The Trouble with Writing About Chaos Government

One of the frustrations of the second Trump term, as a writer, is quite how opaque the facts frequently are on so many fronts. This is a professional annoyance, but it’s more than just my own grievance: it’s also bad for democratic debate. And while some of this is the result of issue environments outside of the current administration’s control, it’s also a predictable side effect of executive-driven governance that is all about the use of power and leverage rather than the deployment of reason or principle or the defense of law.

Donald Trump has always presented a challenge for commentators, especially in foreign affairs. Those of us who deal in public argument tend to analyze whether or not political leaders are taking a defensible position. Are they asking for something reasonable? Are they prioritizing something important? Are they demanding things that are illicit or illegal or none of their business? In democratic politics, the reasonableness of one’s goals is inseparable from power: if your position is strongly grounded in reason, emotion, and/or moral sentiment, it is more likely to attract public support, and if you have public support, you have more leverage in contests with other actors in the same democratic system. Public opinion matters, too — if less directly — in international affairs.

Trump, however, is accustomed to thinking in terms of a business negotiation in which the justice of your demands is beside the point, and all that matters is leverage. He will therefore sometimes demand or threaten something indefensible (such as invading Greenland) but then settle for something reasonable, with the result that critics of his original negotiating position appear hysterical. Or he will demand something entirely just and reasonable (such as a Venezuelan government answerable to its people) and then settle without getting the reasonable and just part, so long as he gets his cut of what he wants, with the result that defenders of his original negotiating position are made to look foolish or hypocritical. It’s all baked into his habit of treating everything as negotiable, and it undermines anyone who tries to assess Trump’s methods by anything other than the bottom line. But that also makes it all the more essential that we can tell what the bottom line is. Honest commentary that seeks to call balls and strikes and tell readers the score doesn’t work if you can’t see the pitches or the scoreboard. On Greenland, on Venezuela, and on multiple other fronts foreign and domestic, Trump treats the negotiation and the use of leverage as an ongoing dynamic, and onlookers get their own version of what is being agreed with handshakes or disputed with acrimony behind closed doors.

We see the same dynamics playing out across domestic policy as well. Given my background as a lawyer, I prefer to deal in evidence, which is easiest to do when dealing with court decisions; legislation; official economic, fiscal, and demographic data; public speeches and debates; polling data; election returns; and other hard and verifiable facts. Two of the branches of our government — Congress and the courts — can ultimately exercise most of their powers only through formal, written laws, resolutions, orders, and opinions. Even when deliberations are secret, actions are public, and the reader can see what was done and not done. But the executive branch is different: it can act by closed-door threats, by internal supervision of the government workplace, or by the action or inaction of law enforcement, the military, and the intelligence agencies. So, the more power and events shift toward the executive, the less we know.

And the problem of knowledge concerns not just secrecy but credibility. When we shift to questions of street incidents such as the recent shootings in Minneapolis, and “protest” activity aimed at obstructing or threatening law enforcement, or quiet deportations, we increasingly end up in a choose-your-own-reality debate in which it’s impossible to get agreement on the basic facts, and everybody has his own anonymous sources (whether or not they exist or are trustworthy, the reader cannot tell) and his own edits and angles of video. The left and the national political press thrive in this environment, flooding the zone with emotive narratives that can pick up speed before anyone can get to the facts. And MAGA populists love the post-truth news environment for the same reasons. But it makes it enormously difficult to bring reason, law, morality, or prudence into a debate when you can’t even argue in the same factual universe.