Trump’s Power Gambit

President Trump has made it clear that that he not only admires Vladimir Putin, but also wishes to emulate him in the way he controls the Russian government. To that end, he has sought to alter the power balance among the three branches of our federal government so that the Executive Branch will have the power to override the dictates of both the Congress and the Federal Judiciary. This is sometimes referred to as the “Unitary Executive “ theory of government and is in direct conflict with the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the Constitution calls for three more or less equal branches of government, with the Executive Branch being required to follow the dictates of the Congress and the Judicial Branch being empowered to determine whether the Executive Branch has complied with the laws enacted by the Congress as well as the Constitution itself.

The reality is that Trump is already well on his way to achieving his goal of converting our federal government into a Putin-style autocracy. His party now controls both Houses of the U.S. Congress. Importantly, Trump has purged Republican representatives in Congress to the point that few of them harbor the courage to oppose him even on issues of far-reaching importance.  Similarly, he has made appointments of Cabinet members and other high ranking members of the Executive Branch, not on the basis of their knowledge or competence, but rather on their willingness to unquestionably follow his directives. In addition, Republican presidents have appointed six of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump during his first term and have displayed fealty toward him. Their willingness to exceed to Trump’s demands was most vividly demonstrated in their 2024 decision in the case of U.S. v. Trump in which the Court ruled that a former president cannot be criminally prosecuted for his official actions taken while in office, in stark contrast to the long held belief that not even a president is above the law.

To solidify his single-handed control of the federal government, Trump needs to maintain his hold on the Congress while seeking to enact a number of legislative changes that are politically abhorrent to his voter base. He also needs the nation’s courts to declare those legislative actions Constitutional. Despite his strong grip on Republican members of Congress, he has a paper thin majority in both the House and the Senate, placing his legislative agenda in peril. That’s because Republican legislators require the support of working class Americans who are counting on Trump to improve their economic positions. Trump’s economic agenda, however, not only does not support their economic well-being, but rather heavily favors wealthy individuals whom he is counting on to supply the funds needed to fill the airwaves with messaging that will help to assure the future support of his voting base. Keeping all of these elements aligned in support of him will require skill and careful timing.

A foundational element of his plan is to have Congress enact an extension of his 2017 tax cuts that largely favor corporations and wealthy individuals which are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. The problem is that the federal deficit is now in excess of $34 trillion and extending those tax cuts will likely cause further increases in the nation’s accumulated debt. This is critical because the annual interest payments on that debt already exceed the nation’s $850 billion defense budget and is expect to rise to $1 trillion in the current year even if the aggregate level on indebtedness and interest rates are not increased. This is because a the current mix of the nation’s outstanding debt instruments was issued at higher interests rates than those of the past several years and that the annual expenses of the federal government will have to be significantly decreased just to prevent a further increase in the level of the nation’s debt.

In addition, should interest rates continue to remain high (which seems quite likely considering Trump’s proposed tariff hikes), servicing the nation’s debt will make it difficult to sustain the current level of social welfare expenditures as well as maintain the nation’s infrastructure. Although curbing the nation’s indebtedness does not seem to be high on Trump’s agenda, it is the number one issue for several Republican legislators and extending Trump’s 2017 tax legislation without making significant cuts in expenditures could be more than they are willing to support, especially if they represent swing districts.

Although Trump has embarked on highly publicized campaigns to deport illegal aliens and to eliminate DEI programs which provide appeal to his voters, those efforts do nothing to relieve the economic plight of a majority of his supporters. More importantly, tax cuts that will result in increasing the federal debt and reductions in social welfare programs are sure to raise their level of unhappiness. In addition, Trump’s proposed increases in a broad range of tariffs is only likely to raise inflation which the very thing that undermined consumer confidence and allowed Trump to achieve a narrow victory in the 2024 election.

