Most everyone other than apologists and professional contrarians would agree at this point that President Donald Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his whims are policy and his will is law.
But the execution has been haphazard. Trump tried to overwhelm the public with a campaign of shock and awe. His executive orders targeted a broad swath of civil society, forcing states, localities, colleges, universities and law firms into a defensive crouch. His so-called Department of Government Efficiency ransacked the federal government, fired thousands of civil servants, obliterated critical state capacity and destroyed entire agencies.
The president’s most recent effort is an immigration crackdown in Democratic-led cities. In Los Angeles, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been conducting roundups of anyone who might lack legal status, Trump deployed National Guard troops and Marines, citing riots and violence from protesters. He has threatened to do the same in Chicago and New York.
Interestingly, the two states with the next largest populations of immigrants in the country illegally after California are Texas and Florida. But under the operating philosophy of the administration — a version of “For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law” — both states have received something of an exception from the White House deportation program on account of their Republican governors.
Both the crackdown by ICE and the calling up of the military to suppress protests were supposed to rally the public to the administration, in opposition to alleged crime and disorder. The president’s military parade — meant to mimic the ornate processions seen in Russia, North Korea and other dictatorships — was similarly meant to be a show of Trump’s popularity.
Except it’s the opposite: Trump’s ambitious effort to impose his will on the country has only generated discontent and backlash.
We see it in the polling, where majorities of Americans say they disapprove of the Trump administration and where the president is underwater on virtually every issue of note, including immigration.
In his influential 1922 book, “Public Opinion,” Walter Lippmann observed that political leaders hold their greatest sway over the public when the issue or interest in question is abstract to most people’s experience.
Here we see Trump’s fundamental problem. He and his White House seem to think that the cost of their policies — the fallout from their effort to mold the country to fit their nativist and mercantilist obsessions — are indirect. Who cares about a few thousand protesters in Los Angeles or even a few million immigrants in the country illegally, out of the more than 340 million people in the U.S.?
Both Trump and Stephen Miller, the chief architect of the administration’s immigration policies, may have imagined that their crackdown would isolate a relatively small group of people and be met with indifference by most Americans. In actuality, there is no way to execute an immigration crackdown in a way that spares ordinary citizens.
The result is a growing number of Americans who have turned against the White House out of anger and outrage over what they see as overreach.
But his response to the failure of this past weekend has been to push the throttle even further. More threats, more arrests, more crackdowns in more cities.
There is every reason to think that this doubling-down will drive the public even further from the administration, and there is every reason to think that the White House will then triple-down in response.
The only thing the White House seems to want, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, is for the American people to cease to call the crackdown wrong and join them in calling it right.
I do not think they’ll get their wish.