Trump’s Chaos Strategy
Is Already Blowing Up in His Face
An interview with New Republic writer
Timothy Noah, who argues that Trump’s funding-freeze fiasco shows that he’s a
“weak president” whose vaunted “chaos strategy” is already running into
trouble.
r/GGreg Sargent: This
is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and
presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s administration rescinded the memo that instituted his disastrous
spending freeze in what looks like a surrender in the face of a national
outcry. Soon after, Trump went before the cameras and pushed
a bizarre lie about $50 million in U.S. taxpayer money supposedly
being spent on condoms for Hamas in Gaza. This kind of thing is often described
as a “flooding the zone” strategy, in which Trump throws so many lies and
abuses of power at us that we can’t keep up. Checkmate libs, Trump wins! But
what if this chaos strategy actually isn’t all that clever after all? What if
it’s more likely to backfire? Today, we’re talking about this with The New
Republic’s Timothy Noah, author of a good
new piece arguing that Trump’s chaos strategy is all about creating a
pretext to consolidate power. Tim, thanks for coming back on.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump’s lie about condoms.
Here’s what Trump said on Wednesday about the process of rooting out waste,
fraud, and abuse that his government is supposedly undertaking now.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): In that process, we
identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.
Fifty million. And you know what’s happened to them? They’ve used them as a
method of making bombs. How about that?
Sargent: Tim, MAGA is pushing this one hard. Press
secretary Karoline Leavitt made this claim from the White House press podium; a
State Department spokesperson also pushed it. The Washington Post’s Glenn
Kessler looked at it and found that it’s made up. He asked
Leavitt and the State Department spokes for documentation, and they had
nothing. They’re really struggling to prove that their hunt for waste and abuse
is yielding anything at all. What are they trying to do with this?
Noah: Yeah, it is entirely made up. Trump says things
because he likes the way they sound. I do put forward this theory in my piece
that the way authoritarians consolidate power is to manufacture crises. And
that is clearly what the Trump team is doing. But I should add an
important caveat, which is that chaos comes naturally to Donald Trump. He is a
mentally disabled president of the United States—I think that’s the only way
you can describe it. He has a narcissistic personality disorder that’s well documented,
and he has had some decline in cognition that’s also been documented and
observed by a number of medical professionals and others.
So you have this crazy guy who is president of the U.S.
saying all sorts of things, and it creates mayhem. This is being channeled by
his aides to, as I say, manufacture crisis and manufacture chaos, but it
isn’t working.
Sargent: At least not yet, that’s for sure. The
administration has now rescinded the memo instilling that massive spending
freeze, which had caused chaos and confusion and threatened to have a huge
impact on all kinds of government programs. It’s a little unclear what happened
here. They seem to be still trying to pause some spending but this is
clearly a surrender, I think. You wrote in your piece that Trump probably
thinks turning off all that federal spending was also beneficial to his larger
strategy of consolidating power. How would that work exactly?
Noah: I don’t believe that either Donald Trump nor
Russell Vought, who is Trump’s yet unconfirmed nominee to run the Office of
Management and Budget, who the White House more or less confirmed has been
running this operation. I don’t think either one of them really understands
what they were talking about in this memo. It concerns something called federal
financial assistance. What is federal financial assistance as opposed to other
kinds of spending? This is outlined in a 1977 law that doesn’t make it hugely
clear.
What we know is that procurement of an object like an
aircraft carrier is not federal financial assistance. However, the purchase of
services is sometimes federal financial assistance, and sometimes not. As a
consequence, you had every agency in the federal government switching off every
switch it could because nobody really knows which falls into which
category. It was utter mayhem.
Sargent: Not only that but it’s clearly illegal. I want
to read a line from your piece, “No president in history, not even Trump in his
first term, ever logged so many illegal actions in so short a time.” So we’ve
got the purge of inspectors general, which was likely illegal designed to make
it a whole lot easier to be really profoundly corrupt at the
agencies. We’ve got the threat to prosecute state officials who refuse to
implement Trump’s mass deportations; that was clearly legally ungrounded. And
now this effort to usurp congressional power and turn off federal spending that
Trump doesn’t like—clearly illegal. I really do think we haven’t seen an effort
to consolidate power quite like this one, have we, Tim? Beyond the whole
question of what the role of chaos is, there’s a mechanical effort to
consolidate power unlike anything we’ve seen.