This makes it important for him to walk a tightrope between cutting government expenses while not attacking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which a significant percentage of his supporters count on to give them a modicum of financial security. The only other expenditures of the federal government that could even begin to offset the impact of extending the 2017 tax cuts are veterans health benefits and defense expenditures. The problem is that veterans enjoy broad support among American voters and a sizable segment of Trump’s most outspoken supporters are veterans. Although the level of the nation’s defense expenditures borders on the obscene as they dwarf those of all other nations (both in absolute amounts as well as a percentage of GDP), they are generally regarded as sacrosanct among Republican politicians and donors.

In order to make his plan to extend the tax cuts even minimally palatable to his voting base (and the deficit-fearing members of the Congress), Trump has adopted a three-prong strategy. First, he has embarked on a plan to reduce federal spending (or at least give the appearance that the federal budget is being reduced). To implement this element of his strategy he engaged Elon Musk, our nation’s most successful entrepreneur, to search for ways to cut the costs of operating the federal government. Second, he is in the process of raising additional revenues for the federal government by imposing tariffs on a broad range of imported goods.  Lastly, he is pursuing efforts to divert the attention of his supporters by making statements and taking actions that appeal to their hates and fears.

Elon Musk has a long history of finding ways to cut costs. In designing Tesla’s cars, he experimented with finding new ways of achieving the same results by eliminating parts which he hoped would not compromise the operations of the vehicles he would be producing. Although some of the eliminated parts had to be restored, this technique worked surprising well. Similarly, when he acquired Twitter (which he renamed “X”) he applied that same principle to employees, eliminating 6,000 of the company’s 8,000 employees. Indeed, he has always operated under the belief that a small group of highly motivated workers can accomplish more than a large workforce primarily interested in putting in 40 hours/week and collecting their paychecks at the end of the week. See, “The World’s First Trillionaire” for a brief summary of how Musk came to be the world’s richest man at age 53. Thus, it’s entirely understandable why President Trump chose Musk to develop ways to make the federal government more efficient.

What President Trump may not have fully appreciated is that Musk’s managerial techniques are not well-suited for a democratic government. Musk will never be accused of fully considering a problem before acting. He believes that it’s impossible (in addition to being time-consuming) to comprehend in advance all of the collateral problems any course of action might trigger. He, therefore, prefers to act (and act fast) and then assess what unforeseen problems arise. Perhaps even more importantly, he doesn’t consider hardships imposed upon others by his actions to even be a problem. Like Trump, he seems to believe that causing others to incur hardships is a form of victory. Simply stated, “If you lose, I must be winning.” The result has been that Musk has attacked one agency of the federal government after another, firing as many employees as he deems feasible, often without regard to the agency’s missions or the roles played by the terminated employees in carrying out any of those missions.

Unfortunately, Musk’s actions have created untold chaos within the federal government as well as engendered widespread animosity among American who depend upon the governmental operations that he has crippled. That animosity was clearly demonstrated yesterday when Wisconsin voters  elected a Democrat to serve on their Supreme Court, notwithstanding Musk’s $20 million expenditures to defeat her. This has posed a serious problem for President Trump who cannot afford a popular backlash to his agenda before he has had an opportunity to implement it through Congressional action.

Hardly a day goes by that the news media does not publish stories of the problems being caused by the actions of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. In many cases Musk’s actions have been reversed by court injunctions and temporary restraining orders. To offset such adverse publicity (something Trump is loathe to tolerate), the President has provided conflicting statements as to Musk’s actual role and his status within the federal government. He has also announced that he is “considering” distributing 20% of the savings achieved by Musk’s efforts to American citizens without making a firm commitment or explaining how and when those savings will be distributed and to whom.

To help appease members of the public who are upset by Musk’s actions, Musk has sought to exaggerate the savings to the federal government that his actions have achieved. This effort, however, has done little to quiet anxieties. First, many of Musk’s termination orders have been rescinded as a result of court orders or simply by the heads of the affected agencies who understand that their agencies cannot operate without certain employees terminated by Musk. More importantly, many of Musk’s claims of reduced costs have been questioned by various news agencies leading to their being removed from Musk’s posts on “X”.

