Trump 2.0: A “Hostile Takeover of Washington”

PAULA NEWTON: Now, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is just one example of the whirlwind changes in Washington this year, from aid and foreign policy to trade and beyond. Trump has upended U.S. doctrine, transforming institutions and redefining America’s place in the world. Staff writer at The New Yorker, Susan Glasser, joins Michel Martin to cut through the noise and identify the defining themes of the past 10 months.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Paula. Susan Glasser, thank you so much for joining us once again.

 

SUSAN GLASSER: Oh, it’s great to be with you.

 

MARTIN: So, obviously we’ve called you because you followed, you know, politics and policy in Washington and around the world for many, many years. What about this year stands out to you? And I know it’s hard to pick because — there have been so many consequential events this year, you know, one after another. But when you just think about the year on the whole, what stands out to you?

 

GLASSER: Yeah, I mean, look, if the goal was to overwhelm, let’s just say they’re succeeding and then some. You know, I, if anything, I — the year has been characterized by a level of disruption and even at times, destruction in Washington that is, is something that I suspect we’ll all be looking back to for a long, long time.

 

MARTIN: I’m thinking about, you know, the first part of the year is that — I don’t even know what to call it. It’s not an agency, this kind of ad hoc group led by Elon Musk whose main projects seemed to be to destroy, you know, humanitarian aid around the world as well as, you know, federal agencies. And then of course, the tariff policy, the mass pardoning of January 6th defendants on Inauguration Day, these moves to reshape the federal bureaucracy — particularly with an eye to things that have been disturbing to conservatives for years, like the Department of Education and things of that sort. Is there anything that constitutes a through line through all of that?

 

GLASSER: Yeah, you know, that is, I think, important for us to try to reckon with. And as I think of it, you know, in some ways Trump 1.0, you could say, was the completion of what Trump’s son-in-law called the hostile takeover of the Republican Party. And that was accomplished really, you know, by a couple years into Trump’s term, I would say, you know, as figures like John McCain left the scene and were replaced by enablers or, you know, supporters of Trump and his MAGA movement. 

 

I would say — if that was 1.0, Trump 2.0 is the hostile takeover of Washington and the turning of the executive branch of the U.S. federal government into an extraordinary personal platform for the expanded powers and reach or overreach, as the case may be, of one man. This is something that, again, I think we’ll be studying for, for many, many decades to come, which is the incredible aggregation of power in the form of one man in the Oval Office. And the idea that the Congress has largely stepped aside, including even abdicating many of its constitutionally assigned functions. There was a moment recently that was so telling when President Trump said, you know, I feel like I am the speaker of the house as well as the President, too. And in some ways you can’t argue with that. 

 

So again, this incredible accretion of personalized executive power in the presidency. We don’t know yet to what extent, if at all, this Trump-appointed conservative majority in the Supreme Court may yet act to constrain him. We don’t know yet whether the voters ultimately will rebuke this and restrain it or roll it back in the midterm elections. But for now, 2025 is the year that America got a different kind of presidency.

 

MARTIN: Of all the things that we are thinking about here, when you think about the year, there are things that are really visible inside Washington. There are things that are visible outside of Washington. What are the things you think that might be most visible outside of Washington?

 

GLASSER: He said that he was going to be the president who was gonna bring back the economy, the president who was gonna stop inflation, the president who was going to restore kind of the way things were before the COVID pandemic disrupted the U.S. and the world. And that, I think is where it’s pretty remarkable that he’s lost the very people arguably, who brought him back to the presidency. Those kind of non-frequent voters, the independents, the young people who thought, Okay, well, things aren’t going well, and I’m really unhappy about the state of things in the economy. I’m unhappy about how much I have to pay. And here we are, not even a year later. And in fact, Americans are even more upset about the state of the economy than they were a year ago when they elected Donald Trump to fix it. 

 

And, you know, he promised a lot of things that he was gonna do on day one. He promised he was gonna settle the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He hasn’t done that. But most importantly, from the point of view, I think, of the American electorate, he promised that he was gonna bring prices down on day one of his second presidency and restore the economy. Instead, where we are is we have essentially the same level of inflation now that we did a year ago when Donald Trump was campaigning against the Joe Biden economy. He said the 3% inflation at that time was literally like the worst inflation in the history of the world, which of course it wasn’t. And it wasn’t even the worst inflation in modern times in the United States. But nonetheless, Donald Trump campaigned against that level of inflation. A year later, we have 3% inflation, essentially the exact same numbers that we did on eve of the election. And now Donald Trump is calling this an affordability crisis that’s a Democratic hoax that’s just not true. The electorate needs to suck it up and get over it. Very similar, very similar in some ways to the level of denial that we saw from the former president, Biden.

