I think the federal government shouldn’t be doing much of what it is doing. I support nearly all of the spending cuts the Trump administration has proposed. But there is a right and a wrong way to attempt to get them implemented.”
By Robert Robb
Donald Trump and his administration have conducted a political blitzkrieg, moving fast and hard on an ever-expanding number of fronts.
Supposedly, the strategic value is overwhelming and keeping off balance opponents and the media by overloading the attention zone with too many targets to effectively track and counteract. I suspect it also has something to do with the temperament of the president. Donald Trump seems to want every day to be a movie starring him. Some days it is a drama; some days it is a farce. But the star remains the same. This goes well beyond the usual desire of an administration to control the daily media narrative to the extent possible.
Substantively, the success of the blitzkrieg has been hit or miss. It involves stretching the outer limits of presidential authority and, in my view, vastly exceeding them. Some of the blitzkrieg’s objectives have been achieved. Many are being challenged in court, thus far for the most part successfully.
Politically, however, the blitzkrieg has been a clear loser. Trump’s approval ratings, both overall and on every specific issue, have been in a steady decline. His approval rating on even immigration is underwater, even though new illegal immigration has already become negligible.
In large part, this is due to massive overreaching. The body politic wanted more rigorous enforcement of the immigration laws. That’s a long way from supporting or approving deporting people to a foreign prison without due process and in violation of a court order.
I believe that there is, however, another factor at play that underlies all this mounting disapproval and somewhat unifies it. The blitzkrieg violates, indeed attacks, a widespread sense that government plays the role of providing a measure of stability in our civil order.
A free people live in a turbulent world. Creative destruction is a fundamental characteristic of a market economy. Cultural norms aren’t fixed. Innovation is a constant source of upheaval.
This is often intuited rather than stated, but government is seen as a sort of shock absorber for all this turbulence. Something that is more of a constant than an additional source of churn.
This is not to say that the body politic doesn’t want change in government. We frequently vote for the party that is perceived as offering the most change, meaning the party not currently in charge of an unsatisfactory status quo. However, our constitutional order provides a deliberative process for effectuating change in government, a process that moves more slowly and consensually than hurtling Truth Social thunderbolts.
By way of illustration, it is worth considering a counterfactual: What if Trump, rather than a blitzkrieg, had proceeded in a way that respected the sense of the body politic that government should be, in part, a source of stability not chaos?
There are three planks to Trump’s approach to the economy: maintaining the Trump I tax cuts; deregulation; and a protectionist tariff.
Now, I don’t buy the case for a protectionist tariff. However, even if it is to work in increasing domestic manufacturing employment over time, in the short term it will result in shortages and higher prices for goods presently imported.
The logical way to proceed would have been to start with maintaining the Trump I tax cuts and deregulation to strengthen the economy to absorb the short-term adverse effects of a protectionist tariff. And then to implement a protectionist tariff with enough of a lead time for producers to adjust their supply chains.
Instead, Trump began with helter-skelter tariffs based upon a legal assertion that they can be anything he wants them to be based upon however he is feeling that day. Contrary to Trump’s claim, this is not what he campaigned on. During the campaign, he advocated a universal tariff of 10% to 20% and a higher tariff only on China. There would be adverse consequences to that, but economic actors could adjust to them.
Instead, we have day-to-day uncertainty and not only about the tariffs. There is no certainty that congressional Republicans will be able to muster the votes to keep the Trump I tax cuts from expiring. Eliminating that uncertainty should have been economic Job One, and should have preceded any movement on disrupting trade through tariffs.
I have a radial view of federalism, or the respective roles of the federal government and state and local governments. I think the federal government shouldn’t be doing much of what it is doing. I support nearly all of the spending cuts the Trump administration has proposed. But there is a right and a wrong way to attempt to get them implemented.
Through DOGE, the Trump administration moved immediately and aggressively in the wrong way, asserting the right to shutter agencies established by statute and not spend money appropriated by Congress and approved by its predecessor. Lawsuits proliferated.
The right way is reflected in the recent recommendation by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins in October. It provides roughly 40 pages of proposals to increase spending in certain areas and decrease it in others, with specifics and rationales. The decreases point in three directions: increasing the responsibility of state and local governments; eradicating the DEI requirements the Biden administration had injected into myriad federal grant programs; and emphasizing energy production rather than climate change containment.
What if the Trump administration had skipped the DOGE wrecking ball and instead concentrated on winning the argument for the 2026 budget? DOGE has cost the Trump administration far more in political capital than it has gained in substantive savings or policy changes. Discussing what the federal government should do on a going-forward basis is far different than indiscriminate firings of federal workers and willy-nilly cancellations of existing contracts and grants. The DOGE chaos has poisoned the well for the going-forward discussion.
Under the counterfactual — doing tariffs last rather than first, making them predictable rather than unpredictable, and arguing about future spending rather than trying to undo decisions already lawfully made — I think the political situation would be entirely different. That would be attempting to enact change that didn’t threaten or undermine the role of government as a source of stability in our civil order.
I understand that in MAGAworld, the wrecking ball approach is regarded as necessary to overcome an inherently hostile deep state. And MAGAworld likes the chaos. Moreover, I think turning the Oval Office into a daily soap opera is an unalterable part of Trump’s political DNA. So, I’m not expecting any course correction.
Outside of MAGAworld, the body politic wants a steady hand on the tiller, even if steering the government toward change. That’s not Trump, nor his unmerry band of marauders.
Editor's note: Retired Arizona journalist Robert Robb opines about politics and public policy on Substack. Reach him at robtrobb@gmail.com. Please send your comments to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
