Trump Exhaustion Syndrome
Among the greatest tricks Donald Trump ever pulled is convincing significant portions of the population that the slow erosion of their rights is not, actually, that big of a deal.
After all, do undocumented immigrants with purported gang tattoos truly deserve due process? Is it really so bad to urge citizens to turn on their neighbors and co-workers for saying something outrageous? And is it problematic to punish journalists for reporting facts that the government would rather keep hidden? (Yes, yes, and yes! come the emphatic cries of constitutional-law experts, civil-liberties advocates, and others who care about this sort of thing.)
A year into Trump’s second term, the emboldened president’s maximalist strategy—pushing every norm to its most elastic, and then a bit beyond, and from that new breaking point pushing yet again—conjures the boiling-frog theory, in which a frog placed in boiling water will immediately hop out, but a frog placed in cool water that is slowly heated will complacently boil to death. (And yes, I know that this amphibious metaphor for failing to notice incremental negative changes is apocryphal, but the lesson is still apt.)
Or, as the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it to me, the Overton window is moving so far, so quickly, that the more apt way to understand Trump’s strategy is: “Fuck the Overton window.”
Bannon continued: “He’s driving deep. Remember, our strategy—I say it every day—is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
“We haven’t met any resistance” is overstating the case, but it is astonishing just how far Trump has pushed the country over the past year. The list of actions Trump has taken that would have outraged even his base—in some cases, especially his base—had anyone else attempted such maneuvers is as long as it is audacious. Already, many Americans have grown accustomed to bands of National Guard troops patrolling their cities; the United States bombing other countries without congressional approval (or even notification); white-nationalist rhetoric filling government social-media feeds; federal funding disappearing from elite universities that are viewed as too “woke” and hostile to Trump’s movement; hundreds of thousands of immigrants being arrested and deported, often with extreme force; the once-independent Justice Department taking orders from the White House; conservative influencers masquerading as journalists; government data losing their reliability; museums quietly whitewashing history; and the White House being physically and symbolically demolished and rebuilt in Trump’s image.
Tellingly, the president told The New York Times this month that his powers in international affairs are checked only by himself: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Since Trump’s return to power, I have had a recurring conversation—with diplomats, Democrats, and certain Republicans. They have all repeatedly told me a version of the same thing: During Trump’s first term, they believed that his election was an aberration, an out-of-character mistake that would soon be corrected—but one year into his second term, they now think that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was the aberration, and that Trump’s reelection is not a fever dream but rather a reflection of the country at this moment.
Maybe that’s why so many Americans are shrugging as the temperature rises.
During the first Trump administration, resistance was often easy to identify. Sure, there were the hordes of women in pink pussyhats and the lawyers descending on airports as Trump announced a travel ban, but there was also the quiet resistance within the administration, the top advisers and deep-bowel bureaucrats who viewed themselves as guardrails or checks on power, and who relished that role.
Now Trump’s administration is filled with true believers who ruthlessly enact his ideas, no matter how outlandish. (Earlier this year, someone close to Trump told me that his advisers have an unofficial rule: When he asks for something twice, they make it happen, regardless of the request.) Congressional Republicans have largely done as they are told, and Democrats, who don’t control either chamber, often seem to have descended into learned helplessness.
[Read: Does Congress even exist anymore? ]
Governors and mayors—along with world leaders, corporate executives, and tech moguls—seem to have collectively concluded that it’s often better to flatter Trump and offer small concessions than to risk his wrath and vengeance. Activists have been labeled domestic terrorists, accused of left-wing “street violence,” and threatened with “the power of law enforcement.” And even though a majority of Americans, including large swaths of Trump’s own base, disagree with some of the things he is doing, the president seems impervious to his low poll numbers and to the fact that his party is careening nervously toward the midterm elections.
As many of my colleagues have repeatedly described, the dismantling of a democracy comes slowly, then all at once; rarely does it begin with armed, jackbooted men marching in the streets. It remains unclear just how far the president is willing to go, and what his endgame is. Less than a week after Trump lost the 2020 election, I wrote that Republicans were largely allowing him to pursue his baseless claims that the election had been stolen, despite privately reconciling themselves to a Biden victory. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a top Republican official told me at the time. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.” After the deadly January 6 attacks, that quote hit different, periodically resurfacing and going viral for its seeming naivete. But in the moment, when the top Republican uttered it, I will confess that the words seemed plausible to me; neither of us anticipated—could have even imagined—how Trump’s first term would end.