Noah: Right. And there’s even more impeachable offenses
that you didn’t mention. You mentioned one or two that I hadn’t mentioned. As I
said in my piece, it’s become kind of a parlor game. How many are there at this
point, nine days in? But it looks like he’s doing more than he really is, and
Trump thrives on the playacting part of being president. He says he’s done
things that he hasn’t done, claims credit for things that he can’t claim credit
for. And you’re seeing that here.
The main purpose, I think, of that OMB memo was to assert
that the president has the power to impound appropriated funds. Trump was
trying to just blunder his way into asserting this power over appropriations
that he doesn’t have. It led immediately to all sorts of lawsuits, entirely
foreseeable, and Trump withdrew. Trump is, I have argued, not a strong
president. He is a weak president. He has authoritarian tendencies,
but he’s weak. He’s mentally weak. He is subject vulnerable to all sorts
of manipulation by his aides. He tries to do all sorts of contradictory things.
He is not competent.
And on the evidence of this particular example, neither are
his enablers. Surely, Vought have understood that this memo was going to
be challenged immediately in court. He ought to have been able to anticipate
that Trump could not tolerate the bad publicity surrounding it so that Trump,
even before there was a court judgment, withdrew the memo. These are all signs
of a weak presidency, but weakness can cause chaos too. And we’re
certainly experiencing a lot of chaos, a lot of fear, and a real degradation
of the ability of government to perform its functions.
Sargent: I want to get at your point about weakness and
failure here. An interesting thing is how this contrasts with Trump/MAGA
propaganda right now. That propaganda is relentlessly pushing the idea that
Trump and his allies are ruthlessly forging ahead with his agenda. You see it
all over Twitter. All of MAGA’s tweeting immense congratulations to
Trump, he’s crushing the libs, he’s doing this, he’s doing that.
Noah: You even saw it pronounced by John Harris in Politico, which I have to
say, I still haven’t gotten over reading that piece. I was deeply troubled by
that piece.
Sargent: And The New York Times had an absurd
piece today, essentially saying Trump has got his opponents on the run with this “flood the zone” strategy. The
amount of credulousness, the portrayal of Trump’s strategy as something savvy
and clever and effective, is just so deeply offensive coming from journalists,
isn’t it?
Noah: Yeah, it’s a transference because it’s hard for
us journalists to keep track of everything Trump is doing. But I guarantee
you it is not hard for the people who are going to be making court challenges
to these individual actions because each action has a different constituency
that is focusing on a particular topic and is at the ready to take Trump to
court when he does something illegal.
Sargent: Exactly. The real story here is that they’re
actually screwing up already. The spending freeze is getting reversed. ICE is
already leaking like crazy about how Trump’s demand for much higher arrest is
going to create major problems. The effort to undo birthright citizenship has
stopped in court. I don’t want to be too optimistic here. They’re going to do a
lot of damage—already are doing a lot of damage. But clearly what we’re seeing
now is that they’re not going to be able to roll over the bureaucracy and our
institutions, as easily as they thought, as easily as John Harris thinks, as
easily as that credulous New York Times piece portrayed, right?
Noah: That’s right. Even in the Republican Senate,
Trump was only barely able to get his defense secretary choice, Pete Hegseth,
through. I don’t believe he’ll be able to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through.
His whole decision to nominate Kennedy was really a reflection only of
Trump’s vanity.
One of the less attractive qualities of Trump is that he
deeply appreciates seeing people who previously denounced him come crawling on
their knees to him. And that endears him to such people. And in this case, he
rewarded Robert Kennedy Jr. with this nomination to which Kennedy is manifestly
unqualified for, argued with astonishing forcefulness by Carolyn Kennedy yesterday.
