Donald
Trump Is Picking Fights. Will Anyone Hit Back?
On
Chris Wray’s self-defenestration and the dilemma of being on the pugilistic
President-elect’s target list.
December
12, 2024
Is anybody prepared to stand and fight Donald Trump? On
Wednesday, Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director whom Trump had vowed to fire
as soon as he returned to the White House, announced that he would preëmptively
quit in January, with nearly three years left in his ten-year term, rather than
risk a public battle. Going out the door with him will be the crucial concept
of a politically independent directorship, enshrined in law by Congress in the
nineteen-seventies to protect against just such a scenario of a President
seeking to install a partisan loyalist in the country’s most powerful
law-enforcement post. “This is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper
into the fray,” Wray said in a statement, “while reinforcing the values and
principles that are so important to how we do our work.” He did not elaborate
on how his self-defenestration would preserve the institution’s values and
principles from the threats of its incoming director, the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, who said in an interview in
September that his first act upon taking over the F.B.I. would be to shut down
the agency’s main building “and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep
state.”
Wray is hardly the only official to
fold in the face of Trump’s early threats. On Capitol Hill this week, after
days of attacks by a MAGA media
mob, Senator Joni Ernst said that she would support Trump’s controversial
nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, through his confirmation process—a
striking change in tone for the Iowa Republican, herself a military veteran and
survivor of sexual assault who had previously expressed concerns about a
Pentagon nominee who has said women should not serve in combat roles and has
been accused of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and financial mismanagement. For
what it’s worth, it’s not yet clear that Ernst will ultimately vote for
Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, though Senator Tom Cotton, a key Trump ally
in the Senate, now predicts that all of Trump’s controversial
nominees, including Hegseth, will be confirmed. What is clear is that bullying
by Trump, or on his behalf, works.
Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. This week,
his company, Meta, made its first-ever donation to a Presidential Inauguration
fund, chipping in a million dollars to Trump’s January celebration, despite—or,
more likely, because of—Trump’s bashing Zuckerberg as “Zuckerschmuck” and
attacking Meta’s platforms as biased against him. With Trump still riding a
post-election high, some of the people and institutions that seem headed for an
inevitable collision with the returning President have so far been remarkably
wary of clapping back at him, even when presented with the most provocative of
Trump’s insults. Consider the fight that Trump has already picked with Canada,
threatening to impose tariffs of up to twenty-five per cent on its imports
along with those of Mexico—a potentially crippling blow to both their
economies. Earlier this week, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said
that his country would “respond to unfair tariffs” but he had not yet figured
out how—hardly a flaming insult. Nonetheless, Trump reacted to this by
threatening to annex Canada as the fifty-first state and taunting the Canadian
leader as “governor” in a social-media post. Trudeau, who often drew Trump’s
ire in his first term as well, did not respond in kind. Instead, he was hard at
work on a plan to mollify Trump’s concerns about the U.S.-Canada border,
including adding police dogs and drones to a largely unmilitarized zone,
apparently in hope of staving off Trump’s threatened tariffs.
Some of Trump’s presumptive targets
are not even waiting for his expected threats. At NATO headquarters in Brussels this week, word came that
the alliance, which Trump had once threatened to leave entirely if member
states did not start contributing more to their defense budgets, was
considering a new target for members: spending three per cent of G.D.P. on
defense each year, up from the current two-per-cent goal. The move, which would
come at a time when the heightened threats to European security from Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine require significant new military investment, appears to be
an effort to preëmpt Trump’s inevitable demand for three-per-cent spending—an
idea his advisers floated over the summer—and which he’ll likely take credit
for anyway in the event that it happens. And why wait? Elbridge Colby, a former
Trump Pentagon official reportedly in line for a senior post in his next
Administration, went ahead and claimed the win even before any formal decision:
Trump’s “common sense policy is getting results,” he posted on X, on Thursday.
Are these all examples of preëmptive
surrender—“obeying in advance,” as the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has put it—or is something
more strategic going on here?
As much as Trump loves being fawned
over, the spectre of so many prospective rivals caving in so quickly creates
its own sort of dilemma for a leader who craves conflict to sustain his
Presidency and his political movement. Trump thrives on such fights, seeks them
out, and where they do not exist, he will move swiftly to create them. Conflict
is integral to who he is, as a person and as a politician. No doubt, there will
come a point when at least some of those he has targeted, whether neighboring
states whose economic health is threatened by his protectionist policies or
government officials whose integrity and independence are compromised by his
extralegal demands, push back. (Republican senators, maybe not so much.) Every
lawyer in Washington, it seems, is preparing to fight the new Trump
Administration in court if lobbying and favor-seeking don’t work out first.
I suspect that much of what we’re
seeing in the early response to Trump represents a collective conclusion that
resistance to him eight years ago did little good, and often much harm, to
those who did the resisting. The classic example of this was Angela Merkel,
then the German Chancellor, whose statement congratulating Trump on his victory
in 2016 essentially put Trump on notice that she would be watching for him to
violate norms of democracy and common decency. Merkel, to no one’s surprise,
became perhaps Trump’s least favorite Western leader. In 2024, it is entirely
rational to conclude that lecturing Trump will hardly produce favorable
results. It’s understandable, too, that many of his detractors are simply
exhausted by the continual demands of standing against the man. And yet it’s
striking how far many have pivoted to the other extreme. Is there no other
course between going to war with Trump and accommodating him?
There is also a widespread view that
Trump is more bluster than bite. Eight years on, even many of the
President-elect’s fiercest foes now recognize that he presents them with a
unique blend of incendiary hyperbole and actual menace. They know he did not
build the wall on America’s southern border or get Mexico to pay for it. So
maybe better to wait and mobilize against the threats that Trump seems
specifically willing to follow through on. And yet I can’t help but worry that
this post-election transition to Trump’s second term is merely another moment
when hope seems to be triumphing over experience—whether it’s backers of
Ukraine looking for evidence, however scant, that Trump won’t abandon them to a
deal with Russia on Vladimir Putin’s terms, or opponents of “Mass Deportation
Now” who think it will simply be too costly and complicated for Trump to
execute. Just this week, he said he wanted to pardon the insurrectionists who
stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf four years ago—and to lock up the members
of Congress who investigated the riot. Is it really such a good idea to believe
he won’t try it?
Don’t forget the reason Trump picks
all these fights—because he wants to be a winner. Well, he’s beaten Chris Wray
without a fight. Now what? For Trump 2.0, just as in all his previous
incarnations, there will always be new enemies to slay. ♦