“Destructiveness“(1826) | George Cruikshank / Public Domain
Tracking the damage President Trump has done in his first two months in office sometimes seems like counting the homes flattened in a hurricane. Every house matters to someone—but it’s the cumulative devastation that most matters to society as a whole. Yet as long as people are still picking through the wreckage in their own backyards, it’s hard to appreciate the full scope of the disaster. And this is, of course, deliberate. Shock and awe works best when the shocks are widespread and particularly awful. Sometimes one part of a larger disaster may reveal vital lessons about the whole.
Take the strange case of Guantanamo 2.0.
Within days of taking office, President Trump announced that he would start arresting and then deporting migrants to Guantanamo—the notorious Cuban complex where prisoners captured in President Bush’s “War on Terror” were once housed in unfit conditions, tortured, and deprived of all rights, until the Supreme Court intervened (in cases that I helped bring before the court.)
For Trump and his team, the symbolism of warehousing migrants at Guantanamo was irresistible: Over the next few days, and to great fanfare, several hundred Venezuelan migrants were flown to the base, most of whom were imprisoned in the cells that had first been built to house post-9/11 detainees.
Then, as quickly as they came, they went; after howls of protest and waves of litigation, the Venezuelans were repatriated.
The administration’s flirtation with our postcolonial outpost is not the most horrible of the many horrible things taking place in America today—far from it. But it reveals much of what we can expect for the next four years.
Though commentators do it all the time, it is a mistake to talk about the plans and intentions of “the Trump administration” as though it thinks with one brain and speaks with one voice. There are 15 cabinet-level departments and hundreds of executive agencies that employ more than 2 million people, and that doesn’t include personnel in the US military. Most of these workers enjoy civil service protections. The average tenure for an employee in the executive branch is nearly 12 years, which means most federal bureaucrats work under both Democratic and Republican leadership.
Against this, the president can appoint only about 4,000 people, of whom roughly 1,300 are subject to Senate confirmation. Of the latter, President Trump has made only 204 nominations and only 19 have been confirmed by the Senate, at least as of February 21, 2025.
For his part, Donald Trump does not have a coherent theory of governance so much as he has a welter of sometimes contradictory impulses.
He is authoritarian, narcissistic, and transactional. As an authoritarian, he sees the world in simplistic terms and has draconian ideas about law and order. As a narcissist, he demands fealty and depends on adulation. And because he is transactional, he views every interaction as a zero-sum contest in which he must never lose.
These impulses interact with and amplify each other. For instance, like any good authoritarian, he is exquisitely sensitive to real or imagined threats to “us.” The greater the perceived threat, the more viciously he lashes out at an undifferentiated “them.” But because he is a narcissist, he detects those threats in anything that tarnishes the adulation he craves.
Trump thus views the FBI agents who investigated him and the attorneys who prosecuted him as cut from the same cloth as the “rapists” who supposedly stream across the border; all of them threaten “us,” since an attack on him is an attack on the good of the country. And because he is transactional, he measures his success against these threats in quantifiable superlatives: he is the most persecuted president of all time; his wall is the biggest; his crowds are the best.
For Trump, Guantanamo is simply a way to flex his authoritarian muscles, a place to dump the trash. He uses the term not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a place, but as a condition to be endured, as in, “I’m going to Guantanamo those m***********s.” He has no grasp of Guantanamo beyond that, and apart from fleeting references that serve his immediate political purpose, he does not give it a second thought.
But if Trump has no coherent theory of governance, others in his orbit quite definitely do. People like Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s border policy. seem to genuinely believe the United States is locked in an existential struggle with the forces of barbarism. In remarks written by Miller and delivered by Trump in Warsaw in 2017, the President declared: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Take the case of Guantanamo. For people like Miller, the Cuban complex presents an opportunity to quarantine the “barbarians.” If the Millers of the world have their way, Guantanamo would become precisely what the Bush Administration thought it was when the first post-9/11 prisoners arrived in January 2002: a prison beyond the law. Ultimately, I think their goal is to create a space where they can dump outcasts of all sorts, including climate refugees, for as long as they want. This lawless domain would be much bigger than the prison Bush established. Guantanamo is nearly half the size of the District of Columbia and bigger than Manhattan. It has miles of unused space, and could house hundreds of thousands of refugees.
But making good on this vision is no small challenge. To begin with, there is the law.
I was lead counsel in the Supreme Court case that granted post-9/11 prisoners at Guantanamo the right to challenge their detention in federal court. As a result of this litigation, the doors to the federal courthouse are always open to anyone brought to the base and held by the United States, including foreign nationals picked up thousands of miles from the mainland. Any plan to make Guantanamo a prison beyond the law would first have to reckon with Supreme Court rulings to the contrary.
But more important than this caselaw is the expectation that people sent to the base from the United States will be treated in a particular way. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem captured this expectation when she said that “due process will be followed” for migrants at Guantanamo. I suspect Noem was not making a prediction about the application of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. Instead, her remark was meant to signal her recognition that “due process” is among the deeply embedded background principles that people associate with being American. Declaring that migrants will enjoy due process is simply Noem’s way of saying that migrant detention at Guantanamo will be as American as Friday night football, and people should not be alarmed.