Sargent: And by Democratic senators on the Hill, on
Wednesday, we should point out that a number of Democratic senators absolutely
shredded RFK in the confirmation hearing. Can you tell me why you think he’s
not going to get in?
Noah: Well, the basic arithmetic is you’ve got
somebody who isn’t even a Republican, is up against big pharma on all sorts of
bottom-line issues. Republicans don’t like, in the best of circumstances, going
against the business constituency. And I think Trump’s commitment to RFK
Jr. is a weak one. Vaccination and fluoridation are not issues that Trump
really cares about one way or the other.
Sargent: I certainly hope you’re right about that. I
was thinking that he was probably going to get RFK; after today’s hearing, I’m
really not so sure. Tulsi Gabbard looks to me like she might be a very hard one
for some Republican senators to support as well.
Noah: Right. And with RFK, there is a
be-careful-what-you-wish-for component, which is we don’t know RFK to be
committed to eviscerating Obamacare and whoever Trump nominates in RFK Jr.’s
stead, I think, probably will be committed to doing that. And that’s not going
to be very good news.
Sargent: I want to try to pull all this together. Going
back to that ridiculous joke about condoms and Gaza, what we’re seeing here is
an effort across the board to degrade public life in every way possible. Having
the White House press secretary push that absurdity, having ridiculous legal
rationales for immense power grabs, Trump going out there and demanding of his
ICE agents that they hit arrest quotas as has been reported in The Washington Post, everything
is about taking public life and turning it into a big joke.
Noah: Trump offering to buy out federal employees, give
federal employees buyouts to retire. Where the money would come from is
anybody’s guess.
Sargent: Right. And this idea that Trump is this wizard
who can just throw us off with a magical distraction strategy, again, is
constantly treated with unbelievable credulousness by the press. Let’s
talk about that though. The degradation of public life is a thing that’s
happening.
Noah: It is a very, very ugly and mean moment in
American politics.
Sargent: You wrote about the degradation and the
spreading of meanness in U.S. politics and what that means for your newsletter.
Can you talk about that as well?
Noah: Yes, I have a Substack newsletter called Backbencher that
I use mainly to publicize pieces I write in The New Republic. Today,
I wrote about.... Well, I remember my mother telling me in 1968 after Robert
Kennedy was killed—I was 10 years old and my mother said, I don’t
understand what’s happening to this country. I have compared notes with
other people my age and just about everybody I have asked has said yes, they
had a parent say the same thing to them when they were 10 or 9 or 11.
Nineteen-sixty-eight was a terrible, terrible year. We saw
the assassination of Martin Luther King and of Robert F. Kennedy. Later, we saw
this awful mayhem at the Democratic convention. We saw an endless war in
Vietnam. It was a time that was as dismal as can be imagined. People were
saying, I don’t understand what’s happening to this country. And I
think people felt that way during Trump’s first term. I think they feel it more
powerfully now. And I think more and more people will feel that, many
people who voted for Trump in 2024 will feel that. It’s a sad moment. For those
of us who really believe in this country and believe in its government, it is
devastating to see what is being done in its name.
Sargent: Well, just as happened in 2018, we could see
in 2026 some similar backlash, one that is really all about reasserting decency
in public life and pushing back on the degradation of it, don’t you think?
Noah: Yes, I think that there will be a route, but
that’s a long way off. Even longer term ... I don’t know whether you agree,
this is a little out there, but I think the Republican Party is in the process
of disintegrating. Liz Cheney has said that, and I think she’s dead right.
Conservatives, serious conservatives are going to need to start looking for a
new party to create in its stead because the Republicans have really sold out
on just about every principle and have become—this is not an original thought—a
cult of personality. And that isn’t easily undone.
Sargent: Well, one has to hope that you’re right about
that. I’m not sure about the former piece, the idea that the Republican Party
is disintegrating, but the latter piece that any principled conservative really
should have no choice but to seek some alternative is clearly on. Timothy Noah,
thanks so much for coming on, man. Great to talk to you.
Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
