Yuval Levin: You Can’t Run Government Through Retribution

Donald Trump’s key early actions are responses to frustrations from his first term. 

But did he learn the wrong lesson?

 

Every modern presidency has started out as a reaction against the one that preceded it. A half-century ago, Jimmy Carter came to cleanse the sins of the Nixon era. Then Ronald Reagan promised a rejection of Carter’s malaise. George H.W. Bush sought to soften Reaganism’s harder edges. Bill Clinton offered the sympathy and warmth that Bush’s WASP frigidity had lacked. The younger Bush said he would restore some dignity in Clinton’s tawdry wake. Barack Obama stood for a sharp change of direction after Bush’s unpopular wars. Trump embodied a reaction against the radicalism of Obama’s second term. Biden offered normality after the unceasing frenzy of Trump’s first presidency. And Trump then came back, promising an assertive rebuke to Biden’s catatonic wokeism.

But Trump’s return is different, precisely because it is a return. Only one other president in our history has served one term, then sat one out stewing, and came back. When Grover Cleveland did it at the end of the nineteenth century, some dubbed his restoration “Cleveland’s revenge.” And Trump’s second term so far certainly has the feel of retribution too. At least as much as it has been shaped in response to the Biden administration, it has been guided by the lessons Trump and his team learned from their own first time around.

Sometimes this has literally involved retribution. The Trump administration has gone after some individuals and institutions that gave Trump trouble last time, or pursued him during Biden’s term. It has ended Secret Service protection for disfavored former aides despite ongoing threats against them, for instance. It has fired the FBI director Trump had chosen but then found disappointing. And it has used the leverage of federal power to punish and pressure law firms that had represented Trump’s opponents or critics.

But it’s not all settling scores that crudely. The administration is also applying two kinds of conclusions that Trump’s team reached in its years in the wilderness.

One is that Trump’s circle was not effective enough in working the system to achieve its objectives in the first term. It lacked a worked-out policy agenda and legal strategy, and needed to hone its command of the tools at the president’s disposal. Some of Trump’s policy aides have spent the past four years filling those gaps.

This mode of learning has been especially evident in immigration policy. It’s clear that Trump’s key immigration staffers have systematically mapped out what didn’t work in the first term and thought through practical, pragmatic ways around the obstacles they faced. Although there have still been some explosive public legal disputes (like the district-court confrontation over deportation flights this month), much of their work is now proceeding relatively quietly through changes in formal procedures and guidance. And the administration is also clearly laying careful legal predicates for winning immigration fights lost in court in the first term.

A characteristic example is a little-noticed State Department memo published in the Federal Register on March 14, which asserted that:

 all immigration policy will now be considered “a foreign affairs function of the United States under the Administrative Procedure Act.” 

This seemingly mundane move could exempt some immigration-policy changes from the procedural requirements that usually constrain new regulations, nullifying one of the most effective legal strategies used by opponents of Trump’s immigration policies during his first term.

This approach to applying the lessons of the first term by working within our constitutional system more adeptly is likely to bear real fruit. Whatever you think of the policy goals involved, this strategy will render Trump’s second White House more effective than his first in some key areas—not only immigration but some aspects of education, civil-rights enforcement, and more.

But a second lesson has mostly overshadowed this one, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone who has read the memoirs of pretty much any former president. The insight presidents tend to walk away with from their White House years is that it would all have gone better if they’d been freer to be themselves in office.

They don’t normally get a chance to try that, but Donald Trump has that opportunity and he is clearly intent on making the most of it. Simply put: The conclusion he and much of his inner circle drew from his last time around was that Trump needs to be liberated from constraints.

This is one way to understand a lot of the administration’s most prominent and peculiar early actions. The sense that Trump was constrained by senior appointees who did not share his priorities has led to a far greater emphasis on personal loyalty to the president in this term than in his first one. The sense that he was constrained from acting as he wanted by assorted norms and rules he never bought into has led to the abandonment or suspension of executive-branch ethics rules and of limits on mixing his business interests and his public work.

The desire to put the powerful policy levers available to the administration at Trump’s unmediated personal disposal—so that, from trade and economics to defense and diplomacy, his personal momentary preferences become policy—is a powerful force behind this administration’s restructuring of executive policymaking.

