The Breaking of the Constitutional Order

The Breaking of the Constitutional Order

The political analyst Yuval Levin discusses Trump’s first few weeks in office and the limits of presidential power.

This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Markets reacted with shock. We were really doing this? Didn’t Trump’s Wall Street backers tell us those were just negotiating ploys?

But then Mexico announced that it was adding 10,000 troops to the border and Canada said it would appoint a fentanyl czar, and noted some efforts it was already making on the border; and Trump delayed the tariffs by a month in both cases. So did Trump back down in the face of market turmoil? Did he get what he wanted, even though it wasn’t much? Are we going to have this happen again in a month, and maybe every month after that? I don’t think anybody actually knows, including Trump.

What seems clear is that Trump likes tariffs, but he dislikes political pain. He wants to be seen as in control. He wants the world bending to his will. But the stock market plummeting does not make it look like the world is bending to his will. The stock market plummeting threatens his control. So when other countries see that, their strategy is going to become clearer. The more Trump bullies other nations, the more they are going to band together in retaliation, and the more that will batter markets. The world does not want to be endlessly pushed around by Donald Trump. So Trump has the power to impose tariffs, but he does not have the power to impose them without paying a price. And so far, at least, he does not seem to want to pay that price.

Domestically, Elon Musk is trying to remake the federal government … I was going to say by fiat, but it’s not even by anything as official as that. His people have pushed their way into the Treasury Department’s payment systems, putting the longtime civil servant in charge of that system on leave when he wouldn’t give a bunch of Musk’s deputies access to systems that virtually nobody even in the Treasury Department has access to because they contain so much private data, because they present such severe cybersecurity risks, and because something going wrong would throw government payments into total chaos.

And that has been far from their only move. Musk’s team also announced that they were closing down U.S.A.I.D., the foreign aid agency created by Congress decades ago. They do not have the authority to close U.S.A.I.D. And so I agree with Loren DeJonge Schulman, a former Office of Management and Budget official, who wrote that the way to talk about this is not something anodyne and settled, like: They got the passwords to the payments system. Or: They closed down U.S.A.I.D. It’s more like, “They illegally broke into a secure facility over a weekend, hijacked sensitive data on vulnerable people and U.S. businesses, destroyed property Americans paid for, cut off resources for sick and hungry families and fired Americans across the country.”