And how will this term end? As Trump has adopted an unapologetic strongman stance, I have been struck by just how little meaningful resistance he’s faced, from citizens and even from lawmakers who claim to find his actions appalling or terrifying. In his first term, he and his team ultimately abandoned some of their most chilling and controversial edicts—the travel ban, the family-separation policy—in the face of public backlash. And some of the other incidents that prompted outrage back then—Trump essentially firing his first chief of staff by tweet, the path of a hurricane being altered with a thick Sharpie squiggle—now seem positively quaint. Yet the level of agita generally on display now, for far bolder and more brazen norm-shattering, seems, if anything, more muted.
Trump Derangement Syndrome, in many ways, has been replaced by Trump Exhaustion Syndrome: The populace notes the latest indignity, and then returns to business as usual.
Many Americans awoke on the first Saturday of this year and were stunned to learn that, on Trump’s orders, the U.S. military had executed a predawn capture of Nicolás Maduro and spirited the Nike-sweatsuit-clad Venezuelan leader to the United States to stand trial. But they should not have been so surprised.
After all, even if seizing Maduro was not Trump’s initial goal, the president had slowly been desensitizing the country to such a possibility for months and setting Venezuela up as a dangerous enemy. The first bill Trump signed into law as the 47th president was the Laken Riley Act—in honor of a nursing student in Georgia who had been attacked and killed while jogging by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant—which mandates that undocumented immigrants who commit certain crimes inside the country face stricter punishments. (The bill felt so common sense that a dozen Senate Democrats and nearly four dozen House Democrats voted for it.) Two months later, in March, Trump creatively deployed the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, arguing that the U.S. was at war with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—and using the long-dormant legislation to begin deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison. Then, under the continued guise of defeating these “narco-terrorists,” Trump ordered the Navy to strike suspect boats in the high seas off Venezuela. (As of last Friday, 123 people have been killed in 35 strikes in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.)
By the time Trump seized Maduro, the capture felt less like an alarmingly broad interpretation of American might and more like the logical next step in a string of reasonable ones.
After all, a through line of Trump’s presidential campaign was the denigration and dehumanization of immigrants; he would start with an archetype that sounded genuinely scary—“They are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said in his 2015 campaign launch—and then tacitly apply it to all immigrants, or any other group that he deemed a threat.
Journalists and liberal activists have also been targeted. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Vice President Vance urged people to call out their neighbors and co-workers—including by reporting them to their employer—who exercised their right to free (if abhorrent) speech by celebrating Kirk’s death. Trump also issued an executive order casting a wide range of liberal activists as potential domestic terrorists, the same label immediately placed on Renee Nicole Good, the Minnesota mother killed by a federal immigration officer this month. Trump’s attacks on the media, which once were a somewhat playful campaign gimmick, have escalated. The White House now severely limits reporter access, and the Defense Department has swapped out the Pentagon press corps in favor of a new one that regurgitates administration propaganda. Last week, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist.
After six congressional Democrats with military or national-security backgrounds released a video advising members of the military to not follow illegal orders, Trump accused them of sedition—and shared a social-media post suggesting that they be hanged for treason. The president has abandoned the idea of an independent Justice Department, chiding his attorney general—in a private message that he accidentally posted publicly—for not doing more to prosecute his political opponents and enemies. Earlier this month, the DOJ launched a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whose biggest crime seems to be refusing to ignore economic indicators and lower interest rates just because the president says he should.
The bureaucratic and staid Powell responded in a rare video message, warning, in part: “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”
[Read: ‘I run the country and the world’]
Yet for all this (and more), Trump has faced little meaningful congressional opposition, although his approval rating has declined. And in some cases, the public has largely responded with a Gallic shrug. Even after the Maduro raid, Democrats en masse led with talking-point pablum—Maduro is a bad guy (true!)—rather than emphasizing the lack of congressional authorization and the possible violation of international law (also true!). Five Republican senators did join with Democrats to advance a bill forcing Trump to seek congressional approval before taking additional military action in Venezuela. But they soon backed down.
The Overton window gets moved with little consequence, Bannon told me, and the result is a further-emboldened Trump: “You move it, and you do it, and no one complains—or MSNBC and The Atlantic complain and nobody gives a fuck—and then you do it again, and push it again.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the word unprecedented has been used (dare I say) an unprecedented number of times a year into Trump’s second term—up from the previously unprecedented number of times in his first term. I asked a senior White House official whether the lack of meaningful resistance has given the president even more faith in his ability to pursue his instincts as brazenly and brashly as possible. This person reframed my question, arguing that there has been little resistance because Trump’s policies are broadly popular: “Most Americans, if you ask them, ‘Do you want a drug boat sailing to the United States blown up?’ they’d say yes.”
