Trump’s ‘Shock and Awe’ Looks More Like Chaos and Confusion

Trump-policy pooh-bah Stephen Miller was reportedly blindsided by his own administration’s funding freeze. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP Photo

Even before Donald Trump took office, we were told he was going to “hit the ground running” and perhaps even “flood the zone” with sweeping policy proposals that would overwhelm the 47th president’s many enemies and disparagers. The need for deft juggling of controversies by the administration’s opponents was often cited as the reason Trump chose so many controversial Cabinet nominees. If Democrats and the “enemy of the people” media focused on Pete Hegseth’s manifest lack of qualifications to run the Pentagon, perhaps they’d miss opportunities to fight Kash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard or Russell Vought or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., each of them outlandish figures who would have attracted vast negative attention in a normal administration.

But whatever its merits as a way to smuggle dubious personnel into power, the breakneck pace of decision-making activities is in danger of short-circuiting the control panel. Just this week, there were several big, dangerous Trump 2.0 debacles that show the supposed geniuses at the White House are asleep at the wheel.

The preeminent screwup, and one so egregious that it is giving fresh hope to Democrats everywhere, was the aborted federal-funding freeze. The Office of Management and Budget announced the funding “pause,” modified it multiple times, then abruptly rescinded it after judges started batting it down. Sloppily written, released without warning or exposition, and causing nationwide chaos among state and local governments, nonprofit grantees, health-care providers, and many others, the freeze memo from acting OMB director Matthew Vaeth was a really big deal. Yet we learn from the New York Times that top White House officials didn’t even know about it beforehand:

The explosive Trump-administration order that froze trillions of dollars of federal grants and loans this week was published without vetting by key officials in the White House, according to three people with knowledge of what happened.

The order was drafted inside the Office of Management and Budget by the agency’s general counsel, Mark Paoletta, two of the people said. And it was released without being shown to the White House staff secretary, Will Scharf, or to Mr. Trump’s top policy adviser, Stephen Miller.

Twice the new and very green White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to field questions about the scope and purpose of the OMB ukase, adding her own incomprehension to the mix. Leavitt, Miller, and eventually Trump eventually blamed the media for the furor as it tried to keep up with an ever-changing story potentially affecting about half the U.S. population.

A second blowup that caught the White House by surprise came from an agency even more obscure than OMB: the Office of Personnel Management, which abruptly emailed millions of federal employees with a pushy offer to let them resign in exchange for continued salary through September. The offer was clearly modeled on Elon Musk’s successful effort to run off a big majority of employees at Twitter when he took over that company (the OPM memo even had the same title, “A Fork in the Road.” The email created massive confusion and fear throughout the federal government, which may in fact have been part of its purpose. But as the Washington Post reported, the purported buyout plan was cooked up by Musk acolytes who have quickly infested OPM, bypassing the usual policy channels for so dramatic a step:

Top political officials at the White House budget office were not consulted about the offer, several people familiar with the matter said. Neither were the agency’s career staff. The career staff at the OPM also were not involved in drafting the proposal, the people said.

Clearly the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.

Finally, there’s also a slow-motion riot underway thanks to inadequate White House guidance for the congressional Republicans who are trying to design the legislation that will implement the portions of Trump’s agenda that cannot be accomplished by executive action alone. This has been an increasingly critical problem for weeks now. House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are willing to do whatever Trump wants. But he apparently can’t be bothered to give them even very basic directions. Senate Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus would prefer two budget-reconciliation bills (the device that will be used to create legislative packages that Democrats cannot filibuster) so as to get a relatively quick “win” on border security and energy before getting into the complex quagmire of tax-cut legislation later in the year. Speaker Johnson prefers a single bill, and while Trump has said he likes the idea of “one big, beautiful bill,” he has refused to referee the dispute, and also won’t answer questions about the level of offsetting budget cuts he will support in order to pay for his plans.

This very week, House Republicans decided to go right to the source for more clarity by holding their annual policy retreat at Trump’s Doral Golf Club in Miami, with the 47th president making the keynote address. As Politico reports, they are flying back to Washington with as many questions as answers:

Key strategic disputes continued to fester inside the GOP ranks, and the uproar from Trump’s federal-spending freeze gave vulnerable members a taste of the backlash that could result if they follow through on promised cuts to key programs …

In the final meeting of the retreat, House committee chairs laid out their budgetary targets for the legislation, setting updated “floors” for potential cuts that are set to be embedded in the blueprint that the House Budget Committee is set to take up next week to kick off the reconciliation process.

Johnson, however, didn’t provide members with a top-line number for the overall package, and many members complained they didn’t get a better picture of the path forward, according to three people with direct knowledge of the closed meeting who were granted anonymity to discuss it.

All Trump appears to have told them is to stay united. But that’s not looking good, as the senators and the House rebels continue to pull in a different direction:

At some point, both friends and enemies of the MAGA project need to concede that all the “shock and awe” Team Trump planned is at the very best a mixed blessing. The wheels may come off soon if the White House doesn’t get a better handle on its own initiatives and those of its essential allies. The funding freeze and the federal-employee resignation gambit were both unforced errors and gifts to the Democratic Party. If they don’t solidify congressional plans, everything could fall apart. So a little more coordination and a little less self-congratulation are in order.