Gretchen Whitmer Fell Into Trump’s Tariff Trap (2025)

The second Trump era is something of an exercise in natural consequences. What happens if you put the most flamboyantly stupid goons in charge of everything? The results will neither surprise nor confound you: It is an absolute omnishambles. Trump’s not nearly through his first 100 days, and we’ve seen markets buffeted by the administration’s trade war whiplashing, allies abandoning us as our foreign policy lapses into nihilism, and everywhere the previously well-calibrated work of the federal government is coming undone—and killing people—as Elon Musk rampages across the city.

In short, mayhem and nonsense are not in short supply, and town halls across the country are filling up with people who are pissed about Trumpian misrule. Despite all this, it wasn’t until this bizarre natsec group chat fiasco—which one social media quipster appropriately named “New phone, Houthis?”—that the Trump administration has been made to bleed in public. It’s worth exploring why that is, and what Democrats can learn from this folderol to confront a far more pressing and destructive problem: the aforementioned pillage of the civil service at the hands of DOGE.

To begin with, it should be obvious that there are some things about this flap that simply aren’t replicable—and I’m not just talking about the part where key figures on the Trump national security team accidentally loop in the editor of a major national magazine on their plans to drop bombs in Yemen. One of the biggest reasons this particular scandal has dominated the news cycle for days is simply the fact that a media organization ended up at the center of it. But after a day of the Trump administration alternating between public prevarication and slagging inadvertent Signal chat participant Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic was forced to take something other than a neutral position by publishing screenshots of the chat to prove—contra the inveterate liars in the White House—that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had indeed revealed precise plans for airstrikes on Houthi rebels.

Democrats, by and large, believe that this is how it should always go with the political press: that some sort of civic impulse might stir in the media’s breast, pushing them in the direction of critical thinking and coverage that comes down against irresponsible and immoral actors. This might be the news industry we deserve, but it’s not the one we have, and Democrats will continue to suffer dismay as long as they harbor the illusion that the press will reform itself and align itself with the cause of keeping our civic fabric intact.

That said, this week’s contretemps over the group chat did engender something that can be replicated: Angry Democrats are now in the public eye, eviscerating the GOP. This is one of the big rules in the current information landscape in which we’re forced to live: Conflict creates content. The media beast may be cynical, but it is reliable—and if you feed it enough antagonism, it will hand over the headlines. Given the opportunity to get down to some good old-fashioned battering of Republicans, the outrage of Democrats got, and held, the media’s attention.

Democrats need to scheme up ways to do this kind of thing every day. It shouldn’t be hard: DOGE’s destruction is handing Democrats daily fodder. Now they need to take it and muster the same sort of passion that’s been on display as they torched Trump’s natsec nimrods. That means finding regular opportunities to sound off in front of whatever reporters, television cameras, and microphones are at hand.

It also means thinking unconventionally. One of the most appealing aspects of The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky’s idea of putting together a shadow Cabinet is the way it can be fashioned into a dagger aimed squarely at the heart of Elon Musk’s enterprise, by combining expert argument (here’s where an army of pissed-off federal employees fired by Musk can help a lot) with combat-ready liberal figures. Such an enterprise would pile up the pressure on Trump while taking it off the Democrats’ respective minority leaders in the House and Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who just aren’t built for political fisticuffs.

That said, there are lots of current operations underway that also provide ammunition for the content creation wars. Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, as I’ve previously noted, has been an attention-getting boon for the forces of anti-Trumpism. The Democrats are also making great hay staging their own “empty chair” town halls, invading red districts to talk to disaffected voters in places where DOGE cuts hit hardest. And those hits keep on coming: The fact that Elon Musk is damaging the lives of people in places like Osage County, Oklahoma, is opening the doors for Democrats in parts of the country where they’ve had little political luck.

This week, as Democrats grilled the members of the Trump administration who’d perpetuated the group chat flap, they did so with the palpable sense that they enjoyed the taste of blood in their teeth—while uncharacteristically staying on message. While the administration has attempted to wave away criticism, Democrats haven’t budged from the central idea that the group chat was uniquely destructive and disqualifying.

