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President Donald Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad. He likes the ring of calling himself king.
No one can absorb it all. By the time you try to process one big thing — he covets Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza; he turns away from historic alliancesand Ukraine; fires many thousands of federal workers, then brings some right back; raises doubts whether he will obey laws he doesn’t like; orders an about-face in the missions of department after department; declares there are only two genders, which federal documents will henceforth call sexes; announces heavy tariffs, suspends them, then imposes some — three more big things have happened.
Trump’s core supporters are thrilled with what they see. Those who don’t like him watch in horror. The nation is far from any consensus on what makes America great and what may make it sink.
What’s undeniable is that Trump has ushered in the sharpest change of direction for the country at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. But the long-term implications of Trump’s national reset, and by extension his own legacy, cannot yet be determined.
“Make American Great Again” figure Steve Bannon calls all this action “muzzle velocity” — firing every way at once to confuse the enemy. The barrage has left a variety of foreign leaders and many public servants picking figurative buckshot out of their backsides.
Paul Light, an expert on the workings of government and the civil service, reaches for another analogy: “It’s the never-ending volcano. It just doesn’t stop, and it’s hot.”
Says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service: “We’re essentially playing Russian roulette and they just added a bunch more bullets to the chamber.”
Or is it instead a “controlled burn,” as Kevin Roberts, an architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, puts it? “A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish,” he asserts. Project 2025 offered Trump a preelection blueprint for some of what is happening now.
Some 75,000 federal workers accepted the new administration’s “deferred resignation” proposal in exchange for financial incentives, and tens of thousands more have been laid off or are in line to be, out of a civilian federal workforce of about 2.4 million, excluding postal workers.
Democrats, the minority in Congress, and the broader political opposition are mulling which fights are worth fighting and which are not, out of so many to choose from. “Democrats,” said one of them, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, “are not going to engage in the outrage Olympics.”
At the moment, polls suggest slightly less than half of U.S. adults like the Republican president’s handling of his job, a tick better than Democrat Joe Biden’s approval when he left office in January. That sentiment could shift for the better or worse in an hour, after the next big things.
