This Is the Power-Grab Moment

And it's a loyalty-test moment.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

On Monday, Donald Trump’s budget office issued a memo shutting down huge swaths of the American economy and pausing the country’s basic ability to function. The memo suspended all federal grants and loans — money approved by Congress, and going to things like disaster relief, transportation, education, and aid to the needy — until each recipient writes a detailed report about where the funds are going, to be sure no money is going to “Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies,” among other apparent ideological no-nos. The memo itself is partly nonsensical (the Green New Deal is not a social engineering policy, nor was it ever passed into law; Marx did not invent DEI). But it’s clear enough what it means: Trillions of dollars that would otherwise be in the US economy, funding crucial services Americans depend on every single day, suddenly unavailable.

This is a dangerous and potentially deadly and seems primed to piss a lot of people off. Conservatives may say they like small government, but in reality people expect that they’ll have open public schools and emergency rooms, functioning fire departments and roads, and organizations primed to help those who are homeless or hungry or sick or suicidal or escaping domestic violence. There are a small number of highly ideological libertarian-leaning conservatives who want to gut government because they believe that the federal bureaucracy is far too large. But I’m not sure that’s actually what’s going on here. Trump is not a small-government conservative because he read Ayn Rand in college. He’s a government-of-one conservative — an authoritarian.

This is part of several broader efforts on the part of the Trump White House to (1) consolidate power in the president simply by grabbing it and assuming Congress and the Supreme Court will acquiesce; (2) demand ideological conformity or else; (3) test just how far he can push his own party; and (4) root out any hint of disloyalty and instill terror in anyone who might question the president.