Musk's rampage through government shows us how we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about | Osita Nwanevu

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : After defenses from Vance and Trump, he was reinstated.
53% : And the major legal challenges to all he's done and will do this time around will inevitably wind their way to a supreme court dominated by conservatives Trump himself and the Republican party successfully installed, in full keeping with the constitution's rules, to give themselves their best possible odds of winning their policy fights and hobbling Democratic governance.
47% : Donald Trump, a Republican president backed by Republican voters and the Republican party as an institution, is using extralegal means to enact longstanding parts of the Republican agenda and the conservative project ⁠- including, chiefly, the crippling of the federal government.
44% : Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump.
43% : What's more, all of this comes on the heels of Trump's extraordinary freeze on federal loans and grants ⁠- justified as a step towards rooting out "Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies" in government ⁠- which threatened programs like Medicaid, Head Start and even Meals on Wheels before it was blocked in court.
42% : But anyone who's bothered to examine the Canadian and Mexican concessions closely knows that Trump delivered next to nothing ⁠- his ploy won a Canadian border plan that had already been announced and a reshuffling of Mexican troops to bolster the 10,000 already stationed at that border to little effect as far as the flow of fentanyl is concerned.
42% : Even the 10% tariff on China now in effect is much lower than the 60% levy Trump promised during the campaign.
41% : As a matter of substance, this is a system that needs to be dramatically reformed or reimagined rather than rescued; as a matter of politics, one of the central lessons of this past election is that critical constituencies Democrats need to improve with in order to stay competitive federally care far less about protecting our sickly institutions than they care about a great many other things that they hoped Donald Trump would accomplish.
36% : The very mechanisms the founders crafted to protect the republic are now an existential threat to it; in their greed and determination to implement the conservative agenda, Trump, Musk and Republicans empowered by those mechanisms are happily ignoring or working to override the parts of the constitution that don't advantage them or suit their ends.
32% : Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America's institutions but as the defenders of the American people's concrete interests ⁠ -- showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them.
30% : If appeals to our norms and constitution were politically potent enough on their own to work against Trump, he wouldn't be in the Oval Office waging war against the administrative state today.
29% : From the "department of government efficiency", or Doge, it was said, Musk would issue easily ignored recommendations the gullible would take as evidence that Trump was streamlining the federal bureaucracy - a promise reliably made and broken by countless presidents.
28% : They were followed, in the years just before Trump fully entered the picture, by a period where candidates like the now-sainted Mitt Romney leaned into restricting immigration so strongly that Republican leaders openly feared they would be permanently uncompetitive with Latino voters.
22% : It should never be forgotten that Trump was brought to power by an ugly mutant of the founders' electoral college to begin with.
10% : Trump, Musk and the Republican party are happily overriding parts of the constitution, and using means of questionable legality to cripple the federal government It is humbling to realize, almost a decade into his tenure at the center of American politics and life, that Donald Trump still has the power to surprise us.

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