What Does Trump Want?

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

 

Today on the podcast, Eliana Johnson noted that the Trump administration’s demands on Harvard were so aggressive that it makes you wonder if Donald Trump ever had any intention of getting the university to comply. Does the administration really want Harvard to reform or were the demands crafted to elicit the “no” that would trigger federal defunding? Eliana’s question gets at the core mystery about this administration: What is Trump trying to achieve by overreaching in every direction?

 

When he first came to office, it was easy to see Trump’s first shock offensive as a tactic to throw political enemies off guard. If he summoned a storm of transformative executive orders, it would take the Democrats a long time to get their bearings, figure out what to fight, and how to do so. And maybe it was also a numbers game: If you threw enough ideas out there, at least some of them would get through political hurdles and legal challenges and would bear fruit.

 

Good plan. But Trump’s on-paper assault was soon augmented by maximalist policy implementation that can’t be easily explained away as political cunning. There are numerous examples. The indiscrimination with which DOGE has cut programs and fired thousands was certain to invite the pushback it got. Elon Musk and his team have now been checked by the courts several times. In department after department, hundreds or thousands of federal workers fired by DOGE have been rehired either owing to court rulings or out of necessity. What’s the political upside in being reckless, getting caught, and having your mistakes corrected in public? A more careful review of federal waste would take a little longer but get the same results without all the sound and fury. Americans were already supportive of reducing federal waste, but they’ve soured on the way Musk has gone about it.

 

The administration may be flirting with the same problem regarding deportations. Trump is on firm ground legally and politically in moving to deport illegal aliens, beginning with violent criminals. But he’s pushing the policy into areas that make Americans uncomfortable. The administration has admitted to error in deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on the grounds that he’s a member of the MS-13 gang. Now, it justifies his deportation on the grounds that he entered the U.S. illegally in 2011, which he did. The problem is that an immigration judge granted him asylum in 2019 because, true or not, Garcia convinced the judge that he might be killed in El Salvador. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return. Not only has Trump made it clear that Garcia isn’t coming back; he publicly urged Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to build prisons where the U.S. could send American criminals in the future.

 

What’s the point of all this? Trump has dramatically stemmed the flow of illegals into the U.S., and ICE has been busy detaining and deporting the ones already here. That’s a big, sustainable win. Why die on the hill of an admitted mistake, compound it by further not following process, and the hint at deporting Americans? Some in Trump’s base thrill to the bluster, but it’s only going to earn him more trouble and suspicion as he tries to fix our border and immigration crises. 

 

His trade-war brinkmanship has already tanked his poll numbers on economic matters, which was his best-polling issue when he took office. The Hill reports on a recent CBS News poll: “Twice as many Americans hold Trump responsible for the sorry state of the economy as Biden. And most people believe the economy has gotten worse since Trump was inaugurated in January.” He didn’t have to go nuclear on tariffs to renegotiate unfair trade deals. He didn’t have upend global markets, period. But the administration claimed multiple justifications: The trade war was going to bring back American manufacturing or bring down prices in the long run or stop drugs from coming across the border, and more. Finally, when Trump scrapped the disaster in process, his team claimed it was a successful negotiation gambit. So, again, what was Trump really going for?

 

There are those who believe Trump simply enjoys creating chaos. To state the obvious, they don’t have a terrible case.

 

But there’s another, perhaps more useful, explanation for all the overreach. Trump has always been a goal-directed man with little understanding of either his own limitations or those imposed by the world outside his head. Many who served in his first administration have told stories of Trump wanting to do things he didn’t know American presidents can’t do. This combination of delusional overconfidence and simple ignorance has sometimes served him well. It’s why he became the most unlikely president in American history. But at other times, it causes unprecedented problems. What we’re looking at isn’t planned chaos; it’s what happens when Trump’s grand plans make contact with unforgiving reality.

 

My guess is that he believed he could get Harvard to cave (just as he thought he could make Vladimir Putin put down his arms). He believed that all the DOGE cuts were good and necessary. He believes that he’s within his bounds to deport whomever he wants. And he believed that he could solve an array of problems with a global trade war.

 

To put a spin on a Salena Zito’s characterization of Trump: He takes himself literally, which means we have to take him seriously. Because he’s always got another grand plan to try out.