 

MARTIN: Let’s talk about immigration. His polls have declined — maybe not with his core supporters, because he’s got a core group of supporters who seem to support him no matter what. But it does seem that there are a lot of people who are disturbed by the way his immigration policy is unfolding. You know, they’re seeing these images of people, women, being dragged from their cars. They’re seeing parents being arrested in front of their kids. When they drop them off. And how do you think this is playing? How do you assess how this is going?

 

GLASSER: Yeah, I think it’s really important. It was something not only that Trump campaigned on, but was very much a mobilizing factor for his core supporters. And I remember very vividly being at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. And when he said “mass deportation now” — there were pre-printed signs — and it was one of the only things, aside from the mention of his name itself, that that audience really went crazy for. They were absolutely stirred up and rallied by that. And they held up the “mass deportation now” signs. The other issue, by the way, that really seemed to energize that core group of supporters, it was any mention of like, men playing women’s sports or, you know, trans issues. Those were the two things that I think really crystallized the culture war as it played out in the 2024 campaign.

 

So, flash forward, he’s executing on that. As you said, we’re now living in this world of these kind of horrible shock videos, right? Do you avert your gaze? Do you feel that you need to look at them? Because it’s what’s happening in our country right now. I mean, it’s a painful aspect of, kind of, the visual backdrop, if you will, to the Trump 2.0 presidency. 

 

You also mentioned Trump’s declining poll numbers. And this, I think, is very significant. Again, as I’m looking for differences between the first term and the second term. Donald Trump in  the first term was a very unpopular president. He was a historically unpopular president. The most unpopular since public polling was taken. Okay…consistently. What’s different is that back in the first term Trump was generally getting pretty good marks on things like the economy, even where he was seen as personally polarizing or unpleasant to voters. So they gave him more credit for at least delivering on the economy in some ways, even if they didn’t like what kind of public persona he had and the polarization. 

 

Now, interestingly enough, Donald Trump is even more underwater in the polls on things like the economy than he is overall in his negative approval ratings. Gallup just found that Trump had the lowest numbers of his two presidencies, including a 60% disapproval rating, but even more disapproval on the economy. Even on immigration, where broadly speaking, even many Democrats and independents had supported the idea of closing the border or making it less permeable. I think a lot of Democrats believe their own party screwed up, and that Joe Biden screwed up as president, to be blunt, in sort of allowing out of control, illegal migration into the country. And so, while there was a residual support in the public, it’s these tactics that you mentioned, Michel, I think, that have really begun to cause a backlash. You know, that the idea that it’s not just the criminal illegal migrants that Donald Trump initially told us that he was gonna go after. But that it’s reaching into, you know, essentially peaceful civil society in ways that people do not support and did not expect.

 

MARTIN:  The other interesting thing that’s happened this week that is related to immigration is the national security strategy was released. And it cites immigration to Europe as a problem, as it — the way it was described is, what is it, the erasure of civilization due to immigration. How do you understand that? And what does this tell us about Trump’s kind of view of the relationship that he thinks the United States should have with the rest of the world?

 

GLASSER: Yeah, I mean, that is a pretty radical document. It’s a pretty disruptive document. It has a worldview that is very, very incompatible with the worldviews of any modern president, whether Democrat or Republican. It essentially abdicates and sort of says, we’re moving on from the idea of the United States as this global superpower and guarantor of the liberal order. You know, I’m old enough to remember when American presidents used to speak of exporting democracy to the world. Donald Trump is now talking about exporting right-wing racism to Europe. Which is really something remarkable. 

