The Breaking of the Constitutional Order
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump announced 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. The markets reacted with shock. We were really doing this? Didn't Trump's Wall Street backers tell us again and again this was all just a negotiating ploy? And then Mexico said that it would add 10,000 troops to the border. And Canada said it would appoint a fentanyl czar, and they noted efforts they were already making on the border. And Trump delayed the tariffs by a month in both cases. So how to read this? Did Trump back down in the face of market turmoil? Did he get what he wanted, even though what he got wasn't very much, was mostly things that Mexico and Canada were already doing?
Are we going to have this happen again in a month and maybe every month after that? I don't think anybody actually knows, very much including Donald Trump. What seems clear here is that Trump likes tariffs, but he dislikes political pain. He wants to be seen as in control. He wants the world bending to his will. But the stock market plummeting does not make it look like the world is bending to his will. The stock market plummeting threatens his control. And so when other countries see that, their strategy is going to come clearer. The more Trump bullies other nations, the more they will band together in retaliation, and the more that will batter markets. The world does not want to be endlessly pushed around by Donald Trump. Actions create reactions. So yeah, Trump has the power to impose tariffs, but he does not have the power to impose them without paying a price. And so far, at least, he does not seem to want to pay that price. Domestically, Elon Musk is trying to remake the federal government.
I was going to say by fiat, but it's not even by anything as official as that. His people have pushed their way into the Treasury Department's payment systems, putting the longtime civil servant in charge of that system on leave when he wouldn't give a bunch of Musk's deputies access to a system that, and I really think it's important to understand this, a system that virtually nobody even in the Treasury Department has access to because it contains so much private data. because it presents such severe cybersecurity risks, and because something going wrong in it would throw government payments into complete chaos. And that's been far from their only move. The really splashy, aggressive thing they did over the past couple of days was that Musk's team announced that they were closing down USAID, the foreign aid agency created by Congress decades ago.
They don't have the authority to close down USAID. And so I agree with Lauren de Jong Schulman, a former Office of Management and Budget official, who wrote that the way to talk about this is not to say something anodyne and settled, like they got passwords to the payment system or they closed down USAID. It's more like, quote, they illegally broke into a secure facility over a weekend, hijacked sensitive data on vulnerable people and U.S. businesses, destroyed property Americans paid for, cut off resources for sick and hungry families and fired Americans across the country. This is part of what I was saying in my Don't Believe Him essay over the weekend. Trump does not have many of the powers he's asserting he has. So when he or the people around him act lawlessly and unconstitutionally, those acts should be treated as what they are, something in between power grabs and crimes. All of it right now is provisional and needs to be treated as provisional, thought as provisional.
We have watched Trump back down on much already, from tariffs to spending freezes. And if the consequences become too painful, he'll back down on yet more. And so the consequences should be painful. What he is doing should be described clearly, and other parts of the political system should respond. And we're starting to see that happen. We're starting to see Democrats find their footing. Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, put a blanket hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees until USAID is restored. That is something any senator can do, but they rarely do it because it is so disruptive. But Schatz is right to do it. Trump is fundamentally disrupting the functioning of the U.S. government.
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