This is exactly how they need to characterize DOGE, because otherwise Musk’s rabid crusade could become cemented in the public eye as a legitimate part of the overall debate about government spending. This is exactly what the GOP is hoping for: Even as public approval of Musk plummets, Republicans like Senate Majority Leader John Thune are trying to pass off DOGE’s sabotage as part of their broader attempt to cut spending (to fund taxes for the rich, of course).

Democratic pushback on DOGE can build on previous successes in fending off the Trump administration’s rapaciousness. When Obamacare was under attack, Democratic unity was key to saving the program from the predations of GOP legislative majorities. Then, it was “Hands off my health care”; now, it’s “Hands off my Social Security” and “Hands off my private data.” These are especially potent rallying cries because they show how every community will be touched by DOGE’s corruption. Suddenly, Democrats have a thousand different ways to reach millions of different voters. That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along all too often.

In February of 2021, a fitness instructor named Khing Hnin Wai shot what might be history’s most viral aerobics lesson. Filming herself in front of a major thoroughfare in Myanmar’s capital city, Khing went through her paces, gyrating purposefully to some up-tempo music. The real action, however, was in the background, as a convoy of armored vehicles sped in her direction. Khing had accidentally recorded the beginnings of a military coup—and created the most lasting artifact of the overthrow of Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government.

Here in the United States this week, employees of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who rarely if ever made headlines beyond the fact that their agency is often the venue for White House Correspondents’ Dinner after-parties, were rousted from their place of work by armed authorities backing Elon Musk’s misnamed wrecking crew, the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s goons were apparently unmoved by the fact that USIP is not an executive branch agency and thus outside of DOGE’s alleged purview. The episode raised important questions about whether there are appreciable limits to the private property that DOGE can enter and take over. Unfortunately, much of the media stood there, dancing, as one more instance of Trumpian misrule unfolded behind them.

To write about the plain facts of the Trump administration is, admittedly, a challenge. It can be hard to write a straight news story about an unlawful administration careening through constitutional boundaries without sounding a bit hysterical. I’ve had a two-year head start on most of the political media in writing about Trump’s plan to effect a wholesale demolition of the civil service and transform it into an engine of malevolence; back when I started, I thought long and hard about whether I’d come off as overreacting. But now that we’ve reached the other side of the election, it’s become clear to me that one can almost never overreact when responding to Trump.

I wish more media professionals would realize this. Unfortunately, all around us I see more of the same exercises in sanewashing that we saw in the media’s disastrous run-up to the 2024 election. The aforementioned siege of the Institute of Peace is a perfect case in point. The New York Times characterized the matter as a “simmering dispute” between two sides that don’t have equal standing where the truth is concerned. But one is an agency that says, correctly, that it is “a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch,” and the other is a group of unaccountable thugs whose response is, “We don’t care.” Still, at least the Times made note of the fact that armed police were part of this “standoff.” One local news station left that out of their account.

But the way the media is covering the mundanity of Trump’s mob rule is just as bad as the way it sands off the edges of its most dramatic confrontations. As Tom Scocca and Joe McLeod wrote Tuesday for their newsletter, Indignity, the press is stuffed to the gills with accounts that stipulate that Trump and his associates have “fired” scads of government workers. Just this week, it was reported by a wide variety of news organizations that Trump had fired a pair of FTC commissioners. But as the authors noted, that was not, in fact, what had happened:

Donald Trump did not fire any commissioners from the [Federal Trade Commission] today. Donald Trump declared that he had fired the commissioners. That is, functionally, he announced a desire that he should have the power to fire FTC commissioners and named the commissioners that he would fire if he were to have that power—a power which he does not, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, possess.

“It is hard to fit that into a headline!” Scocca and McLeod acknowledged. “Yet it is essential for news outlets to find a way.” I wish I saw more of an effort toward that goal, and less of the brain-breaking examples of headline torture I saw in last week’s Times’ account of Trump’s strong-arming of the GOP, titled, “Trump, With More Honey Than Vinegar, Cements an Iron Grip on Republicans.” Does that set a new standard for the mixed metaphor? Between vinegar, honey, cement, and iron, it certainly sets a mixed-media record.