 

As you might expect, this has occasioned an incredible amount of both backlash and I think really existential level soul-searching among European leaders. Because really — not just since the end of the Cold War, but since the end of World War II — it’s this partnership between the United States and Western Europe that has been the anchor of global security in many ways. And what Donald Trump is saying is that, You know, actually in my first term, I talked about pay more for the security. Now I’m saying, yeah, I’m not really in on the deal. And it tells you in many ways, much of what you need to know. That the people who have reacted favorably to the new national security strategy of the United States of America is the Kremlin. And you have both the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, and the former president Dmitri Medvedev, welcoming this national security strategy with open arms. Saying that it was explicitly echoing what Russia itself has said about security. It talks about, you know, ending a world in which NATO is continuing to expand. It talks about the U.S. essentially destabilizing the governments that it doesn’t like of many of its Western European allies and working from within those countries to depose those leaders. I mean, that’s just a remarkable statement. It led one senior European I spoke with this week to say, You know, my concern isn’t so much anymore that the United States is not on this — you know, not working to help Ukraine and Europe. But that the United States is now actively switching sides. And that’s number one.

 

Number two, I think this is very important, is that Trump — in his campaign and in his first year of his presidency now —  has advanced a pretty radical notion of national security in which the U.S. basically is focused mostly on the Western hemisphere, kind of a spheres of influence, almost a 19th century view of carving up the world with the other powers like Russia and China, but also that it should operate with impunity, basically within the Western hemisphere, and that they’re defining national security threats as coming from “the enemy within.” That’s something Trump said on the campaign trail. It’s something that he repeated — and Pete Hegseth, his Secretary of Defense, repeated — in that remarkable convening of America’s general officers in Quantico. He basically said, we should use the U.S. military on the streets of our own cities and that it’s actually domestic disturbances that pose a national security threat. And as you know, of course, he’s kind of started to follow through on that by deploying troops to American cities on made up pretext of crime waves and political disturbances that don’t really exist, and over the objections of those cities elected leadership. So it’s not just about words anymore, Michel. I think that’s a key point.

 

MARTIN: The president’s — how can we put this — seems to be very committed to enriching himself, if I can put it that way… 

 

GLASSER: I think you can. 

 

MARTIN: …in this current administration. I mean, in his first term in office, he said that he’d put his holdings into a blind trust. But in this administration, in this current term, there doesn’t seem to be much concern about appearances of conflicts. It doesn’t seem to be much concern about whether his policies dovetail particularly nicely with his own personal financial interests. Would, would you say that that’s true? 

 

GLASSER: Yeah, I’m glad that you brought this up because I believe that it is very important. The levels of self-enrichment and the, essentially, the mobilization of the U.S. presidency as a tool for the enrichment of Donald Trump and his family is a really remarkable asset — aspect of the second term. And again, the scale and scope of that enrichment, we are talking billions of dollars that are coming into the pockets of the Trump family and those in his inner circle. Like — 

 

MARTIN: And how is that working? How does, how is that happening? 

 

GLASSER: Yeah, well — 

 

MARTIN: And is that visible to the public? Is that the kind of thing that the public can see? 

 

GLASSER: Yeah — 

 

MARTIN: I mean, if they’re interested. 

 

GLASSER: Yeah, they, they, they, there’s been incredible investigative reporting that has produced some really eye popping examples. For example Donald Trump’s sons and Steve Witkoff’s sons — Witkoff being his personal golfing buddy, real estate developer turned peace envoy both in Middle East and Russia. At the same time, the Trump family and the Witkoff family are doing business in with the Arab Gulf Emirates at the same time that they’re negotiating major international accords and actually twinning these things so that Trump and his family are talking about deals — billions of dollars invested in a new crypto company run by the Trump kids and the Witkoff kids — at the same time Trump and Witkoff were in the Middle East for the first visit, foreign visit of Donald Trump’s second term. 

 

That’s one example of many. There are new Trump real estate developments in countries around the world. Trump branded real estate developments in countries around the world that have major business with the Trump administration. He hosted the, the people who gave money to a Trump crypto enterprise for dinner at his club outside Washington, D.C. and then brought them in for a personal tour of the White House. So, you know, again, it’s the co-mingling that is really remarkable. 

 

We know, for example, that the Saudi government entities basically gave $2 billion in seed money to Jared Kushner’s new investment fund at the end of Trump’s first term. Well, did all that money come from Saudi Arabia? Maybe it’s coming from other foreign entities. The answer is that we don’t know. 

 

MARTIN: Susan Glasser, thank you so much for talking with us again.

 

GLASSER: Great to be with you. Thank you.