Emily Bazelon

I think that Trump uses his mouthpiece, like the presidency and what he says as his main mechanism of power.

Right.

So we started the year with the flurry of executive orders and those have continued.

And that's the president just declaring this is what the law is now.

You can go ahead and sue me and try to stop me.

It's not making a deal in Congress.

It's making a declaration, planting a flag, and then seeing if people are going to go along or not, which in the Republican Party, they almost entirely have.

And of late, you know, and Venezuela is another example of this, we see him taking the same idea of just like edicts and decrees into the international realm.

And then it sets off a kind of diplomatic crisis.

And, you know, then Trump undermines our allies by like posting their private signal and text messages to him on social media.

And then when he declares that, you know, he's reached an agreement, like somehow it's all going to be OK.

It's right.

It's all a drama of words that he instigates and then tries to see where the dare leads and how other people react.

I mean, I think it depends on the area of policy, right?

So David was talking about one way to think about the foreign policy goals.

Then there's immigration, where we really have seen enforcement step up in the interior of the country in a way that I think exceeded a lot of people's expectations.

It's just like such a giant project.

Turns out if you're willing to, you know, vastly increase the budget for ICE and just snatch people up off the street, you can do

pick up a lot of people and put them in detention and into deportation proceedings.

So that's effective with enormous costs.