WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is moving with light speed and brute force to break the existing order and reshape America at home and abroad. He likes the ring of calling himself king.
No one can absorb it all. By the time you try to process one big thing — he covets and ; he turns away from ; fires , then brings some right back; whether he will obey laws he doesn't like; orders an about-face in the missions of department after department; declares there are ; , suspends them, then imposes some — three more big things have happened.
Trump’s core supporters are thrilled. Those who don't like him watch in horror. The nation is far from any consensus on what makes America great and what may make it sink.
What’s undeniable is that Trump has ushered in the sharpest change of direction for the country at least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. But the long-term implications of his national reset, and by extension Trump’s own legacy, cannot yet be determined.
“Make American Great Again” figure calls all this action “muzzle velocity” — firing every way at once to confuse the enemy. The barrage has left a variety of foreign leaders and many public servants picking figurative buckshot out of their backsides.
Paul Light, an expert on the workings of government, reaches for another analogy: “It’s the never-ending volcano. It just doesn’t stop, and it’s hot.”
Says Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service: “We’re essentially playing Russian roulette and they just added a bunch more bullets to the chamber.”
Or is it instead a “controlled burn,” as Kevin Roberts, an architect of the conservative Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, puts it? “A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish,” he asserts.
Trump's political opponents are mulling which fights are worth fighting, out of so many to choose from. “Democrats,” said one of them, Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, “are not going to engage in the outrage Olympics.”
Polls suggest slightly less than half of U.S. adults like the Republican's handling of his job, a tick better than Democrat Joe Biden's approval when he left the White House in January.
In his first month, Trump performed a pirouette in foreign policy, disavowing the age-old commitment to defend fellow NATO members if they are attacked, reaching out to Russia and suspending most U.S. foreign aid. Washington, Ukraine's steadfast supporter for three years, has suddenly become its scold.
At home, Trump's explosion of executive orders and marching orders reaches beyond the workings of government and into the culture.
Corporate boardrooms as well as government itself are shedding their programs in alignment with the nascent new order, though a largely blocked . Institutions are also being pressed to abandon any recognition of or accommodations for transgender people, at risk of losing federal money if they don’t.
How much all of this sticks will largely depend on courts. The Republican-controlled Congress has been compliant as Trump pursues his ends by executive action instead of legislation.
Longtime Republican articles of faith such as support for free trade and strong U.S.-led security guarantees against foreign adversaries have been lost in the din.
Republicans have also historically preached the virtues of letting state and local governments make decisions about their communities without dictates from Washington. But the Trump administration did just that this past week, .
Trump was quick to take credit. “Long live the king," he posted in all-caps, meaning himself.
In the civil service upheaval, a blanket staff reduction has been combined with the targeted firing of senior officials deemed disloyal to Trump or otherwise an impediment. Multitudes of nonpolitical public servants, normally left in place when new presidents come in, are out.
Senior officials responsible for keeping agencies honest and accountable were among those purged. Nearly 20 departmental were fired without the legally required 30 days notice. Trump also terminated a who had worked on criminal cases brought against him, striking at the heart of what he calls the “deep state.”
Congress, which holds the power of the purse, is letting the president exercise it instead, so far leaving federal judges to decide when to rein him in. The early result has been massive cuts or freezes in grants and other spending that Congress approved in law, but Trump is stopping solo if courts let him.
“The last month has been entirely distinctive in American history,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University. “We have never had an American president who moved this decisively in the face of the law and the Constitution. We are in a dangerous place.”
To Trump and Elon Musk, though, a challenge to democracy comes not from them but from the unelected officials who resist the agenda of a duly elected president.
“There’s a vast federal bureaucracy that is implacably opposed to the the president and the Cabinet,” said Musk, the titan leading Trump's scouring of the civil service. “If the will of the president is not implemented and the president is representative of the people, that means the will of the people is not being implemented. “And that means we don’t live in a democracy.”
Some polls this month carry warning signs for Trump as he pursues his extraordinary course. More than half of adults in a survey (57%) said he has exceeded his authority since taking office. More than half in a (55%) said he hasn't paid attention to the most pressing problems.
In essence, though, this is a half-and-half country that Trump is responsible for leading the whole of. For vast numbers of Americans, he can do no wrong, or no right, depending which side you are on.
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Associated Press polling editor Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.
