Every big Trumpian news story, and there are five a day, is a dot in a pointillist painting. The whole picture hasn’t yet emerged but became fuller this week.
The most powerful, in terms of implications, is in the courts. A federal district judge in Washington issued a temporary restraining order to pause deportation flights carrying Venezuelan nationals, including members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, to El Salvador. President Trump quickly launched a Truth Social rant calling the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” who “should be IMPEACHED!!!” Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement that was pointed but appropriately dry: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” It was a nice way of saying: Hello executive branch, we are the third and coequal branch, the judiciary. We are here and watching and not a potted plant. A district judge in Maryland then ordered Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to cease dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development on grounds that it likely usurped Congressional authority. These and other cases will make their way to higher courts.
None of this will register with the public until some case reaches the Supreme Court. If the justices rule against the administration, and the president defies the decision, and he’s just the man to do it, then we have our crisis. We’ll again quote the statement attributed to Andrew Jackson in 1832: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” (Editor Horace Greeley who likely wrote those words, accurately reflected Jackson’s stand.)
What happens then? Nobody knows. Jackson got away with it, but no president has tried it since. It takes time for nations to gel and mature and have an agreed-on way of operating. But once they do, and we do, people don’t like a disturbance.
On Thursday the president, unslowed, signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Education Department. Was there waste, fraud and abuse in that agency? There is no way there wasn’t. Did it, as is inevitable when something is so large and busy, probably achieve some demonstrable good? Of course. Wishing reform, can you laser in and, with time and patience, cut muscle from fat? Probably.
But DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.
It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.
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I talked this week with a veteran of 40 years of Democratic Party wars. The general context was that the party is still unsure how to respond to Mr. Trump—play possum or stand and scream? In the meantime, there is no central and fully resourced, shrewdly strategic and toughly tactical apparatus to which Democrats can go to be intellectually armed in the battle. You fight fire with water, with a hose and a great stream of information and facts. You persuade the American people that this is all getting reckless, mindless, destructive. You assert the good that specific programs are doing, and you have the receipts. You tell parents what education money that was being spent actually helps them and their school districts.
The Democrats aren’t doing this. They have forgotten Americans are fair. They will listen and are open to persuasion. My Democratic friend said, in the language of his party, that they need “a war room.” He meant they need an information room and persuasion room. Because public opinion is everything.
Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.
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A final point on this week. The scandal in the just-released remaining JFK assassination papers isn’t any specific revelation, but that they kept all this nothingness secret for more than 60 years. It’s meaningless stuff—obscure and unconnected factoids, memos that go nowhere and look like make-work. Anything revealing in those files met a shredder long ago.
In the public imagination there was always the sense the government was withholding crucial information, and because of that the searing debate over who killed JFK would never die. It would appear they were withholding nothing. Which means the real scandal is that in the past 60 years there was no wise old hand to take the time to have aides review the material, conclude it was nothing, and say, “America, this is all we got, it’s over.” So the endless argument continued.
Decisions to withhold documents are made by the human mind, which works on many tracks. Conscious: “We must be prudent, we can’t betray our sources and methods.” Subconscious: “Many of us, not all but enough, are lazy, time-serving clods, and if we show all we have the public will know it. But if we soberly withhold documents we’ll look—competent! In command. As if we know the truth but the American people can’t handle the truth. Secrecy will bestow on us an air of sound stewardship. And we like that! So we will, in every revealed tranche over the decades, withhold certain documents.”
Your tax dollars at work.
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We end with something happy. The SpaceX return of astronauts after nine months at the International Space Station was both a humanitarian achievement and a technological marvel. It was also a design marvel. The capsule, the uniforms—and here I must have a happiness freak-out about the parachutes that eased the capsule down. They were gorgeous as physical objects and beautifully designed, like high art, like a Christo installation, with their red and white and deep-hued, elegant markings to enhance visibility. At certain points before and during splashdown they moved like huge jellyfish in the sea. They were made with new stitching method and with a specialized polymer called Zylon, developed by researchers at Stanford.
It is a hard thing in life to do something so difficult and technical, so demanding of expertise and boldness, and still pay attention to beauty. It matters that this is done. Beauty can be natural (the rings of Saturn, a baby’s ear) or man-made (the rising view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge), and we must take it where it presents itself, and enjoy. And tip our hats.