The big undercurrent of the Trump era

What to do about the politicization of *everything*

I want to highlight for you six different things that happened this week. They’re all different stories — and each worth reading on their own.

But they’re also all, in a way, the same story. Let me explain.

Ready?

One, Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times: Top generals nominated for new positions must now meet with Trump.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has begun requiring that nominees for four-star-general positions meet with President Trump before their nominations are finalized, in a departure from past practice, said three current and former U.S. officials.

The move, though within Mr. Trump’s remit as commander in chief, has raised worries about the possible politicization of the military’s top ranks by a president who has regularly flouted norms intended to insulate the military from partisan disputes.

Two, Scott Neuman for NPR: Trump keeps pressuring the Fed to cut rates. Here's why its independence matters.

President Trump's tense, televised clash with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has raised concerns about the central bank's independence ahead of this week's meeting to consider interest-rate adjustments. While Trump isn't the first president to pressure the Fed to cut interest rates, experts say his brash and bullying tactics are unprecedented…

Trump himself nominated Powell to the top Fed post in 2017, proclaiming, "He's strong, he's committed, he's smart," but this month, the president seemed to forget all that, accusing Powell of being "too late" in lowering interest rates and expressing surprise that President Joe Biden had "put him in and extended him." (Biden did reappoint Powell in 2021.) Trump has even floated the idea of firing the Fed chair, whose term expires next May — a move that would be legally contentious. Powell himself has said he won't step down if Trump asks him to.

Three, Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic: Emil Bove is a sign of the times.

Emil Bove has had a busy six months at the Department of Justice. Appointed to a leadership role by President Donald Trump almost immediately after the inauguration, Bove quickly set about establishing himself as a feared enforcer of presidential will. He personally fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 rioters, pushed other prosecutors to resign rather than go along with what they considered to be unethical orders, and accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over a list of FBI agents to fire for political reasons. According to a whistleblower, Bove played a key role in encouraging the administration to defy court orders, suggesting that the department should consider telling judges, “Fuck you.”

Under any previous administration, revelations of behavior like this would probably have been enough to get Bove fired. They might even have been enough to bring down the attorney general, if not the presidency as a whole. But this is the second Trump administration, so instead of being punished, Bove was rewarded with a nomination to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed him to that seat, 50 to 49, with all Democrats voting against the nominee. (Republican Senator Bill Hagerty did not vote; his GOP colleagues Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski cast their votes against Bove.)

Four, Daniel Richman, again in the Times: Trump is discovering the downside of a Justice Department with no credibility.¹

From the start, President Trump appears to have put personal loyalty above all in the leaders he chose for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. And he seems to have succeeded in that regard. Attorney General Pam Bondi; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the principal associate deputy attorney general, Emil Bove; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel — all have shown a North Korean level of fealty to their leader. Ignoring norms of Justice Department independence from the White House, they have jumped to follow his orders. They’ve announced investigations he demanded, seemingly regardless of whether there was support for doing so. They have moved to dismiss the cases that suited his political or personal purposes, regardless of the public interest.

Five, Erica Newland, Jules Torti, Walter M. Shaub, and Ellinor Heywood in Dear Civil Servant: To the victor goes the spoils system?

Schedule G lays bare what we’ve long known: the Trump administration’s strategy is not just to fire civil servants; it’s to fire them and then fill their roles with loyalists. The White House is now working on the other side of this Fire and Fill equation: preparing to fill roles long held by career civil servants with loyalists.

As Schedule G’s potential to expand hiring shows, the administration’s gutting of the workforce is not about “right-sizing” the federal bureaucracy — it’s about reshaping the civil service into a tool for unchecked control and removing safeguards that protect the public from the politicization of day-to-day government services. With Schedule G, the president now has a goody bag full of jobs he can hand out as favors like in the days of the Spoils System. And he has made no secret of expecting personal loyalty from his appointees over loyalty to the American people or the rule of law.

And six, just moments ago, Trump announced he would attempt to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like the monthly jobs report:

The big story: the death of the political-administrative divide

Before Donald Trump, our democratic system was quietly predicated on something I think of as the “political-administrative divide.”

The notion was simple: Some aspects of government — national security, the judiciary, monetary policy, law enforcement, and the technical, day-to-day administration of basic functions like gathering employment statistics or assessing drug safety — are at risk of being undermined and corrupted by politics. And therefore our system needs to mediate, and at times insulate, between the political and administrative spheres.

