President Donald Trump is vowing to wield apocalyptic power inside the United States, even as the adverse impact of some of his key policies is becoming clear.
His weekend share of a social media meme in which he threatened to wage war on Chicago, the next Democratic city up in his crime and immigration crackdown, was a classic Trumpian tactic. It depicted him as a strongman unafraid to impose force and incited liberal outrage to delight his base. It was also laced with menace and implied lawlessness that reflects his view of the presidency as a tool of personal power rather than a constitutionally limited national trust.
Still, beneath Trump’s hyperbole, there are signs that his second administration, eight months in, is entering a new phase. His frenetic pace and thunderclap tests of the Constitution have thus far had a disorienting impact. Courts struggled to keep up. Democrats flailed, mourning their election loss and trying to work out the basic business of learning to talk to Americans.
But on the economy, public health and foreign policy especially, Trump’s policies are having impacts that risk political blowback. Democratic opposition is stirring through governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’ JB Pritzker, who are both looking for a fight to elevate their own political futures. The president had a terrible time in the courts last week, with policy priorities at least temporarily disrupted. A landmark Supreme Court decision is pending on Trump’s tariff policy that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” could be “terrible” if the government loses, since Trump would have to cut refund checks for half of tariff revenue.
The White House response to mounting challenges is to double down on more disruption and executive power grabs. It’s the only way Trump knows. Its new front against drugs cartels in the Caribbean underscores the point. US forces last week blew up a speedboat off Venezuela allegedly holding drug traffickers. Officials reacted to questions about the potential illegal use of force and destruction of due process with machismo. “We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, without bothering to explain why.
The administration’s claims the boat was run by the Tren de Aragua gang could be true. But presidents lack constitutional authority to wage war without informing Congress or the public. Vice President JD Vance upped the populist defiance by saying he didn’t “give a sh*t” on X after a Trump critic described the killings as a war crime. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul responded that it was “despicable and thoughtless sentiment … to glorify killing someone without a trial.”
Pundits often warn that events such as those off Venezuela are “distractions” from other Trump vulnerabilities. But there comes a point when the distractions threaten the Constitution as much as the original escapades. And when is a distraction simply distracting from another distraction?
Challenging political months may lie ahead
Putting aside inflammatory X posts and military bombast — Trump now wants Hegseth to be called “secretary of war” — there is growing evidence that the administration is headed into treacherous political waters.
Trump’s economy — the pre-Covid first-term version, which offered a brief window of voter security — helped win last year’s election. But the Trump economy 2.0, now fully exposed to his idiosyncratic theories on trade and government intervention, is floundering in uncertainty. Friday’s jobs report was dire, not just because only 22,000 positions were created in August. It showed negative jobs growth in June, unemployment at 4.3% at the highest level since 2021, and the impacts of Trump’s tariffs and immigration purges on hiring.
By most measures in the report, the Biden economy was stronger than the Trump one. The manufacturing sector has taken a particular hit, which feels somewhat ironic since the president’s trade wars are meant to revive a 1950s-style utopia of factories running full steam.
For those Americans who buy dinner in grocery stores and who will not be regulars at Trump’s new White House “Rose Garden Club,” his claims that prices are falling are absurd. If this disconnect deepens, the administration’s spin could have a similar impact to the false trope that inflation was transitory, which helped sink President Joe Biden’s hopes of reelection.
A new sign hangs at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on Friday after President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. – Mike Pesoli/AP
Trump hosts a dinner with members of his administration and members of Congress in the newly renovated Rose Garden at the White House on Friday. – Francis Chung/Politico/AP
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pyrotechnical display in a Senate hearing last week, meanwhile, portends extreme disruption to public health. It raised the question of whether Trump’s election win last year was really a message that voters want to destroy all the progress made by vaccines and to risk new epidemics this winter.
In foreign policy, the embarrassing failure of Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin was laid bare by this weekend’s ferocious air assault on Kyiv, the war’s largest yet. How much more carnage needs to unfold before Trump becomes the last person in the world to realize his Russian friend doesn’t want peace?
The president told reporters Sunday he was ready to impose tougher sanctions on Russia. But he’s made threats before. Trump also wondered last week whether India was “lost” to the US after his tariffs pushed a nation US presidents have been courting for 30 years into the arms of China.