The real problem is that the annual salaries of all (2.3 million) current federal government employees represent only 4.3% (or roughly $280 billion) of the federal government’s $6.5 trillion annual expenditures. Thus, eliminating as much as a third (a wholly unrealistically high percentage) of all current federal government employees will not even begin to offset the roughly $500 billion that annually will be lost to the federal government if Trump is able to extend his 2017 tax cuts. To more fully understand that Musk’s efforts to pare down the federal government’s payroll is not a serious plan to curb government spending is that the Trump administration has proposed to cut as much as 50% of the employees of the IRS which alone could cause the federal government to annually lose as much as $500 billion in unpaid taxes. In order to make any real dent in federal expenditures, entire programs, not just their employees have to be cut; and this is where the administration’s plans become vague, if not, non-existent.

Trump’s second initiative for getting his tax-cut legislation enacted is his plan to impose tariffs on a broad range of goods being imported into this country. The economic reality is that tariffs imposed by the U.S. are in effect taxes on American citizens, particularly those at the bottom of the income scale as they spend all of their annual income just to enjoy a modest life for themselves and their family members. Thus, in a real sense the tariffs that Trump plans to impose are taxes on U.S. consumers designed to enable him to give U.S. businesses a chance to better compete against foreign producers. In short, tariffs are mechanisms for wealth transfer which are outside of the U.S. tax code which is already skewed in favor of the wealthy.

Initially Trump promoted his tariff plans as being a revenue-generating technique. When his voters discovered that they, and not the exporting countries, would be paying these tariffs, he sought to justify them in terms of preventing our nation’s trading partners from taking advantage of us. Not only will his proposed tariffs cause Americans to spend more for the items they need, but they will also invite retaliatory action by the affected nations, causing further damage to our economy and middle-class Americans. As a result, such plans are more in the nature of political theater than sound economic proposals. Trump actually telegraphs this by threatening them well in advance of their implementation and then withdrawing them when their adverse effects become apparent.

Aside from the direct economic effects of tariffs, Trump’s penchant for announcing and then withdrawing tariffs has a very unsettling impact on U.S. businesses, causing them to postpone actions until they know whether the threatened tariffs and opposing counter-tariffs will come into effect. This explains why most business leaders do not support Trump’s tariff proposals even though they are the intended beneficiaries of those tariffs.

Trump’s third strategy for having Congress to pass his legislative agenda is to divert the attention of his voting base from the adverse impact his economic agenda will have on them. Trump is a master of diversion and he is currently staging at least two diversions to distract his supporters.

The first is his deportation of foreign immigrants. This effort is intended to be a demonstration to his base that he is carrying out his promise to deport all (roughly11+ million) illegal aliens. Supporting that conclusion is the fact that these deportations have been highly publicized and the flights transporting those being deported have been given extensive press coverage.  Significantly, the Trump administration has made a point of treating those who have been apprehended in a brutal fashion and shipped them off to a notorious prison in El Salvador which the Trump administration refers to as the “Terrorism Confinement Center.”  Although the deported individuals have been labeled as members of a violent gang of Venezuelan criminals, many of them were apprehended simply on the basis of persons with whom they had been in contact.

If these deportations were truly serious efforts (and not just exercises in political theater), they would have significant underlying rationales and not simply be efforts to arouse the hates and fears of Trump’s political base. There are a few possible rationales for deporting illegal aliens, but none of them justify the type of wholesale deportation program advocated by President Trump. The first such purported rationale is that illegal aliens take jobs from U.S. citizens. This is largely a bogus explanation as unemployment rates are quite low and few unemployed Americans would even consider performing the type of work that illegal aliens are compelled by economic necessity to accept. The second rationale is that those being deported are violent criminals who pose a danger to Americans. This too is nonsense as the crime rates among illegal aliens are actually lower than the crime rates for U.S. citizens.

