Trump “shock and awe” approach is opportunistic — but it’s also strategic. It has muddled the landscape enough that the media simply chases each incident. The reality: Trump is dismantling almost a century and a half of reform and progress, from Presidents Republican and Democratic, to create exactly the royal Presidency the founders warned against.
Media coverage implies that there is no logic to Trump’s assault on the American state. History suggests otherwise. Trump’s favorite President, Andrew Jackson, exemplified the pre-reform American Presidency: “to the victor belong the spoils.” Trump’s first month in office have launched a systematic effort to roll back five waves of statutory and normative reforms of Jacksonian “spoils” government. Each seemingly random Trump spasm conceals an attack on one of those five waves of reform. Trump is undoing almost 200 years of American progress.
Splashing on the front pages all month is Trump’s earliest but rarely mentioned, target, the Pendelton Act of 1883 which created the modern Civil Service. Pendleton was passed after a disgruntled job seeker assassinated President James Garfield. It was explicitly intended to replace the spoils system, and create a merit and skilled based civil service The high point of Pendleton reform was Teddy Roosevelt’s creation of the independent federal agency, whose heads could not be fired at will: the first was the Interstate Commerce Commission. This doctrine, that Congress could constrain Presidential whim, was upheld unanimously in the 1930’s by the Supreme Court; Trump is now challenging it wholesale. Today’s Supreme Court might be inclined to grant him his belief that the Constitution allows not only that the President is a monarch, but an absolute monarch.
Trump’s whole attitude towards conflict of interest, hiring and firing, nepotism, the concept of a government of laws not personal loyalties is Jacksonian and pre-Civil Service reform. Trump simply doesn’t believe in a modern government designed to competently and effectively delivers services to the public through a merit based civil service. And based on his campaign promises, the language of his MAGA allies and the stated policy goals of his donors, undoing civil service reform and bringing back the spoils system is simply the first step an intentional Trump’s assault on all five waves of modernization reforms of American politics: the Pendleton Civil Service, the Progressive era reforms of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, the new Deal Reforms of Franklin Roosevelt, the Civil Rights Movement and the post-Nixon reforms of the 1970’s. Key legacies of each one of these reform movements are already under attack.
In addition to the Independent Agencies, the Pure Food and Drug and the Antiquities Acts were Teddy Roosevelt’s great contribution to the Progressive Wave; Bobby Kennedy’s appointment to Health and Human Services puts the patent medicine lobby back in charge of drug approvals. Trump had already reversed National Monument protections in his first term, slashing millions of acres from sacred and previously protected Indian lands. He’s reopened that attack already in his second term.
A raft of appointments of anti-environmental cabinet members at the Departments of Interior, Energy and EPA lays out the anti-public health and environmental reform bias Trump has hard wired into his Administration. The arbitrary cancellation of all clean energy development on federal lands and waters has abandoned Franklin & Teddy Roosevelt doctrines of protecting public lands for public benefit. Trump’s personal hostility to new wind and solar collides particularly acutely with his proclaiming an emergency national power shortage — 95% 0f new power generation available in the pipeline is Trump-banned wind and solar!
Trump’s knee-capping of the National Labor Relations Board by not appointing members effectively repeals, without Congressional assent, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, Roosevelt’s signature high wage, workers’ rights legacy.
Trump has even caved in to the long-standing conservative loathing by supporting a $4.5 trillion cut in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Trump has already shredded his campaign pledge to protect income security programs and encouraged Republicans in Congress to slash retiree protection by $4.5 trillion to finance tax cut for billionaires and other ultrawealthy.
The most recent major assault on the New Deal reforms is the firing of a raft of independent agency heads, Inspectors General, the FBI and other public interest officials. These had all, on the Teddy Roosevelt model, been guaranteed fixed terms to protect them from political pressure from the White House. Trump now aims to make them entirely politically responsive to Trump policies and business interests — and he makes no secret that he wants them under his thumb.
The major post-war reform wave was the Civil Rights Movement, with its climax in the 1975 Voting Rights Act, which Trump, along with the rest of the Republican Party and Trump’s three appointees to the Supreme Court have already done everything possible to weaken and repeal. Trump’s most spectacular and clearly illegal act so far has been his issuing an Executive Order overruling the oldest civil rights promise in the Constitution — that anyone borne in the United States would be an American Citizen. Trump’s order was promptly slapped down by the first federal judge to get his hands on it and is now makings it way for an expected rebuff even by Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court.
The post-Nixon reforms were primarily normative or regulatory, not legislative. Assaults on the standards of conduct for the Justice Department were some of the most visible lowering of short-cuts by the first Trump Administration. Now that Trump has stocked the Justice Department with complaisant allies, the independence of the Justice Department is essentially completely dismantled, as witnessed by the direct bribe offered by Trump DOJ prosecutors to drop charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams for bribery in exchange for changes in NYC policy on immigration.
The Jacksonian Presidency is back in full force.
Trump “shock and awe” approach is opportunistic — but it’s also strategic, because it has muddled the landscape enough that no one is saying clearly, “Trump is dismantling almost a century and a half of reform and progress, from Presidents Republican and Democratic, to create exactly the imperial Presidency the founders warned against?”