Kim Lane Scheppele:
Trump 1.0, I mean, he just flailed around. He had a lot of ideas. But he didn’t entrench himself. He didn’t attack the institutions. So he sort of dropped government on the floor, but he didn’t try to completely change the way it operated.
Second time, he comes back and he’s got lawyers. Everything is legal. That’s why you see the flurry of executive orders. You see these memos going out saying the president has commanded this in law. And so he’s going after the civil service, for example. And civil servants who work from one government to another, from Republican to a Democratic administration, and back again, are used to having somebody say, this is now the law, you follow it.
And so this is where he’s trying to get the civil service to completely change the way the state is organizing itself. And those people who are not willing to do that, he’s offering that they be displaced, fired, put on this kind of imaginary leave and so on.
And so he’s trying to really control the bureaucracy doing it by law. So he’s got lawyers this time. That means he can do way more damage than he could do the first time.
