurrency meme coin on the eve of the inauguration, the picture is clear: the most powerful office in the world is becoming the court of an emperor, untrammelled by alliances, the constitution or the law. The task is to see it.