Last week was also a setback for the administration in the courtroom. A judge ruled Trump’s deployment of the federalized National Guard to California in June “willfully” violated the law. The ruling coincided with a huge military parade in China showing the immense domestic power of President Xi Jinping. It was a reminder that a US strongman still faces more constitutional constraints than genuine tyrants.
Another US judge ruled that the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members is illegal and blocked its use in several Southern states. One federal judge handed Harvard University a huge victory, ruling that Trump had unlawfully blocked $2 billion in funding against the Ivy League school. And another froze Trump’s termination of temporary status allowing more than a million Haitians and Venezuelans the right to live in the United States.
Why Trump fans don’t think his administration is in trouble
The administration doesn’t have much time for district court rulings, arguing, sometimes with reason, that it will fare better in more conservative appeals courts and at a Supreme Court with an expansive interpretation of executive power.
And supporters see the political environment differently.
Trump has been using wrecking-ball power executive power, defying courts and attacking public health, military, legal, educational and media establishments ever since he took office. This is an end in itself for many MAGA supporters. His relish for battles is a selling point, one that was noted by Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, on “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I have tremendous respect for who he is. And a lot of people have tried to really, really make life very difficult for him. And he’s emerged and he’s been a terrific leader and a terrific symbol for many, many Americans,” Ladapo told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Still, Trump seems unconvinced by Ladapo’s attempt to end Florida’s school vaccine requirements. “You have vaccines that work; they just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used,” he said Friday.
Cabinet officials like Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor, understand the base.
Members of the National Guard are seen cast in silhouette while standing at the Washington Monument on September 2. – Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Tough talk and forcing liberals to argue that alleged drug traffickers were victims of war crimes can be good politics. So can sending National Guard troops into Democratic cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC, that have tolerated high levels of crime and homelessness.
“Thank God President Trump called the National Guard in to bring peace,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said on “State of the Union,” crediting reservists with lowering crime rates. His comment underscored the political equation here. In the abstract, it may be troubling that soldiers are on city streets and often look under-occupied, with some reduced to picking up trash during a $1-million-a-day deployment. But might not voters get used to their presence and see it as reassuring? Can you put a price on lives saved in the inner cities?
Trump has another thing on his side — there’s no chance that supine Republicans on Capital Hill will do anything to check him, even though his actions off Venezuela and in trade wars are usurping congressional power.
And if all else fails, the White House simply declares victory. Trump’s claims to have ended seven wars might be an exaggeration, and his trade deals lack details — but they sure sound good.
Low polling numbers haunt Trump again
New polls Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating in the low to mid-40s. The latest CNN Poll of Polls has him at 43%. Historically, this is threatening territory for Republicans, with a midterm election just over a year away. But Trump has almost always polled at such low levels during White House years when he’s made little effort to govern for every American, so the West Wing may not be alarmed. However, this a poor place to start if the economy does deteriorate this year.
And that’s the key question. Will Trump’s so far impregnable support from a base that always sustains him crack if the economic goes bad? How long will his promise that a golden age is beckoning stand up if inflation strikes, unemployment rises and economic gloom envelops the nation?
In the short term, Friday’s jobs report may offer some political help by prompting the Federal Reserve into larger interest-rate cuts than expected. But Trump’s attempt to eviscerate the independence of the central bank is a longer-term issue. He could send prices soaring if he orchestrates huge rate cuts next year after the end of the term of the Fed chief, whom he calls “Too Late” Jerome Powell.
The impending peril can be detected in in scattershot response to the jobs report from Trump’s subordinates. Bessent said on NBC that August was the “noisiest” month of the year statistically. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the problem was “dissonance in data.” Wealthy Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick predicted on CNBC that great jobs numbers would be “starting six months from today to a year from today.” That’s no consolation for a working American who just lost their job in Trump’s economy.
None of these officials addressed the core issue: the impact on the economy of idiosyncratic trade policies that have long obsessed one man — the president — but that most experts believe are rooted in fantasy.
Perhaps the economy, which has been extraordinarily resilient, will save Trump. If not, Americans will learn whether he can truly defy political gravity. At that point, a meme of Bill Kilgore, the amoral but guilt-free protagonist of “Apocalypse Now,” wouldn’t be of much help.
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