Ezra Klein (5:25)

Got a hammer? Muzzle velocity?

Steve Bannon (5:28)

Muzzle velocity. Remember, if you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one. Then the impression of Trump's power remains, and the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the Reality of weakness. Don't believe him. You could see this a few ways. Is Trump playing a part? Is he making a bet or is he triggering a crisis? Those, I think, are the options. And I'm not certain that even he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as a bet, a calculation, then here is a bet he's making. Maybe this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It's not impossible to imagine that bet paying off for him. But the odds are bad. So what if the bet fails? What if Trump's arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis. Does he just ignore the court's ruling? To do that would be to attempt a kind of couple. I wonder if they have a stomach for that. The withdrawal of the OMB order to me suggests they don't. Because bravado aside, Trump's political capital is thin. Both in his first and his second terms, he entered office with approval ratings below that of any other president in the modern era. Gallup is Trump's approval rating at 47%. That is about 10 points beneath Joe Biden in January of 2021. There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these very same directives as legislation to pass through Con. A more powerful executive could convince Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes, or to reform the civil service to give him the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. And there's a good reason to do that. To write these changes into legislation would make them both more durable and would allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. He would be reforming the entire system. Even if Trump's real aim is just to bring the civil service to heel, even if all he really wants to do is rid the state of his opponents and turn it to his own ends, he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. It's rule one of a power grab. He never wanted to look like a power grab. But Republicans at the moment, they have only a three seat edge in the House, smallest majority since the Great Depression. They have a 53 seat majority in the Senate. Trump is obviously doing nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda's legislation, it would fail. It would likely die in the House. And even if it didn't. It would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. And Trump doesn't want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare appeal. Congress is a place where you can loosen. That is the tension at the heart of Trump's whole strategy. Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is doing that, hoping that perception then becomes reality. But that can only happen if we believe him. This flurry of activity, it's meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they're ready this time. They've been preparing, plotting, scheming. They will control events rather than be controlled by them, control institutions rather than be curbed by them. But the closer you look, even at this first two weeks, the less true it seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against each other in the press. Already we learned that the OMB directive was drafted reportedly without the input or oversight of key Trump officials. It didn't go through the proper approval process, an administration official told the Washington Post. For that to be the process and product of such a sweeping signature initiative in the second week of a president's second term, it's embarrassing. But it's not just a spending freeze. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the deep state they believe hampered them in the first term. And a big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides now at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email that got sent out to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent out to Twitter employees after the acquisition. A fork in the road It's a kind of bragging Elon wants you. He wants everybody to know it was him. The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout. Agree to resign, and in theory at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Doge account on X described it this take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill while receiving your full government pay and benefits. The Washington Post reported that the email blindsided many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that. It blindsided many of the people who are going to have to run these agencies that are now going to be dotted by resignations. I suspect Musk thinks of the federal workforce as this huge mass of woke and largely useless ideologues. For most federal workers, they have very little to do with politics. About 16% of them work in healthcare. These are nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs Department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? How many primary care doctors treating veterans is he hoping Take a buyout? Twitter worked terribly after Musk's takeover. It had these frequent outages and bugs. But its outages are not a national scandal. When VA health care degrades, it is a national scandal. To have launched this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything later goes wrong. What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They don't have some secret reservoir of focus and attention. The rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself, that it is, in a sense, a replacement for an actual strategy for thinking and talking things through, for consultation, for planning things out. Don't believe them. I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive, and asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he said was that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular, that made his opposition weaker and more confused, if he worked by stealth, if he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the state in the places where it was weakest, where people couldn't really see him doing it. But Trump didn't do any of that.

Ezra Klein (12:36)

Instead, muzzle velocity.

Steve Bannon (12:39)

And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless and absent after the election, now it's beginning to rouse itself. There's a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads, this non buyout really seems to have backfired. I'll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I'm fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible. As I write this, it's been upvoted more than 39,000 times, and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. The people who pose you ideologically, they're going to fight you. Offering them a buyout isn't very helpful at all. In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in a district that Trump had won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back as he zeroed in on protecting the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn't building support right now. He's losing it. He isn't fracturing his opposition. He is finally uniting it. This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and that Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, you have to keep moving. You have to keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear to keep the media and the opposition overwhelmed. But then you overwhelm yourself. They are flooding their own zone. I don't know that Trump sees his own fork in the road coming. He may believe that he has all the power he's claiming. That would be a mistake on his part. It would be a self deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he convinces the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have. The first two weeks of his presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off balance. He is trying to convince you of something that isn't true. Don't believe him.

Ezra Klein (15:00)

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