That’s not to say politics didn’t get a say in administrative matters of government, of course. Various mechanisms, from legislation to executive orders to appointments to impeachments, sought to give political actors oversight and direction over the apolitical ones. The idea of the divide, though, was that politics should guide the administrative sphere, not consume it.

This divide wasn’t a rule or a law, per se. It’s not in one specific place in the Constitution. It’s not even something that was taught in civics classes, like checks and balances or federalism. It somehow went deeper than all that.

It was simply a norm that, after centuries, had become so well-established it was sort of like the air we breathe — all around us and mostly invisible.

Some aspects were old, like the longstanding tradition that the military must be loyal to the country, not the president, or the independent, co-equal judiciary with lifetime appointments unbeholden to political leaders.

Other aspects were newer — like the creation of the modern civil service and the idea that many government employees should be hired on merit, not political connections. These were generally developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s in response to the corruption of the early industrial age.

Still others, like the norms of DOJ independence and that law enforcement must uphold the law, not any personal or partisan political agenda, are fairly modern, mostly created after Watergate.

There were obviously intense — and, I think, good faith — disagreements about the exact scope and limits of this divide. And in recent years especially, many conservatives argued that the divide had gone too far and needed to be pared back. These critiques, through what’s usually called the “unitary executive theory,” held that presidential power was and needed to be quite sweeping.

But I still think there was generally bipartisan agreement that the divide should exist in some form. Or at least no one in the mainstream of American politics was eager to rock the boat.

Donald Trump and the MAGA movement broke that bipartisan consensus. And now his administration is actively seeking to destroy the political-administrative divide in all areas of American government.

In many ways, this is the story of the Trump era. The attempted politicization of everyone in government, from statisticians to judges to civil servants to air traffic controllers, is perhaps the single biggest way this administration has reshaped American democracy (so far).

I don’t think we know yet whether and to what extent he will succeed. But that may be beside the point. The divide has been breached; not only is the politicization of everything the federal government touches suddenly on the table, but there’s also no easy way back. We can’t simply revert to a world where the political-administrative divide was a consensus.

New protections against the abuses and corruption of politicization will have to be built again from scratch.

The three-step plan for how to respond

To formulate a response, we need to understand that all this politicization is not an end in itself.

President Trump is attacking the political-administrative divide because it’s the single largest barrier to authoritarian consolidation in the United States. Obliterating the political-administrative divide is simply a necessary step towards a permanent lock on power.

And so the counter-strategy is obvious:

One: Slow the politicization as much as possible, especially around easily-abused powers. Realistically speaking, I don’t believe the president wants to personally interview four-star general candidates to assess their military qualifications. And he’s not going after the Fed and the BLS’s independence because he genuinely disagrees with their economic analyses. No, it’s because they control levers of power — troop deployments, interest rates, and employment data — that could be used to consolidate political control.

As a result, a top priority for all of us, whether it’s litigation or protest or writing letters to your elected officials, needs to be protecting the defenses against politicization that still exist. From a democracy point of view, the biggest priority are the bulwarks around functions and systems — like the military, the Federal Reserve, and law enforcement — that are especially ripe for abuse. At the same time, politically speaking, the most resonant consequences are likely those with a tangible impact on people’s lives: drug safety, air traffic control, emergency response, and so on.

Two: Win the ongoing debates around politicization in every aspect of government. There’s a flip side to the Trump administration’s politicization of, well, everything. Everything should now be presumed to be politicized. When courts, journalists, and voters evaluate the administration’s statements, they should do so with the knowledge that they may not be on the level.

Similarly, the president’s decision to attempt to politicize everything in the federal government means that all of it — including institutions like the Department of Justice that were, in my view, previously entitled to some degree of political deference — is now on the table. Critics need to do everything they can to make the administration own the consequences of politicization, to make the attacks on the political-administrative divide unpopular.

There’s some evidence this may already be happening, at least in some areas. According to a new poll, “76 percent of voters believe the Justice Department is hiding important information about its Epstein investigation, with nearly half saying they have ‘no confidence’ in the department's handling of the case.”

Similar attempts to politicize the Fed, the BLS, the military, the civil service, and the judiciary need to become equally repulsive.

Three: Rebuild the bipartisan consensus around a new political-administrative divide. The political-administrative divide only worked because there was a reasonable expectation that all sides would, in most cases, respect it. Institutions like the military, the FBI, the BLS, the Department of Justice, and the Fed managed to stay (mostly) politically independent because both sides could trust that, when the other was in power, they too would respect the same norms and guardrails.