Or consider a report of a more recent vintage from The Washington Post: “Trump has a plan to remake the economy. But he’s not explaining it very well.” The piece reduces the trouble the president is having on the economic front—where for the first time he’s underwater on polls—to one in which he’s left the investor class with insufficient insight into his master plan. In this telling, the president’s claims of a soon-to-arrive golden age are taken at face value. “If the administration’s plan succeeds, the $30 trillion U.S. economy would be remade,” the article claims, adding that the United States was set to become “even more self-sufficient, producing more of its energy, lumber, steel and computer chips than ever before.”

Paul Krugman greeted this article’s array of assertions and unfalsifiable claims with something more reality-based: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Trump’s problem is that he’s doing a poor job of explaining his plan. I think his problem is that he’s offering fake answers to fake problems, and the public—unlike, apparently, the Washington Post—isn’t buying it.” That seems right to me. Beyond that, if anyone is actually in need of an “explanation” about Trump’s economic plans, I’d say that once you understand that everything proceeds from the fact that the president is an omnidirectionally corrupt moron whose desperate need for adulation fuels his every decision, with the added problem that he has, since his first term, become more intellectually infirm, everything starts to make sense. The constant whiplashing between implementing and retracting tariffs, the constant characterization of prosperity as a bad thing, the wild-eyed talk of how economic hardship will finally set us all free—all of this stems from the simple fact that the man at the top is a deceitful asshole with a cranial cavity full of damp parsley.

Like I said, you can sound a little strange when you straight-facedly account for the plain facts of this administration. But what’s the alternative? Most of what the Trump administration does, every day, is act illegally or unconstitutionally, rampaging and pillaging the government in ways that we’d discuss in much clearer terms if it were happening in some other autocracy—like Myanmar, for example.

As Scocca and McLeod wrote, “A constitutional crisis is also a crisis of newswriting, because it is a crisis of knowing.” One of the biggest debates that seems to be raging in the media right now is whether or not we are actually allowed to tell the truth about the Trump administration—to state clearly that unconstitutional corruption is afoot in the nation’s capital with the same clarity and urgency we once used to talk about, say, a secretary of state’s private email server. Are we going to actually tell the public what is going on, or are we going to stand in front of it, dancing energetically in a fluorescent-yellow outfit?

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Last November, voters elected a president who’d largely campaigned on an unrelenting hostility to trans people and a plan to let Silicon Valley oligarchs gut the civil service and turn government into a machine for the president’s self-enrichment and political revenge. Much of the political press either ignored this stuff or didn’t care enough to inform their readers—some were too busy trying to polish a mass deportation scheme into a sensible response to the housing crisis—but some of us, here at The New Republic and elsewhere, went hoarse trying to warn about the consequences.

And now here we are. While it’s early days, Trump’s second term has been going about the way you’d expect the presidency of an anti-trans, pro-oligarch, corrupt mass deporter to go: not well! Migrants are effectively being thrown into internment camps, a gang of child cybercriminals are heisting our personal data, and what’s left of the civil service is bogged down wondering whether or not they have to send busy-work emails to gang leader Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Trump has largely checked out, prompting Musk, on multiple occasions, to step in as the president’s emotional-support fascist during public appearances.

If you’re fond of certain social media memes—sowing/reaping, how it started/how it’s going, fuck around/find out—this is a real boom time. But here’s the bottom line: Trumpism isn’t working. This mostly portends pain for the country and the planet, but there’s a silver lining to be found in a president who has screwed up so royally this soon into his post-inauguration honeymoon period: His opponents have an unexpected advantage.

