CNN
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It was the week reality began to catch up with the White House.
President Donald Trump made clear in his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night there will be no let-up in his relentless pace, his attempts to maximize executive power and his shake-up of the country and the world.
Yet every political action causes a counter reaction.
And the first signs of friction are appearing that could slow the president’s shock-and-awe start to his administration. It’s unlikely to stop Trump’s aggressive power plays, but it shows that even he is not immune to political gravity.
There’s little sign that he faces any imminent and meaningful opposition from congressional Democrats, whose glum and lame acts of protest during his primetime speech only exposed their powerlessness.
But the complications of a softening economy do now seem to be weighing on Trump’s behavior. The impact on regular Americans of Elon Musk’s bid to shred the federal government has prompted GOP lawmakers to demand a role. The Supreme Court just issued a ruling that could frustrate the administration’s attempt to shut down foreign aid. And more court rulings reining in Trump’s power grabs mean that the coming months are likely to be more impeded than his first six weeks in office.
On Tuesday for instance, an unrepentant Trump made a huge deal of imposing blanket 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Yet a day later, he’d exempted the auto industry for one month. On Thursday, he put all of the Western Hemisphere tariffs on hold until April. The moves against China remain unchanged. But this isn’t the first time in his second term that the president has wielded the tariff stick and then stepped back – both Mexico and Canada have been on the Trump roller coaster for weeks.
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The president’s aides often bill him as the greatest dealmaker in history – but it’s unclear what exactly he got for this concession on a policy he’d framed as all but existential to America’s prosperity and national security only two days before.
His decision to blink, however, followed severe losses on the stock market – a barometer Trump uses to judge his own performance – rising concern among Republican lawmakers over likely consumer price hikes that could be caused by the new policy and increasingly gloomy data on dipping consumer economic confidence.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul on Thursday offered a glimpse into GOP angst. “Almost every industry in Kentucky has come to me and said, ‘(Tariffs) will hurt our industry and push up prices of homes, cars,’ and so I’m going to continue to argue against tariffs,” Paul said.
It seems strange that the president didn’t realize the impact of his policies before imposing them. Or that the CEOs of the Big Three auto giants would have to get on the phone to explain he was imperiling an iconic American industry. Perhaps the president’s love for “beautiful” tariffs blinded him from their consequences. Or, is the theatrical thrill of wielding power reserved for the president so seductive that this was meant to be nothing more than a stunt all along?
“April 2 is going to be a very big day for America,” Trump said Thursday, setting up anticipation for yet another tariff deadline day – that is sure to create greater uncertainty that could hamper economic sentiment and infuriate Mexico and Canada.
Trump’s self-imposed halt suggests confusion rather than the strength around which he’s centered his political persona. He looks like he backed down once Canada and Mexico – which threatened their own tariffs – refused to back down themselves. The next time he wields the tariff stick, he risks crying wolf.
Elon Musk’s effort to gut the federal government is racing ahead. Every day brings news of more mass layoffs. This week, it emerged that Musk and Cabinet officials are drawing up big staff cuts at the Pentagon and the Internal Revenue Service. The president is prepping an executive order to close the Education Department – a goal of Republicans for at least four decades – although this will certainly trigger a court fight over executive power.
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Musk’s early shuttering of the US Agency for International Development was low hanging political fruit, and the general principle of reducing the size of government is popular among many Americans. But the deeper he cuts into agencies that have a direct impact on the lives of Americans, the greater the political risk.
Plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs are already sparking claims that the president and Musk are turning their backs on citizens who served their country and, in many cases, paid a heavy price with their physical and mental health. “Their reckless plan to wipe out the VA’s ability to deliver on America’s promise to veterans will backfire on millions of veterans and their families who risked their lives in service for our country,” Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees warned on Wednesday.
Administration officials insist that cuts are about streamlining bureaucracy and reversing bloat from President Joe Biden’s era. But they could have an ulterior motive – advancing a plan to privatize the VA by stealth. The president mulled a plan to expand private care for veterans in his first term – one reason why current cuts are so alarming to veterans’ groups.
“They’ve been sniping at the VA, cutting it bit by bit. And now it seems like they’re taking to take a big chunk out of it,” Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran who now serves as political director of Common Defense, the country’s largest veteran-led grassroots organization, told Audie Cornish on “CNN This Morning” on Thursday.
The increasing sensitivity of Musk’s mission is one reason GOP lawmakers and Cabinet secretaries are now asking the White House for some role in shaping the direction of his chainsaw at the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump said on Thursday he’d hold bi-weekly meetings of his Cabinet secretaries and Musk about the government-trimming operation, in a sign that the White House is seeking to mitigate future political fallout.
“As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet,’” he added. “The combination of them, Elon, DOGE, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”
The Tesla chief held meetings with House and Senate lawmakers Wednesday amid calls for votes on codifying some of the cuts made by his DOGE team. This was the first sign that the Republican Congress – which has done almost nothing to check Trump – now wants to retain some of its power ahead of looming spending fights.
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More involvement of Congress also follows a Supreme Court ruling this week in which a 5-4 majority told the administration it would ultimately have to disburse more than $2 billion in frozen foreign aid already appropriated by Congress. The case is far from a definitive judgment on the administration’s extraordinary use of executive power. But it did deliver a hint that the court may challenge the White House’s belief it has unilateral power to shut programs and departments.
On the one hand, Republican lawmakers might be seeking a slice of the credit for achieving a goal that has long united their party – limiting government. But their involvement is sure to slow the pace of Musk’s shock therapy. Every lawmaker after all, has a project in their district to save. And one result of the DOGE purge has been to highlight the fact that the federal government isn’t just confined to the Beltway. Every state has its big federal building – and jobs and programs are at risk in every state as the government dismantling drive goes on.
An effort to codify Musk’s cuts in law is the proper constitutional course and could spare the administration prolonged legal battles in some cases. But it will also add to the load of a Congress already weighed down by the need to pass Trump’s proposed huge tax cuts, his budget, a coming debt ceiling crisis and a potential government shutdown. And forcing Republicans to vote on cuts that could turn out to be unpopular could also play into the hands of Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday that he’s working with the Senate Finance Committee to make “good headway” on legislation but that “it’s going to take some time.”
Taking time runs directly contrary to Trump and Musk’s disrupt first, think later mantra.
The revolution still seems likely to happen. It will just go a little more slowly.