At the same time, it’s not like the divide was working perfectly before. There were serious problems, from sclerotic regulatory systems to an extremely dysfunctional Congress. So really the question is: How do we rebuild a better, newer divide from the wreckage? One that balances politics with administration in ways that are both responsive to the voters’ needs and resistant to abuse and corruption.

In any case, we don’t really have a choice but to start fresh. It’s not like the next administration can just unilaterally restore all these norms and protections against politicization if every expectation is they’ll go away again as soon as they’re out of power. It takes two to tango.²

Unfortunately, that means it’s going to be a long road back to consensus. Do we get there through (*gulp*) an escalating cycle of politicization until all sides agree to a truce? Or simply a political breaking point where all of this becomes unpopular enough that most post-Trump politicians feel pressured to return to the divide? I’m not sure. It’s pretty hard to see around this particular bend.

But in any case, this is the world we live in now. Time to get used to it.

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“Trump’s tariffs get frosty reception at federal appeals court”

On Thursday, POLITICO reported on federal appellate judges’ skepticism during oral arguments toward the Trump administration’s argument in favor of the president’s use of an emergency declaration to unilaterally impose global sanctions.

To understand why the court wasn’t buying what the administration was selling, read Protect Democracy’s amicus brief in a related case:

…the President’s unilateral declaration of a “national emergency” is not a blank check… common sense, undisputed facts, and the President’s own statements make clear that the asserted “emergencies” are both non-existent (e.g., intended to address a decades-old issue involving trade deficits) and being exploited for pretextual reasons (e.g., as with the 50% tariffs threatened against Brazil, a country with which the United States enjoys a trade surplus, for the avowed purpose of penalizing a foreign sovereign’s prosecution of one of the President’s political allies).

Importantly, our brief plays on the administration’s home turf, laying out an argument for restraining executive emergency powers based, in part, on legal arguments (e.g., the major questions doctrine and nondelegation doctrine) long embraced by conservative legal thinkers.

Read more: Trump’s tariff roller coaster.

Lead counsel on the brief Amit Agarwal would know — he served as solicitor general of Florida under two Republican attorneys general and clerked for Justice Samuel Alito on the US Supreme Court and for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

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What else we’re tracking:

• For Lawfare, Raphael Goldman argues that Trump’s agreement with El Salvador violated the Constitution.

• Caitlin Dickerson writes for The Atlantic about the possible financial gains for Trump administration allies thanks to the expansion of ICE funding and lack of oversight: ICE’s mind-bogglingly massive blank check.

• The assault on universities continues: Brown cut a deal with the Trump administration, and though previously defiant, Harvard is reportedly open to doing the same.

• Speaking of Harvard, read this letter sent by some of the preeminent scholars of democracy and authoritarianism to the university’s administrators as they negotiate with the White House.

• A new Reuters special report demonstrates “How Trump’s crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable.”

• Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to turn around deportation flights to El Salvador. Now, the DOJ has filed a misconduct complaint against Judge Boasberg — for having the audacity to insist that the president abide by court orders.

• Twelve members of Congress filed a lawsuit detailing their attempts to gain oversight over ICE detention facilities. (In case you missed it, read Ansley Skipper on why ICE may be so resistant here.)

• President Trump’s elevation of unqualified loyalists to national security posts makes us less safe, writes Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Bulwark: Trump’s unqualified hires are making America more vulnerable to attack.

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How you can help:

While authoritarians try to divide and isolate us, Anna Dorman offers some ideas for how to build and strengthen our communities:

Social isolation and loneliness are key ingredients of authoritarianism which conversely makes community — even community built around non-political ties — a potent antidote. We saw this in Chile in the 1980s where women's and youth social groups were ultimately critical in toppling Pinochet’s dictatorship, and we see it today as communities in Los Angeles mobilize to protect one another. This week we encourage you to spend some time thinking about what you can do to deepen or build community within your own life, whatever that may look like. Maybe it's a book club, maybe it's a local political group, maybe it's your local small business association or kickball league.

Whatever it is, commit to one or two ways you can make that community a little stronger, more inclusive, and more powerful.

1. For our piece on a similar argument, see: MAGA discovers the downsides of a politicized DOJ.

2. There are tons of complicated implications for what this means for pro-democracy actors and whether they should tactically embrace hardball tactics. We’ll have more on this at some point, but for now, Jonathan V. Last’s take is worth reading: Why won’t Democrats fight?