It’s No Secret What Trump and His Allies Mean When They Talk About ‘Shock and Awe’

Americans were supposed to be stunned by the opening salvo of Donald Trump’s second term. In fact, his aides and allies took pains to describe his initial flurry of executive activity as “shock and awe,” reviving an analogy to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when American troops pounded Saddam Hussein’s army with a fusillade of ordinance as they charged through to Baghdad. And in much the same way that President George W. Bush believed he was cowing America’s enemies with an overwhelming display of military might, Trump believes he is pounding his domestic political enemies into submission. Trump also believes, I imagine, that he and his acolytes will be greeted as liberators.

It is possible that flooding the zone — another metaphor made popular by Trump’s ascendance — in this way will disorient the president’s opponents. But the other way to think about this shotgun approach to undermining the federal government is that it is galvanizing them. Consider the administration’s targets: the entire federal work force, the F.B.I., the intelligence services, and anyone who has a direct interest in a rational, consistent and nonpartisan federal bureaucracy.

Perhaps they will slink away in defeat, or perhaps they’ll attempt to fight back using whatever tools they have. Some appointees have filed lawsuits contesting their dismissals. And then there’s the extent to which anger at these maneuvers have kindled, in some Democrats at least, the fires of resistance. On Tuesday, for example, a large group of congressional Democrats were joined by ordinary Americans demanding to know why Elon Musk has been allowed to ransack the Treasury Department and other government agencies.

Two weeks ago, the Democratic Party seemed prepared to just give Trump what he wanted in Congress. Now, there’s a real chance that Democrats will try to slow business in the Senate to a halt and may even refuse to negotiate on a budget deal and the debt ceiling. If Democrats aren’t thinking about this, then they should be. There’s no reason to negotiate with a White House and a Republican Party that don’t believe they are bound by congressional spending. If nothing else, as long as Musk can “delete” entire federal agencies, there’s no reason to treat an agreement as anything other than a suggestion.

As for the analogy to the Iraq war, my colleague Michelle Goldberg notes that the White House is pursuing something analogous to the “de-Baathification” pursued by the Coalition Provisional Authority during the American occupation of Iraq. JD Vance even called for a literal de-Baathification of the federal government while speaking on a right-wing podcast in 2021, telling his host that, should Trump return to the White House, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

This is exactly what the administration has tried to do, recruiting young ideologues to purge the civil service of nonpartisan bureaucrats. Of course, as Goldberg writes, “The de-Baathification that Vance wanted to emulate is widely seen as a disaster that contributed to the deadly chaos and instability that followed America’s invasion.”