Elon Musk receives the National Medal of Science from President Donald Trump during the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit at the Institute of Peace on October 8 in Washington, DC. / Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.
The front page of Tuesday’s New York Times was an old-fashioned newspaper scandal sheet. It reported that Elon Musk has already spent $366 million dollars in support of endangered Republicans in House and Senate races. Another story detailed that an arm of ICE was involved in executing a federal warrant calling for a search of the home of four-term Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who is sure to be re-elected in Minneapolis. A third tells of President Donald Trump double-crossing Ukraine, the United States, and NATO in the unending war between Ukraine and Russia by suspending sanctions on the sale of Russian diesel fuel at a time of a price spike in America.
The Republicans are facing a shellacking—no matter what the cost of diesel fuel may be—in next month’s election. The House is sure to go to the Democrats, and Republican control of the Senate is at high risk. The US war with Iran has turned into a quagmire.
And all the while the president carries on with his rallies, his meandering MAGA speeches and his never-ending efforts to use his office to make money. That part of the business is now handled largely by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, a friend of Trump’s from the New York real estate scene. The two foreign-policy novices mix investment talk overseas with the pretense of being diplomats. They aren’t very unsuccessful diplomats.
I have turned in the past to the reportage of two former national security officials in Democratic administrations, Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, who have focused on the Trump excesses in an ongoing series of dispatches for the Washington Spectator, now flourishing as an online magazine of political journalism. The two won instant fans for what turned out to be prescient warnings that there were gaps in the Constitution that would allow a president facing election defeat to ward off a loss by reaching into what they wrote was “a deep reservoir of presidential [emergency] powers” that could change the outcome.
Their newest essay on little understood presidential powers is called “It’s the Power, Stupid”: “Trump may not have a strategy or contingency plans for the Iran war,” they write, “but he certainly does for staying in power” as president. “The DNA of Trump 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0 in many respects. Foremost is the fact that the first term could have been a fluke—and indeed the popular vote went against him in 2020—but still the American electorate narrowly voted to bring him back in 2024, in the face of all the evidence. Trump 2.0 necessarily reveals something deeper about forces and attitudes pervasive in American society. It’s true that Trump is a uniquely gifted populist communicator, but the significant point is that large sections of the population are inclined to endorse and tolerate his brand of rope-a-dope leadership for their own reasons. People vote for the leaders they want and get the leaders they deserve.”
The two go on to note that the “first term was like a serious accident that the system’s antibodies partially contained—thanks to ‘the adults in the room,’ an opposition House, professional lawyers and generals who slow-walked the worst orders. Vice President Mike Pence played a key dissenting role at the pivotal moment on January 6, which otherwise could have ended in a constitutional meltdown.
“In 2024 the electorate—with full knowledge of January 6 . . . chose this second Trump presidency. We do not condescend to the voters who made that choice; we note only that the choice forecloses the comfortable theory that all of this is a misunderstanding.”
Medish and McCleary depict the second Trump term as “a far more deliberate project” that rests on an electorate mandate. “To be sure,” they write, “Trump eked out the 2024 vote with a mere plurality. But one of Trump’s populist tricks is to ignore his consistently weak approval ratings—under 40 percent—and to rule as though he has an 85 percent mandate. . . . Another critical distinction between the first term and Trump 2.0.” they write, is the presence of the “extraordinary collaboration” between what they call MAGA’s “pitchfork populism” and the “tech evangelism” of Silicon Valley. “This condominium of interests” as seen in the importance of Elon Musk and his ongoing political spending, “has transformed the nature of political power.”
Political scientists, they note, have a four-syllable word for a government operating for private streams of wealth—kleptocracy—and “it obeys an iron law—the wealth is safe only while the power lasts. Exit means exposure; exposure means claw-back, prosecution, ruin.”
In their analysis, Trump’s reason for returning and staying in the presidency—the man is clearly bored by foreign policy and the usual legislative duties of such—is clear: “money and power.” They write: “Put the two together and you have the equation that governs everything in this essay. A President for whom loss of power means personal, legal, and financial catastrophe will rationally spend whatever it costs to retain power. He may not succeed, but he could bring us all down failing.”
“Ceasar crossed the Rubicon not from appetite alone,” Medish and McCleary conclude, “but because laying down his command meant standing trial. The Founders tried to design a Presidency that man could safely leave. This critical design assumption has failed. For the first time, we are governed by a President who cannot afford to become a private citizen again—and who has, in the [Supreme Court’s presidential] immunity ruling, the pardon power, and the machinery” and “the means to insure he never has to again”—that is, just be a regular fella again.
They explain: “Every serious analytical error made about Donald Trump across a decade has flowed from the same premise—that he wants something other than power; that the tariffs, the culture wars, the deportations, and the crypto ventures are the ends and the accumulation of unaccountable executive authority the means. Reverse the lens and the picture resolves. The ideology is negotiable. The policy is fungible. What is constant is the drive to make power permanent, personal, and profitable—and above all make it safe to hold and ruinous to lose.”
In the streets of working-class Chicago, where I grew up, there was a phrase for Trump’s economic machinations: “Bullshit walks and money talks.” America’s voters will have their say on which is which in three weeks.