Right now, Trump’s biggest weakness is the very thing he believed was going to confer unprecedented strength on his return to power: his attempts to purge the federal government of its loyal workforce and replace it with subservient confederates. What Trump and his cronies misunderstand is that the civil service is essentially an extension of the people’s will. While this institution is too often castigated as a faceless bureaucracy, there’s an important material connection between those who serve the public and the public that’s being served. And when you rattle the cages in Washington, those vibrations spread outward. It’s no wonder that a recent Morning Consult poll found majorities of respondents rejecting the idea that the civil service was “too liberal,” as the Trump administration has tried to get people to believe. Nor is it surprising to find that the same set of respondents are not exactly “clamoring for DOGE cuts.” At the same time, public approval is trending against Trump’s Silicon Valley suck-ups, not to mention Trump himself, of whom half the country now disapproves.

People should be worried about the destruction that Trump is wreaking. The civil service is a collection of people doing the mostly invisible work of keeping daily life thrumming along and keeping us safe from a multitude of harms. Now, everywhere you look, Americans are getting anxious. People are suddenly less convinced that they can travel by air safely. Consumer confidence is nose-diving. The percentage of Americans who feel the economy is on the wrong track has risen 10 points in less than a month.

Reading the tea leaves, the administration is now desperately trying to finger Biden as the culprit for what could be an apocalyptic jobs report, which is pretty rich coming from the administration that’s cutting programs and putting people on the unemployment rolls. “It seems unavoidable that we are headed for a deep, deep recession,” former U.S. Labor Department economist Jesse Rothstein told The Telegraph this week. Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok said that “layoffs could approach 1 million after factoring in the likely chain reaction” that Trump’s cuts to the civil service will have; Slok went on to observe that “the US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index was now higher than at any time during the great recession.”

So it’s hardly shocking that people are already starting to react as if something has gone very wrong. Republicans are facing torrents of angry voters at their own town halls, where representatives from deep-red districts are getting earfuls of anti-Musk invective and chants of “Tax the billionaires!” Some Republicans even seem chastened enough to offer the first stirrings of anti-Trump defiance that we’ve heard from members of his own party in a while. (Naturally, it’s now being suggested that Republican members cancel their town halls entirely—a curious move for a party that claims to have a mandate to govern.)

I may not be as confident as The American Prospect’s David Dayen, who says “Trump’s cooked,” but the environment is certainly more favorable to such optimism than I imagined it would be a month ago—which makes this an apt time for Democrats to up the ante. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said during an interview on CNN this week, “Our best strategy is to make sure everybody knows exactly what the Republicans are trying to do.” That’s a plan that doesn’t require a congressional majority, just a commitment.

There really is a big opportunity here, to make some fundamental shifts in public sentiment on the value of the government that Trump is trying to burn to the ground. A 2019 study by the Niskanen Center found that Americans “mistrust services provided by the public sector, even though they increasingly rely on government programs.” The misalignment is so bad, in fact, that the public tends to “misperceive good services” rendered by the government as coming from the private sector. The biggest problem, according to the study, is that most of the good work the government does is invisible—we only notice when it’s being done poorly. Because of that, the study concludes, the public’s “views of government don’t become more positive even if they directly benefit.”

As Trump and Musk stampede through Washington, and the inevitable maladies of this destruction become more visible to the public, liberals might be staring at a historic opportunity to turn public opinion on the value of government around. And they can back up their case by showing some backbone in Washington, because the price of being associated with Trumpism is too high. This week, they passed an important test with flying colors when they voted in lockstep against the Republican budget plan, and with considerable aplomb: California Representative Kevin Mullin flew to Washington to cast his vote straight from being discharged from the hospital; his Colorado colleague Brittany Pettersen made a similar sojourn with her newborn son.

All in all, this was an instructive week of how an out-of-power party can offer a steely response to, and take advantage of, a stumbling Trump. So let the cheap clickbait merchants beat on about how Democrats would be better off rolling over and playing dead. With public sentiment riding against Trump’s designs and no end in sight to the chaos he and Musk foment, there’s never been a better time for the party that believes in government to defend that government, connecting the ruination of the civil service to the ruination that will be visited on ordinary people. Democrats might be locked out of power, but they don’t need a parliamentary majority to land damaging blows against a flailing president and party. Strike while the iron is hot.