The third rationale is that by engaging in wide-spread deportation efforts, the U.S. will discourage other asylum seekers from seeking entry into our country. This rationale, however, assumes that those seeking asylum in our country are neither wanted nor needed.  This is a highly dubious assertion for a number of reasons. There are a large number of businesses that welcome the prospect of employing individuals willing to perform menial jobs for low pay. Were that not the case, asylum seekers would never receive employment opportunities (which coincidentally are illegal) and would not be enticed to enter our country. You might also have noticed that the Trump administration has proposed to allow underage children into the workforce, claiming that there is a need for more workers. The simple fact is that the U.S. can use more members of its workforce to help pay for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. While the payroll taxes paid by illegal aliens help pay for these programs, illegal immigrants are not eligible to receive the benefits provided by such programs.

The bottom line is that illegal aliens are not inherently evil even though it is altogether appropriate to ascertain who among them will make positive contributions to our nation’s economy and to deport only those that will not. What also signals that the Trump administration’s efforts to deport ALL illegal aliens is simply an act of political theater is that it has exerted little or no effort to identify those aliens with criminal records or to accord them anything even vaguely resembling due process.

Instead, those individuals who have been taken into custody have been quickly shipped off to foreign countries and not necessarily the country from which they came. More importantly, there has been no effort to carry out these deportations in an economical fashion which is what you would expect were Trump really serious about deporting 11+ million aliens rather than the few thousand. Indeed, the first group of deportees were transported via U.S. military aircraft to the U.S. prison located in Guantanamo, Cuba. It’s not only that the costs of using military aircraft is roughly three times the cost of chartering commercial aircraft, but shortly after they were transported to Guantanamo they were quietly returned to the U.S. where they are now being held in a domestic prison.

A second diversionary tactic has been Trump’s assault on DEI policies both within the federal government and in private businesses. This effort is designed to play on the antagonism that his voter base harbors for intellectuals whom they believe look down upon them and for ethnic minorities whom they believe are being given priority in filling job opportunities. To this end, Trump has ordered that all references to DEI policies be eliminated within the federal government and within those entities that do business with the federal government. Although Trump argues that DEI policies call for hiring without regard to competence (a contention which he is yet to support), but also his own hiring practices reveal that competence is not even important to him.

Trump’s problem is that his economic agenda consists of proposed tax cuts that heavily favor the “Haves” and cuts to government regulations that protect the “Have Nots.” He therefore has to implement that agenda before his loyal supporters grow wise to the fact he is anything but the savior of the working class that he professes to be. Although Musk’s efforts to reduce the payroll of the federal government appeals to the fiscally conservative leanings of Trump’s voter base, the implications of the service cuts that he is effecting clearly has frightened voters. This gives Trump a very short window in which to solidify his Putin-style oligarchy. Tuesday’s elections in Wisconsin and Florida in which Republican candidates did far worse than past experience would have indicated provides a good barometer of the declining support Trump is facing.

Although Trump’s remaining pathway to creating an autocratic government is short, it could still be foiled if his voters sour on what he is trying to accomplish. Accordingly, Democratic politicians need to focus their efforts on explaining to Trump’s supporters what he has in mind, starting first with those voters in the swing districts which have a Republican representing them in Congress. This process has already begun with Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ro Khanna and Greg Cesar holding town hall meetings in Republican dominated districts explaining the impact of Trump’s agenda. In addition, Cory Booker’s record-breaking address to the Senate has underscored their message.

The question is whether their messages will get to Republican leaning voters before Republican members of Congress accede to Trump’s threats that they vote in favor of his economic agenda. Stated another way, will  Republican members of the House choose to vote against extending the Trump tax cuts and face the prospect of a well-financed opponent in the 2026 primary election or will they vote for that legislation and face the ire of their voters in the general election. My instincts tell me that they will choose the latter.