Under Trump, Process Is for Suckers – Michael Warren

Vance said the attack, which killed 11 alleged drug smugglers, was the “highest and best use of our military,” and Krassenstein replied that it was a “war crime,” prompting the vice president’s aforementioned colorful dismissal. The administration has not offered any proof for the public of the identity of the boat’s passengers nor a legal justification for the strike. A designated terrorist organization, TdA is a Venezuelan-based criminal network that is known more for its human trafficking operations than drug trafficking. 

Still, Vance’s admission of indifference is telling. Who cares about questions of legality or procedure when it comes to killing those who “poison our fellow citizens”?

For Trump and his administration, constraints on government power are annoying hurdles to overcome. Checks and balances are for those who don’t know “what time it is.” Critics don’t deserve good faith. The process is for suckers.

The list of debatable actions that administration officials appear not to “give a sh-t” about justifying is growing long, from the non-enforcement of the ban on TikTok to Trump’s by-any-means-necessary search for authority to impose tariffs unilaterally. No one in the White House seemed to care when Elon Musk told an outrageous tale about government waste that turned out to be untrue. The president is still publicly toying with the idea of sending American troops into other major cities along the lines of what he has done in Washington, the federal city where the president has much more leeway on deploying the military.

And when I talk to sources in the government’s broad national security apparatus, this is the complaint I regularly hear: The processes by which information is communicated, decisions are made, and policy is enforced are broken. 

The May ouster of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, along with large portions of his staff, has neutered the process of the National Security Council and concentrated the power there into the acting head, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The confused rollout, and then rollback, of a decision to cancel munitions to Ukraine this summer laid bare how rudderless things are at the Pentagon. The process within the intelligence community in the run-up to the American strike on Iran this spring was a mess, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard finding herself out of the loop while her technical subordinate, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, was the White House’s preferred adviser.

This heedlessness to procedure manifests itself in ways both serious and trivial. Consider the other major action last week affecting the military: granting the Department of Defense a secondary name, the “Department of War.” That was accomplished through an executive action, signed by Trump on Friday, and also allows for corresponding secondary “War” titles for the secretary and subordinate officials at the Pentagon. 

But buried in Trump’s order is a reluctant acknowledgement that a formal name change to the largest executive department will ultimately require Congress, which established the Defense Department, to rename it via legislative action. In truth, the rechristened Department of War really isn’t, yet the Trump administration persists.

The best description of the animating principle of Trump 2.0 came at last week’s National Conservatism Conference, when activist Rachel Bovard gleefully declared that the lesson of the administration so far is “you can just do things.” Activity, unconstrained by law or custom or prudence, is the highest priority for the MAGA movement, and Trump is delivering as best he can. (Activity can also be good politics, especially if your opponents get hung up on whether you followed the rules to a T when you were cracking down on crime or solving big important problems. Whether all this will prove to be popular is up for debate, but it isn’t polling well so far.)

Excessive process, on the other hand, is the enemy of action. For conservatives in the federal government, this has long been the most frustrating aspect of attaining power. Bureaucratic resistance is a tale as old as Washington, as conservatives who have been agitating since the Reagan administration to dismantle the Department of Education (established in 1979) can attest. It took a persistent President Richard Nixon, to whom Trump is often compared, for the “temporary” (and ugly) Navy office buildings erected on the National Mall near the end of World War I to finally be razed.

But procedure is also a part of our republican government’s stopgaps against tyranny. It’s inherent to the structure of Congress, where a majoritarian House of Representatives is tempered by the less democratic (but theoretically more deliberative) Senate. It’s embedded in long-standing legal institutions like the Bill of Rights and the federal rules of criminal and civil procedure that protect Americans’ rights from violation by the federal government. And it’s a neutral check on elected officials, from the county dog catcher all the way to the president of the United States, no matter which party holds power.

Trump is hardly the first president to treat these procedures like mere niceties that must be cast aside for the greater good. But the open disdain that he, his administration, and many of his followers and supporters have for these limits and rules does seem novel. 

And if there is a process at work in the Trump administration, it’s this: Do whatever the president wants at that given time. Consider what has happened in front of the White House in just the last couple of days.

During a press availability in the Oval Office on Friday, a correspondent from the pro-Trump network Real America’s Voice asked the president about a continuous Peace Vigil protest that has taken place in Lafayette Park just north of the White House grounds for decades. The correspondent referred to the tent where anti-nuclear protesters have held an ongoing vigil since 1981 as an “eyesore,” seeming to alert Trump to its existence for the first time. Trump’s immediate response was for someone to “take it down.”

Two days later, federal law enforcement officers partially dismantled the tent. Peace Vigil volunteers have said the officers incorrectly designated the structure a homeless encampment and that while they maintain the structure, they are not homeless and do not live in the tent. The volunteers are arguing their civil rights to protest have been violated, seemingly on the whims of the president. 

Does the Trump administration give a sh-t? What do you think?