When it comes to Guantanamo, therefore, the long-term ambitions of the right-wing ideologues are frustrated by a combination of established law and settled expectations, which collectively act as a bulwark against their tyrannical vision. So they have targeted that bulwark. Right now, it is natural to say, “Of course migrants brought to Guantanamo from the United States will have due process.” But they want the opposite to be equally natural: “Of course migrants at Guantanamo will not have due process. Due process is not meant for them; it was never meant for them. That is meant for us.” This is the vision they want reflected in both law and society.
And of course, what is true of Guantanamo is true generally. Standing against the ideological aspirations of Miller and his counterparts throughout the executive branch lies an entire lattice of legal precedents, settled practices, and embedded norms.
This lattice represents the way we have come to expect American society to operate. It includes the principles we take for granted and the assumptions we no longer question, along with the institutions we have built, the laws we have passed, and the positions we have staffed to put those principles into operation and to make them real in the world. Collectively, it is what so many of us take for granted as essential to the American experience.
Some have tried to reduce the MAGA program to a single word or expression, variously charging the Trumpian movement as fascist, white nationalist, or culturally conservative. The better way to think about the MAGA program is to focus less on the label than on the beneficiaries—not on the what but the who. As these Americans see it, life in the United States has gone badly astray, working systematically for the benefit of the wrong people, people who see the nation through a distorting prism of ists—racist, sexist, classist, ableist—and who have tried to build a world that discriminates against a mythologized “normal” in order to achieve their vision of a diverse, multi-cultural nirvana, which the Trump ideologues see as coercive, discriminatory, and ahistorical.
To the MAGA right, conservativism is not about big government or small government; it’s about their government. The federal government will be activist when it suits them, as when it targets congestion pricing in New York City, threatens to punish the state of Maine for its policy on trans athletes in public schools, or redirects taxpayer dollars to private religious schools. Other times, it will be passive, as when it kills the Consumer Financial Protection Board. But the goal, writ large, is to make the country work for the right people, those they think of as authentic Americans.
To achieve this, they need to change nearly everything a great many people have come to take for granted—a lighter lift in some domains than others, mostly because the principles at work have never taken firm hold. For instance, the MAGA ideologues view any attempt to elevate the historical or contemporary experiences of non-whites in this country as inherently suspect and discriminatory against whites. This explains their attack on DEI. In the face of this assault, many private businesses have been quick to jettison even a rhetorical commitment to diversity. For most of them, it was never more than performative virtue-signaling, and garments only lightly worn are the easiest to cast off.
In other places, however, dislodging this lattice will be much more difficult. These are the sites where the settled expectations about the way the world ought to be are much more firmly embedded.
It is one thing to do away with performative prancing about racial justice, but quite another to eliminate all efforts to reverse the effect of discrimination, and still something else to repeal all anti-discrimination statutes. The former is not embedded; the latter two are. But I suspect all three are in the crosshairs.
This brings us at last to what some people imagine as our looming constitutional crisis. They fret that President Trump will direct his subordinates to ignore judicial rulings that displease him or his ideological attack dogs.
But the issue at stake in such a move—that no one is above the law and no president is a king—might be the most firmly embedded principle in American life.
Some in Trump’s orbit may be itching to provoke such a crisis and may (mis)read popular sentiment’s enthusiasm for that fight.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Trump is in that camp, not because he is a constitutionalist but because it would be a distraction that would tarnish his popularity. It doesn’t fit with his transactional narcissism.
In any case, if the ideological right is good at anything, it is the long game. I may be alone in this assessment, but I don’t think the ideologues in Trump’s orbit much care whether they win their fights this time around. The purpose of their endless Executive Orders is to reset the national conversation about what it means to be an American, which helps explain why so many of these orders are so poorly drafted, clumsily enforced, and quickly enjoined.
To put it simply, the Executive Orders are not serious attempts to create enforceable norms. They are battles in a long war to reclaim the meaning of the word “America.”
To achieve their reset, the reactionary right will make rational calculations about which battles they think they can win now, and which they need to shelve for the time being, much as they did for many years with welfare reform and the private right to bear arms.
But they will view themselves successful if they have forced a conversation about an entirely new set of policy choices that move us dramatically away from everything they view as anathema.
To give just one example, when they lose their battle over birthright citizenship in the courts (as they will), I have no doubt that they will comply with the law. But they will have introduced a serious conversation about who can claim to be a US citizen and with what benefits; at least for now, that is enough.
A few days after the Venezuelans were repatriated from Guantanamo, the administration sent 40 more migrants to the Cuban base. Shortly before a federal district court was scheduled to rule on the legality of their transfer, the United States transferred all of them back to the mainland. For now, the symbolic prancing at Guantanamo is over. More recently, the government began shipping migrants to jails in El Salvador.
La lutte continue.
