We're not ready for the chaos

Trump will get a sliver of the policy he wants but all of the disorder

Over the weekend prior to Christmas, the president-elect threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal, which has been owned by the sovereign nation of Panama for decades. And then he restated his intent to purchase Greenland. In his Christmas message to the country, Trump lied about the Canal and indicated an intention to purchase or seize Panama, Greenland, and Canada. This came after a week in which he and his centi-billionaire benefactor (and auto manufacturer and government contractor) Elon Musk attempted to blow up a negotiated federal budget deal and nearly caused a government shutdown. He’s already the King of Chaos, and he won’t be sworn in for another month.

Here's the thing. Trump doesn’t and won’t have the formal powers to do a lot of the things he talks about doing. He can’t just unilaterally take back the Panama Canal or buy Greenland or make U.S. states out of Canadian provinces. He can’t just toss Liz Cheney in jail. He can’t just end Obamacare and replace it, or lower prices or hand eastern Ukraine over to Russia. He can’t compel companies to end DEI hiring practices or trans-friendly employee policies. And he can’t simply deport 10-20 million residents with the wave of his hand.

But he definitely thinks he can do at least some of this. And more importantly, he can create a lot of chaos and panic in the process.

It was a minor thing, but to me one of the most instructive moments from his first term was from August 2019, when Trump insisted that Alabama was in danger from Hurricane Dorian even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) said nothing of the sort in its forecast. And, fine, he made a misstatement, which anyone who’s in front of a microphone a lot will do from time to time. But instead of correcting himself or just letting it go, he insisted he was right, and produced an obviously doctored map allegedly showing Alabama to be in the storm’s path. NOAA tweeted that the President was inaccurate, but then, under increasing pressure from Trump, the agency refuted its own tweet and changed its forecast to match his made-up claim. Trump didn’t exert any specific authority inherent in the presidency. Rather, he made a stink. Sometimes when he makes a stink he forgets about things that make him upset and sometimes he remembers, and when he remembers, he punishes. So rather than stick to a scientifically defensible weather forecast, the government agency just acceded to him.

We saw a version of that recently when ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump, paying him $15 million because George Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been found liable for rape (instead of the slightly-more-accurate, distinction-without-a-difference, liable for sexual abuse), a case that ABC News likely would have won. Maybe ABC wanted to win his favor, maybe they just didn’t want to be in a legal battle with the next president, but the result was that a major news organization handed an incoming president money and an apology for negative coverage.

Relatedly, Trump’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer because they ran a poll showed him trailing Kamala Harris in Iowa is, of course, absurd, and it seems highly unlikely to succeed. But again, he’s trying to impose costs on people and organizations he doesn’t like, and he’s proven he can bully people into submission regardless of his actual legal standing or authority.

You very likely haven’t seen anything yet. This next term is likely to be like these above examples multiplied a hundredfold. He’s definitely not going to get everything he wants, or even most of it, in terms of policy. But he’s going to push. And unlike in the last administration, when he had numerous staffers who tried to restrain his worst instincts or distract him from following through on them, he’ll have a party, a staff, a congressional majority, and a bureaucracy that’s far more compliant. And sometimes they’ll just cede ground to him because not doing so will seem worse.

Will he actually successfully remove 10 million undocumented immigrants from the United States? Highly unlikely. But he’ll probably pick a few cities as test cases. He’ll get massive pushback from protesting residents, some elected officials, and possibly even law enforcement in those cities. There will be violent demonstrations, horrific news accounts, and dozens of lawsuits filed against his actions. People’s lives will be turned upside-down. Children will be torn from their parents. People will be placed in detention centers indefinitely. And there’s a decent chance that, years later, Trump’s actions will be ruled unconstitutional.

But in the mean time, he’ll have achieved his short term goal. He’ll be at the center of attention, he’ll have angered the people he wanted to anger, and he will look tough for the people he wanted to look tough for. And he will have wrecked a lot of people’s lives, even if it turns out he didn’t have the authority to do that.

There’s a big difference between what a president is empowered to do by the Constitution what one can do anyway. Accountability for presidents has always been a pretty murky area, but it became far more so when the Supreme Court just basically publicly announced that presidents — or Trump anyway — simply aren’t subject to the law.

This does not mean that Trump’s political opponents are helpless. Far from it. Jamelle Bouie is quite right that an organized opposition party (e.g.: something Democrats are not currently acting like) can limit what a president can do. They can simply make it politically costlier to do each new action. They can organize public opinion in a way that draws attention to each unpopular thing Trump does. They can make it more politically dangerous for Republican members of Congress to sign onto each thing he does.

And beyond that, while Trump is quite skilled at inventing presidential powers that don’t really exist, he’s not always great at using the ones that do exist, such as negotiation and diplomacy. He did not coordinate things well with Republicans in Congress during his first term, and sometimes just tried to cajole them through tweets rather than get involved in the wheeling and dealing of interbranch politics.

But rest assured, this next administration will be chaotic and exhausting, and that’s the point. Don’t go for the “This is a distraction from the more important issue of X” arguments. The distraction is the attraction. Trump will use many of the powers he has as president and will attempt to use a good many more. And how many of those he is actually allowed to use will depend a great deal on what others in the political system willingly surrender.