Get Used to the Whiplash: Chaotic 24 Hours Confirms Trump Is Improvising as He Goes
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For those trying to give Donald Trump’s second administration a chance to prove it knows what it’s doing, the last 24 hours haven’t been reassuring.
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The administration’s fever dream of pausing trillions of federal spending on a dime prompted widespread panic about the impact on popular programs—Meals on Wheels, HeadStart, and Medicaid, for starters—that Trump’s team was not immediately ready to answer, suggesting that perhaps they hadn’t given it much thought. The awful optics made spectacularly bad timing for a parallel effort to force millions of federal workers off payrolls through an unfunded buyout program, as many of those workers doubted the administration officials behind the offer are equipped to see it through.
Put plainly, Trump mistakenly thought the cogs of a system he now leads would defer to his chaotic amateurism. Instead, he was handed a cold dose of realism: He may be more empowered than his predecessors to take big swings, but Washington won’t bend to his whims on everything, particularly when his people can’t answer basic questions about those disruptive measures.
The funding pause was the most embarrassing of Trump’s walkbacks. After a federal judge on Tuesday ordered a weeklong pause on the plan, his White House on Wednesday rescinded the original order. Then Trump’s top spokeswoman said it was only the memo behind it that had been rescinded, not the actual work of slashing cash. Where does that leave hundreds of programs that depend on federal funding to serve millions of people? Massively confused and, in some cases, still panicking. His workforce reduction effort, meanwhile, seems to be stuck in the mud as the union representing millions of federal workers cautioned against taking it seriously.
As all this was unfolding, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued waivers to allow for potentially billions of dollars in federal aid to move forward just days after the administration announced it was freezing nearly all U.S. foreign assistance. “Implementers of existing lifesaving humanitarian assistance programs should continue or resume work if they have stopped,” the memo read, according to The Washington Post.
On multiple fronts, Trump’s sweeping yet vague efforts to shrink the federal government are leaving states, nonprofits, and contractors lurching between panic and rage, as critical funding for seniors, the poor, and students are put in jeopardy at exactly the moment Trump wants to eliminate the very people tasked with moving that money out the door. It is as if Trump is creating chaos in service of using it as justification for his actions.
Trump interpreted the results of November’s election as a mandate that gave him carte blanche to remake Washington. While that’s what his voters bought, institutions are pushing back mightily, in some cases with the backing of an alarmed public. This pattern looks likely to continue, as Trump is going to continue to fumble in some cases, and only merely stumbles across the finish line in others. What was promised as a more disciplined Trump 2.0 has actually emerged as a completely predictable pile of improvisations.
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