This is a really good summation of how the features become the bug.....
The White House Is the Crisis
Feb. 1, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET
By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
Last February I wrote an essay
about the Trump administrationâs strategy of âmuzzle velocity.â Muzzle
velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a
bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun. The term came from
an interview that Steve Bannon, President Trumpâs former chief
strategist, gave in 2019. âAll we have to do is flood the zone,â Bannon
said. âEvery day we hit them with three things. Theyâll bite on one, and
weâll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will
never â will never be able to recover. But weâve got to start with
muzzle velocity.â
Trump world has an
affection for analogies that glorify the combination of violence and
speed. After Trumpâs second Inaugural Address, Taylor Budowich, then one
of the White Houseâs deputy chiefs of staff, tweeted,
âNow, comes SHOCK AND AWE.â âShock and aweâ refers to the bombing
campaign that launched Americaâs invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was an
awesome demonstration of initial force that belied a catastrophic
absence of information, planning and wisdom. It was the belief that an
immediate show of dominance would lead to a societyâs submission rather
than its revolt. Both Bannon and Budowichâs metaphors have proved more
grimly apt than they intended.
The strategy of the Trump administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing. This was Bannonâs insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate â they can only focuss on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose.
But what you are doing to the opposition you are also doing to yourself. âIt is a strategy that forces you into overreach,â I wrote last year. âTo keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself.â And that is what happened. The Trump administration is overwhelmed â by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos.
There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump administration is that it has created those
crises itself. The Trump administration chose to create a regime of
ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through
force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies,
leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the
Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging
both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to
stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the
horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And
thatâs just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of
the last few weeks and months.
Muzzle
velocity was built on the idea that the Trump administration had
reserves of attention and focus that the rest of us did not. The reality
is just the opposite. The White House has demands on its attention and
focus that the rest of us do not. We are not responsible for managing or
controlling everything from the labor market to A.I. policy to
immigration enforcement and vaccine approvals. We will not be blamed for
a measles outbreak or a recession. But the president will.
That
is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes
and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of
information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention
of the president and his top aides. Well-managed White Houses â and
personally disciplined presidents â are ruthless in their pursuit of
prioritization. âYouâll see I wear only gray or blue suits,â President
Barack Obama told Vanity Fair
in 2012. âIâm trying to pare down decisions. I donât want to make
decisions about what Iâm eating or wearing. Because I have too many
other decisions to make.â
But this
White House â and this president â have treated freneticism as a virtue
and discipline as a vice. Instead of seeking to limit the number of
crises and conflicts that they need to remain on top of, members of the
Trump administration, from their first day, sought to multiply them.
They spent their initial months in office ripping the wiring out of the
federal government, including gutting internal teams, like the National Security Council,
that are meant to help process information on behalf of the president.
They have treated caution and restraint as an admission of weakness.
In
January Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who, in practice,
acts as Trumpâs prime minister, delivered a message to ICE agents: âTo
all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your
duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries
to obstruct you is committing a felony,â he said.
That message was part of a broader effort to change the culture at ICE
and the Border Patrol, Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic
who covers immigration, told me:
I
was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would
always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a
potentially violent and dangerous one. Usually the concern was that
officers would be too unwilling to use their gun because they worried
about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of
investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he
was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldnât use his gun in a moment
when he needed to.
And now itâs
almost as if the opposite fear is true. Weâve seen in ICE people losing
their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because theyâre not
delivering enough deportations, theyâre not being aggressive enough. I
think Miller is just underscoring that argument that youâre not going to
get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing
you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.
It is hard not to see a straight line from that change in culture to the tragic killings on the streets of Minneapolis.
Every
organization comes to resemble its leader. Trump himself is easily
distracted, desirous of flattery rather than counsel, impressed by crude
displays of dominance and violence and obsessed with social media and
cable news â and so too is his White House. The sycophancy among Trumpâs
aides is so crude as to be indistinguishable from mockery. Miller, speaking
to a New York magazine reporter about Trumpâs health, said, âThe
headline of your story should be âThe Superhuman President.ââ When
Miller says this, does he realize he is making his boss look ridiculous?
Does he intend it?
But
itâs not just Miller. Trumpâs cabinet meetings take the form of
totalitarian kitsch. Here is Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, wrapping up remarks in December:
If
you were to ask me what Iâm grateful for, whether itâs a Thanksgiving,
itâs a Christmas, a Hanukkah, a New Yearâs, anytime of year the fact
that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have
just left it in the rearview mirror and went on to really enjoy
retirement, but he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in
at home, because he believes in his flag, our freedom, our liberties and
to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So Iâm
grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President.
The
joke of Trumpâs cabinet meetings is that no one is joking. These
meetings are not just a performance; they are a culture. Trumpâs favor
is won through demonstrations of loyalty rather than competence. The
president wants parades, not process, and that is what he gets.
The
irony of Trumpâs second term is that he was much better served by the
advisers in his first term, who understood that part of their job was to
protect him â and the rest of us â from his worst impulses. In 2020,
when Trump reportedly responded to the George Floyd protesters by asking
the military to âjust shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or
something,â his advisers werenât protecting only us when they refused.
They were also protecting him.
Trumpâs
second White House was built to ensure that no one would ever tell
Trump no again. He wanted a culture of lies and sycophancy, and he got
one. âI hear stories from my predecessors,â Susie Wiles, Trumpâs chief
of staff, told Vanity Fair in December, âabout these seminal moments
where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is
unconstitutional or cost lives. I donât have that.â
Trumpâs
aides flatter him and lie to us. They indulge his constant distraction
and so they too are constantly distracted. They are dominated by him and
so they seek to dominate us. What they believe to be their strengths
are their weaknesses. You can see it in their metaphors. The shock and
awe bombing campaign was the prelude to catastrophe, not to victory. And
so it is here.
This
is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing. Trump is unpopular;
his brutality and his tariffs have turned immigration and affordability,
once among of his strongest issues, into liabilities. Trumpâs
opposition is increasingly united and mobilized; Democrats are besting
Republicans in elections all across the country and disciplined, brave,
beautiful protest movements have emerged in the cities ICE has sought to
occupy. I cannot do better here than to quote Adam Serwerâs dispatch from Minnesota:
Every
social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of
Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was
supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of
the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.
The
secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common,
and that theyâre the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the
ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once.
Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are
brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive â
because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found
and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty
men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own
inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile
about âWestern civilization,â while armed brutes try to tear it down by
force.
We are watching an
administration that is not only retreating in key areas â dropping its
demand for all of Greenland, sending Greg Bovino back to Border Patrolâs
El Centro region, meekly backing off its trade war with China â but
finding itself cornered by its own cruelty and lies. Millerâs slander of
Pretti as a âdomestic terroristâ and an âassassinâ could not stand even
the barest contact with the video of Pretti trying to protect a nearby
woman or the quiet heroism of his daily life.
Trump
appears to be trying to course correct, but he has neither the
discipline nor the personnel to truly change his presidencyâs direction.
This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he
wants. This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the
crisis.