The titanic clashes taking shape over the separation of powers are also, to a significant degree, really about the president’s personal freedom of action. Assertions of presidential authority over federal spending, the unilateral reorganization or shuttering of agencies (like USAID and the Department of Education), and the reining in of assorted boards and commissions have had at least as much to do with making the government more pliable by Donald Trump as with making it more accountable to the presidency per se. Growing tensions with the courts have frequently been grounded in the same desire.

Some people in Trump’s orbit advance a kind of constitutional theory that justifies pushing in this direction, but as a practical matter it does not look like this theory is the impetus for expanding executive power. The problem these efforts aim to solve is not that the American president is too weak but that Donald Trump is too constrained. The identification of the individual and the office runs very deep and is rooted most fundamentally in personal frustration, not constitutional vision.

A similar impulse is evident behind the administration’s aggressive approach toward the federal workforce. Organized, politicized defiance from the career bureaucracy was among the greatest sources of Trump’s first-term aggravations. And he did face unprecedented opposition. Veterans of previous Republican administrations (like me) thought we had seen politicized bureaucratic resistance, but what the Trump team experienced in his first term was unlike anything in the annals of the American civil service. It was not universal, but it was very widespread and in some cases plainly constituted a betrayal of the principles of public service. An aggressive response was inevitable if Trump returned to power.

But here the emphasis on liberating the president, as opposed to working the system more effectively, looks likely to undermine the new administration. Toward the end of Trump’s first term, his team began to advance some civil-service reforms that would have given the president more control over the upper reaches of the bureaucracy. Those ideas (like creating more accountable mid-level officials through a new “Schedule F”) had their serious downsides, but they were the beginning of an effort to think institutionally about the problem the administration had encountered. This time, such ideas are much less prominent, and instead we have been witness to a far more indiscriminate campaign to crudely diminish the bureaucracy.

This has been the centerpiece of the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk. It is not a strategy worked out over four years in the wilderness. It is a frantic and haphazard campaign cooked up just before Trump’s inauguration, rooted in an unfocused desire to punish the bureaucracy, and farmed out to vainglorious dilettantes who are learning about government on the fly. And it is rooted in the view that the president needs to be freed from the frictions and constraints of the career civil service.

The faults with this strategy are broad and deep. The president doesn’t need to be liberated from his employees; he needs to be better served by them. None of the administration’s ambitions can succeed without the cooperation of many civil servants. Some key parts of the bureaucracy (like the FDA) would actually be more efficient if they had more workers rather than fewer. Many other agencies might be well served by trimming their longest-serving cohorts, not the newest hires or those most recently promoted. And the notion that managing people is what Silicon Valley does especially well and could helpfully teach others is. . . not supported by reality.

Some in Trump’s orbit certainly see all this. But they have been unable to rein in DOGE because the effort speaks so powerfully to the president’s desire to lash out at those who once restrained him.

The administration is likely to pay a price for learning the wrong lesson from the first term in this domain. Breaking things to see what happens is not a good response to the public frustration that brought Trump back to power. And doing so in the name of efficiency runs a further risk nicely summarized by the so-called Pottery Barn Rule: “You break it, you buy it.” Rightly or wrongly, it won’t take long before routine experiences of federal ineptitude and prominent failures of federal competence come to be seen less as justifying DOGE than as resulting from it.

But the problem runs deeper still.

The view that Donald Trump failed in his first term when he was most constrained is simply wrong. It was when he had to adjust to resistance and pressure—from Congress, from his own senior appointees, from the courts, from foreign leaders, from public opinion, from the markets—that he was able to advance some relatively popular and durable policies.

The biggest burden on Trump’s popularity was always his own character and personality. Like every president, but even more than most, he was fortunate to have some mediating barriers between his momentary whims and the policies of his administration—on trade and the economy, defense and diplomacy, law enforcement, and more. We may well be in the process of discovering just how fortunate now.

This is one risk of a retributive presidency. An administration rooted in a response to the excesses of its predecessor, as the Trump administration has been on immigration and some cultural issues, at least begins from the public’s own frustrations. But an administration oriented by its own grudges, as Trump’s increasingly appears to be in a broad and growing range of policy domains, is more likely to become misaligned with public priorities, and in ways that grow increasingly aggravating to voters—whose concerns are overshadowed by the president’s grievances.

The lesson Donald Trump learned from his first term seems not to be the one that voters sought to teach him. It’s hard to see that ending well.

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