The Dictator Is a No-Show. Now What?

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, February 10, 2025

 

Liberals warned that Donald Trump, if elected, would turn the immense machinery of the U.S. government into a tool of mass oppression. But Trump, now in the White House, is attempting to curb the size of that machinery and its coercive power. Liberals are flummoxed and, let’s face it, disappointed.  

 

They see themselves as the primary heroes in the American struggle for freedom. And the first requirement for being a believable hero is securing a convincing villain to conquer. When it comes to depriving Americans of their freedoms, however, Trump has proved a flop. 

 

From killing the imposition of DEI schemes to simply allowing women to play women’s sports to rejecting paper-straw mandates, Trump is trying to cover all the bases of liberal overreach into American life. It’s a popular approach because Americans have submitted too long to the death of a thousand “shoulds” and “musts.” They want relief from the scolds. A new CBS News/YouGov poll just found Trump’s approval rating at 53 percent, the highest he’s ever enjoyed.

 

The scolds are in for a terrible time. What do you do when your villain isn’t plausibly villainous? You reframe the villainy. So forget all that tyrant stuff. Trump is now an unprecedented danger because he’s trying to cut waste and reduce the size of the federal workforce. In the Washington Post last week, Ruth Marcus wrote that, of all Trump’s initiatives as president, “The onslaught against government itself has been the most alarming.” What she doesn’t write is that it’s alarming because she had predicted an onslaught against the governed. She says, instead, “The reason to worry about this is not because of unfairness to federal employees, although there is that—it’s because of the debilitating, even dangerous, impact on government operations.”

 

One could make a genuine point about the way in which Trump is going about his bureaucracy-slashing. He’s doing too much at once, and this inevitably creates chaos. But what we learned from the Biden presidency is that “government operations” have become a liberal emergency generator for when the lights go out in the Oval Office. Once Joe Biden went down for the count, we went on autopilot, which looked a lot like boilerplate liberalism. And we would have stayed on autopilot if a clueless Kamala Harris had become president. A government that operates like that needs shrinking, redirecting, and rebuilding. Trump may want loyalists around him, but the more important task is breaking up the operational status quo that defaults to liberal ideas at every level of federal administration. It’s no wonder that Ruth Marcus would prefer a headless government to a headed one. Without the head, the liberal body runs wild.    

 

In the New York Times yesterday, former Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes also took a stab at rebranding Trump’s wickedness. His essay, “This Isn’t the Donald Trump America Elected,” came at the administration from a foreign-policy standpoint. Rhodes doubtless is crestfallen by Trump’s failure to immediately do all the wrong things he was expected to do. He hasn’t handed Ukraine to Russia, his trade wars with Canada and Mexico didn’t materialize, and his plan for Gaza is, if anything, childishly idealistic. So what does Rhodes have to say about the president? “He did not run on the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the conquest of Greenland or the occupation of Gaza.”  

 

First, Trump did run on cutting government waste. If U.S.A.I.D. is wasting resources (as it certainly seems), it’s ripe for cutting. And Trump first talked about an advisory role for Elon Musk last May, during the campaign.

 

Second, Trump has had his eye on Greenland for a long time. As the Times reported in a piece about a dustup with Denmark over the idea in 2019, “He has been talking privately about buying Greenland for more than a year and even detailed the National Security Council staff to study the idea.” 

 

Finally, it’s true that Trump didn’t run on “the occupation of Gaza.” And he’s still not interested in “the occupation of Gaza.” He’s the only president who’s talked seriously about the liberation of Gaza, from Hamas. This, naturally, Rhodes sees as “ethnic cleansing.” 

 

An honest headline for Rhodes’s piece would read “This Isn’t the Donald Trump I Had Said You Were Electing.” Because Trump isn’t the despot that voters were warned about; he’s the man most Americans chose despite those hysterical warnings. He’s also the unpredictable, unreadable figure who could do great damage on a whim. But he is, foremost, the Donald Trump who keeps making liberals crazier and more incoherent than he is. They’re the only ones he controls with absolute power. He remains their dictator, for sure—but not America’s.