Don't Believe Him

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Mixing by Isaac Jones. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Aaron Retica.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:32Ezra Klein?

  If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's Frontline in 2019.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done. Pang, bang, bang. These guys will never, will never be able to recover. But we gotta start with muzzle velocity. So it's gotta start, and it's gotta hammer.

• 1:05Ezra Klein?

  What was the word?

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Muzzle velocity. You gotta, when you get anything in life...

• 1:09Ezra Klein?

  Muzzle velocity. Bannon's insight there is real. Focus is a fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media, be it mainstream media or social media. So if you overwhelm the media, if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next, to the next, faster, faster, faster, no coherent opposition can really emerge. It is hard to even think coherently. Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script. The flood is a point. The overwhelm is a point. The message wasn't in any one executive order or announcement.

• 1:54Ezra Klein?

  It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The speed with which things were happening and changing. The sense that this is Trump's country now. It is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. That he is limitless. If Trump tells a state to stop spending money, then the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, then it's over. Or so he wants you to think. In Trump's first term, people said, "Don't normalize him." In a second, though, the task, I think, is a little bit clearer. Don't believe him. Because Trump knows the power of marketing, the power of belief. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.

• 2:40Ezra Klein?

  He clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV. He remade himself as a winner after the 2020 election by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office, but Trump has never wanted to be president, not the way it's defined in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution. What he's always wanted to be is king. And his plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, if we believe he already has all that power, it becomes likelier that we'll let him govern as a king. We will then give him that power. Don't believe him. Trump has real powers, but they are the powers of the presidency, the powers Joe Biden had,

• 3:25Ezra Klein?

  the powers Barack Obama had. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could indeed pardon the January 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch. And so, yes, Trump could remove protection from Anthony Fauci, and Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton, and Mark Milley, and even Brian Hook, this largely unknown former State Department official who's under threat from Iran, who even donated time to Trump's transition team. All of this, it was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness. This from a man who nearly died by an assassin's bullet months ago. As much as anything ever has been this to me, this was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump's soul.

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  But it was an act that was within his official power. But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, his birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, by a Reagan appointee, who told Trump's lawyers, "I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind." A judge froze Trump's spending freeze. He froze it even before it went into full effect. And truly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the entire order, in part to avoid a court case that it seemed pretty clear they would lose. What Bannon wanted, what the Trump administration wants, is to keep everything moving fast. He's got a hammer. What was the word?

• 4:56Ezra Klein?

  Muzzle velocity. Muzzle velocity, remember? If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one. Then, the impression of Trump's power remains, and the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don't believe him. You can see this a few ways. Is Trump playing a part? Is he making a bet, or is he triggering a crisis? Those, I think, are the options. And I'm not certain that even he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as a bet, a calculation, then here is a bet he's making. Maybe this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed.

• 5:41Ezra Klein?

  Perhaps all this becomes legal now, that he has asserted its legality. It's not impossible to imagine that bet paying off for him. But the odds are bad. So what if the bet fails? What if Trump's arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes a question of constitutional crisis. Does he just ignore the court's ruling? To do that would be to attempt a kind of coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for that. The withdrawal of the OMB order, to me, suggests they don't. Because bravado aside, Trump's political capital is thin. Both in his first and his second terms, he entered office with approval ratings below that of any other president in the modern era.

• 6:22Ezra Klein?

  Gallup has Trump's approval rating at 47 percent. That is about 10 points beneath Joe Biden in January of 2021. There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders, rather than submitting these very same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could convince Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes, or to reform the civil service to give him the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. And there's a good reason to do that. To write these changes into legislation would make them both more durable, and would allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. He would be reforming the entire system. Even if Trump's real aim is just to bring the civil service to heel,

• 7:04Ezra Klein?

  even if all he really wants to do is rid the state of his opponents and turn it to his own ends, he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. It's rule one of a power grab. He never wanted to look like a power grab. But Republicans at the moment, they have only a three-seat edge in the House, smallest majority since the Great Depression. They have a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump is obviously doing nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda's legislation, it would fail. It would likely die in the House, and even if it didn't, it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. And Trump doesn't want to look weak.

• 7:46Ezra Klein?

  He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare appeal. Congress is a place where you can lose. That is a tension at the heart of Trump's whole strategy. Trump is acting like a king because he's too weak to govern like a president. He's trying to substitute perception for reality. He's doing that hoping the perception then becomes reality. But that can only happen if we believe him. This flurry of activity, it's meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they're ready this time. They've been preparing, plotting, scheming. They will control events rather than be controlled by them, control institutions rather than be curbed by them.

• 8:30Ezra Klein?

  But the closer you look, even at this first two weeks, the less true it seems. They're scrambling and flailing already. They're leaking against each other in the press already. We learned that the OMB directive was drafted purportedly without the input or oversight of key Trump officials. "It didn't go through the proper approval process," an administration official told The Washington Post. "For that to be the process and product of such a sweeping signature initiative in the second week of a president's second term, it's embarrassing." But it's not just a spending freeze. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the deep state they believe hampered them in the first term.

• 9:13Ezra Klein?

  And a big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He is longtime aides now at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email that got sent out to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent out to Twitter employees after the acquisition: "A fork in the road." It's a kind of bragging. Elon wants you, he wants everybody, to know it was him. The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout, agree to resign, and in theory at least you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Doge account on X described it this way: "Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill

• 9:58Ezra Klein?

  while receiving your full government pay and benefits." The Washington Post reported that the email blindsided many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that. It blindsided many of the people who are going to have to run these agencies that are now going to be dotted by resignations. I suspect Musk thinks of the federal workforce as this huge mass of woke and largely useless ideologues. For most federal workers, they have very little to do with politics. About 16% of them work in healthcare. These are nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs Department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? How many primary care doctors treating veterans is he hoping take a buyout? Twitter worked terribly after Musk's takeover.

• 10:43Ezra Klein?

  It had these frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When VA healthcare degrades, it is a national scandal. To have launched this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything later goes wrong. What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They don't have some secret reservoir of focus and attention. The rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself, that it is, in a sense, a replacement for an actual strategy, for thinking and talking things through, for consultation, for planning things out. Don't believe them.

• 11:28Ezra Klein?

  I had a conversation a couple of months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. And I asked him, what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it? What he said was he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular, that made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he worked by stealth, if he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the state in the places where it was weakest, where people couldn't really see him doing it. But Trump didn't do any of that. Instead... It's got muzzle velocity. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless and absent after the election,

• 12:13Ezra Klein?

  now it's beginning to rouse itself. There's a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads, "This non-buyout really seems to have backfired." I'll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I'm fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible. As I write this, it's been upvoted more than 39,000 times, and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. The people poised you ideologically, they're gonna fight you. Offering them a buyout isn't very helpful at all. In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state senate seat in a district that Trump had won easily in 2024.

• 12:55Ezra Klein?

  The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back as he zeroed in on protecting the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn't building support right now. He's losing it. He isn't fracturing his opposition. He is finally uniting it. This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and that Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting. You have to keep moving. You have to keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear to keep the media and the opposition overwhelmed. But then you overwhelm yourself. They are flooding their own zone. I don't know that Trump sees his own fork in the road coming.

• 13:38Ezra Klein?

  He may believe that he has all the power he's claiming. That would be a mistake on his part. It would be a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he convinces the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have. The first two weeks of his presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off balance. He is trying to convince you of something that isn't true. Don't believe him.