Part of Trump’s skill in shifting—or shattering—the Overton window is his instinctual ability to choose test cases that allow him to generate sympathy for his causes, even as he blows through boundaries and tramples on rights.
After his administration mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Maryland father with a protected legal status—to a Salvadoran mega-prison, Trump and his team refused to reverse the decision, dismissing concerns of due process and highlighting Abrego Garcia’s tattoos to paint him as a dangerous gang member. (Never mind that the photos that Trump showed of the tattoos had been digitally altered.) Trump’s strikes on small vessels off the coast of Venezuela are said to be aimed at cartel bosses funneling huge loads of fentanyl into the country; in fact, fentanyl doesn’t pass through the Caribbean, the boats aren’t headed to the United States, and they’re steered by the poorest and most expendable members of narco organizations. But who’s going to bother sticking up for drug runners?
“Trump is a master at getting his enemies to defend things that are politically damaging to them,” a former senior administration official still close to the president told me. “So if you are going out and defending the principle of due process—or whatever high-minded legal and constitutional things—even if your constitutional argument is strong, you are still effectively defending a narco-terrorist.”
This person continued, admiringly: “It’s interesting, the issues he picks. Even if his enemies have a legitimate beef—constitutional, legal, whatever—it still puts them in a position where they appear to be defending bad people.”
[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller ]
Daniel Ziblatt, a co-author of How Democracies Die, told me that by demonizing people who are easy to demonize, Trump makes it harder for average citizens to feel comfortable publicly defending the broader principles. After all, who wants to speak up for someone celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk? “It’s harder to defend it, especially when there’s some perceived cost to speaking out against the government,” Ziblatt said. “If you’re going to get picked on in social media or have threats against you, you sort of think, Is this really what I want to spend my political capital on, defending an indefensible person? So you stay silent.”
In the case of Good, the 37-year-old mother who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis after dropping off her 6-year-old son at school, the circumstances of her killing were nebulous at best, and she hardly fit the mold of an easily vilified lawbreaker; nevertheless, Trump and his allies began attacking her almost immediately. Trump’s hard-line domestic-policy chief Stephen Miller dismissed her as an agent of “domestic terrorism,” the vice president called it “a tragedy of her own making,” and Trump falsely claimed that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”—despite video from the scene showing that, at worst, her car might have clipped him. Regardless of the reality, the implication was clear: Good had it coming.
I was eager to understand why so much of the public seems willing to accept actions that they claim in polls and interviews not to like, so I reached out to Conor Kilgore, who produces the podcast The Focus Group for The Bulwark, a center-right website critical of Trump, and who also moderates focus groups with voters who flipped from supporting Biden in 2020 to backing Trump four years later. When I asked Kilgore if these swing voters are now hopping, froglike, out of the water to raise concerns or if they are simply accepting the nation’s gradually rising temperature, his response was unequivocal: “People have generally been less alarmed than we might like.”
“Every once in a while, you will hear people talk about authoritarian creep,” Kilgore told me. “But mainly it’s: Well, maybe this is a little overkill some of the time, but generally, I think he’s doing what needs to be done.”
He sent me some clips of Biden-Trump voters discussing Trump’s use of the National Guard in American cities. One focus-group participant, a Black man in New York, said that he disagreed with Trump using the military to address urban crime and worried that the president was “opening the door” to something even worse. When asked to explain where Trump’s actions might lead, he elaborated: “To where they have more of a choke hold on just the area or region they’re looking over, to where it spreads—like, where does it spread to next? You know what I’m saying? Like, where does it spread to next?”
In a different group, a white man in Georgia named Adam wasn’t yet ready to render a verdict on the deployment, which was then still fresh. But he seemed to accept Trump’s absolute authority to do as he pleased. “I don’t think it’s egregious that he’s doing it,” Adam said. “Because he can.”
That assessment—Trump is doing it because he can—reminded me of something Kilgore had explained during our phone call. “Broadly, people do not have the language for: We are going to descend fully into autocracy,” he’d told me. “As much as people think the political system is fundamentally broken and corrupt, they also think it’s ultimately going to trudge along fine.”
Kilgore had continued, matter-of-factly if ominously: “They kind of have faith in people to rise up, and it’s like, Oh, I don’t think we would take that lying down. Even though they might, in fact, take that lying down.”
At least for now, a year into Trump’s second term, the country seems to have settled for the illusory safety of the fetal crouch.