Many assumed Donald Trump would be governing in a second term with no guardrails. But guardrails are in fact still there. Understanding these constraints is key to defeating him.
As soon as Donald Trump won the election in November, predictions about his second term began to fly. Among liberals and leftists, the dominant interpretation has been that a second Trump term would be “without guardrails,” as Ezra Klein has put it. While much of the Republican Party, from Mike Pence to Reince Priebus, was dedicated to restraining Trump in his first term, now the party is united around Trump as Führer. Accordingly, we should expect Trump to govern in an even more authoritarian manner than his first term.
In less than two weeks, however, this argument is rather closer to the Trump administration’s self-image than its actual practice. While Trump has the capacity to do incredible damage in his presidency, he is no more operating without constraints this term than he was in his first administration. Understanding these constraints is key to defeating him.
Trump’s first two weeks have been filled with executive orders. He has rolled back a number of Joe Biden’s orders and issued about forty of his own. All of these orders are varying combinations of ill-considered, sadistic, superficial. But the most potentially consequential action came from a slightly lower bureaucratic level, in a memo from Trump’s acting budget director on January 27. This memo called for a pause on “all federal financial assistance,” by which it meant the various grants and loans the federal government provides to states, cities, and nongovernmental organizations of various sorts. This money comes to some $3 trillion a year — a massive spigot of cash to suddenly turn off in the name of rooting out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”
Federal grants and loans fund everything from homeless shelters to government mortgage backing to Medicaid. In the twenty-four hours after the memo was issued, all manner of institutions were thrown into chaos, with deep uncertainty as to when the funds might begin to flow again. By the end of the day on January 28, the Medicaid reimbursement portals, which hospitals and doctors use to get payment for treating Medicaid patients, were offline in all fifty states.
The freezing of Medicaid payments led to a major backlash. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, over 40 percent of births in the United States are covered by Medicaid. State budgets across the country, including in red states, are dependent on federal Medicaid payments and would be crippled if they suddenly stopped.
By the end of the day on January 28, the administration was backing down, claiming that its order was never meant to apply to programs like Medicaid. Instead, it attributed the reimbursement portal shutdown to “malicious compliance” by nefarious deep state bureaucrats. It also retreated on its freeze of the foreign aid program PEPFAR, which pays for HIV medications in poor countries and has saved tens of millions of lives. As a coup de grâce, a federal judge blocked the federal grant freeze in response to a lawsuit. On January 29, the administration rescinded the memo.
This episode reveals that the administration is far from all-powerful. To be sure, they are attempting a radical restructuring of the American state. But the manner in which they are attempting it, copying Trump’s new bosom-buddy Mark Zuckerberg’s old motto of “move fast and break things,” is leaving them open to counterattack. Many government programs are politically popular, particularly in the face of proposed cuts. Poorly written legal documents that simply call for slashing everything create otherwise avoidable backlashes.
For most of Trump’s administration up to now, liberals have been cowed by his shock-and-awe tactics. But the administration’s embarrassing reversal on federal grants shows that Trump’s word is not law, and that he is vulnerable to policy backlashes just as every president has been.
This is not a reason for complacency. Trump has made it clear that his plan is to make the United States a more brutal and exploitative country to live in for virtually everyone. But his defeat here shows what building a successful opposition will look like. It will mean rallying around politically popular programs like Medicaid and using them to push a broader argument that the welfare state makes the country a better place to live.
In particular, Trump has made a major miscalculation in this case by raising the political salience of Medicaid in advance of the legislative budgeting process that will begin later this year. For some time now, the GOP has been saying that major cuts to Medicaid are on the menu in the first budget the new congress will write. This is an ambitious goal. Medicaid is not an easy target. Much of the health care industry, which constitutes a fifth of the country’s GDP, depends on it in one way or another. Even the most deranged Republicans in Congress understand that hospitals closing in their district is bad for them politically.
Now, even before that budgeting process has begun, large numbers of Americans have been awakened to the fact that the administration is, in one way or another, threatening Medicaid. This is a foundation for the Left to build on. As their longer-term plans for the program become clearer, a “Hands Off Medicaid” campaign may be needed. The Tea Party was built on opposition to Barack Obama’s health care policy, and it gathered momentum through packing meetings with people ready to scream at their representative over what they thought were threats to their health care. The Left should adopt the same playbook to thwart Trump’s attempt to butcher the welfare state.