Trump is not a King, He’s Just a Weak President

We all know the first couple weeks of Trump’s Presidency have been a whirlwind of inflammatory headlines, reckless declarations, and probing attacks on US trade partners and Federal institutions.

And many of my liberal friends are worried, stressed, and depressed. And this is what I tell them to give some sense of comfort.

While Trump is incredibly talented at getting headlines and capturing attention, he’s thankfully quite terrible at affecting change. He will make more noise than any public figure in history, but he will most likely do very little in the end, to change history.

During his first week in office, Trump signed dozens of executive orders affecting everything from immigration, oil exploration, and healthcare as well as eliminating federal DEI programs, federal protiections for LGBTQ+, and a lot more. (His Anti-LGBTQ+ Executive Orders and how they will fought in the courts are listed here via GLAD.)

His attempt to end birthright citizenship was frozen by a judge days later, as was his order to freeze spending to the Office of Management and Budget. His attempts to ‘buy Greenland’ and absorb Canada, were also loud, toothless headline grabs. His fake ‘tariff war’ bluster, was also cancelled.

To put it simply, he’s not going to get done, 95% of the things he’s ‘attempting’. He’s not a king, he’s a weak president.

Remember his first presidency? Remember the proclamations he was making back in 2017, and his flood of executive orders? He was going to build a Mexican border wall, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and bring back the US coal industry!

None of that shit happened.

This is not to say Trump won’t do real damage, he will in the short term. His push to accelerate ICE raids and deportations is perhaps his scariest move, that is having real-world consequences.

But wait, breathe, by Spring the cracks will begin to show, and the Dems will get their act together in opposition. By the midterms, Congress will flip back to blue. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

If you want a far more comprehensive explanation of what Trump is attempting to do, how he is being thwarted, and how we should deal with him going forward, listen to Ezra Klein’s piece in the NYT “Don’t Believe Him.” It explains things far better than I could:

Ezra Klein: “Don’t Believe Him”