Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.” Video of the moment rocketed across social media, serving as an early indicator of Trump’s enduring strength with his base, despite his recent felony convictions.

Strickland went viral last week for a very different reason: opposition to the president and his plan to take over Gaza. “Man if Trump keeps this bs up I’m about to start waving a Palestinian flag,” the fighter posted on X. “American cities are shitholes and you wanna go spend billions on this dumpster fire. Did we make a mistake?! This ain’t America first.” Strickland’s lament racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.

Strickland is far from the only one expressing buyer’s remorse. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the honeymoon is over; some of his backers are waking up next to the man they voted for and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake. With every policy he implements and offhand remark he makes, Trump is falsifying the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.

In late January, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media personality on the American right, interviewed Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a generally pro-Trump publication. Basking in the glow of the inauguration, the two men enthused over what they described as Trump’s commitment to a new policy of American restraint on the world stage. “It is an actual choice,” Mills said. “We cannot do the border if we do the Middle East.” Carlson quickly concurred: “We have to reorient toward our own interests.” Eleven days after this conversation aired, Trump announced his Gaz-a-Lago gambit. Shortly after, Mills published and promoted a piece declaring, “Trump’s Apparent Gaza Scheme Endangers His Entire Legacy.”

In February 2023, the Trump-curious journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that “the energy behind opposing American interventionism … is actually much more on the populist right than the populist left.” In February 2025, he is now asking, “How does Trump’s intensifying fixation on ‘taking over Gaza’ promote an America First foreign policy?”

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

And the problem is not just the Middle East. Again and again, the fantasies that fueled Trump’s candidacy are colliding with the reality of his presidency, and the result is already dispelling the illusions of many who advocated for him.

“Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism,” wrote the pro-worker, pro-Trump commentator Sohrab Ahmari earlier this month, calling on Trump to fire his billionaire sidekick and arguing that “it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.” (Trump has not fired Musk.)

On Monday, Zachary Levi, one of the few Hollywood celebrities who openly endorsed Trump, went on Fox to plead for the “truly good, working people that work for the government that are getting lost in the cracks” amid Musk’s purge of the civil service. And after Trump’s administration banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the heterodox Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy had enough. “I voted against compelled speech,” she wrote on X. “You can’t just rename a body of water and demand everyone go along with it and call us liars if we don’t. Nope. Miss me with that shit.” Her post garnered 10,000 likes and 1.4 million views.

Of course, Trump was never a free-speech, pro-labor, anti-war paragon in the first place. Over the course of his political and business careers, he’s lobbed lawsuits at multiple media companies, reportedly stiffed contractors and customers, pushed tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, and continued American drone strikes and arms sales in the Middle East. But the outrage of some influencers who believed he’d further their causes is a warning: As president, Trump is no longer the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.

Every candidate runs to some extent on the idea of their presidency rather than its reality, promising to be all things to as many people as possible. The brilliance of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan in 2008 was that it allowed voters to fill in the blanks afterward with whatever they most desired. But because Trump appears to have few, if any, core principles beyond retaining and expanding his own power, he was able to take this approach to the extreme. Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. And because Trump was out of office for four years, his supporters had the unusual opportunity to spin self-serving—and often mutually exclusive—narratives around the former president’s plans without the inconvenience of having to explain his actual policies.

With Trump in the White House again, however, many of these pleasing fictions stand exposed. The president’s hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board has upset the promoters of his domestic agenda in the intelligentsia, while his Gaza proposal has left many of his neo-isolationist boosters scrambling—or sidestepping the subject entirely. The reality of Trump’s presidency can no longer sustain the fantasies that were projected onto his campaign.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Frankly, those who fell for these mirages should have known better. Trump is no conventional politician. He relies on instincts forged in the worlds of show business and real estate—an entirely transactional actor with an unparalleled penchant for self-promotion and flimflam. Attempts to fit him into a traditional ideological box will always fail, because he has never met a box he couldn’t sell for parts to the highest bidder. Attempts to cast him as a staunch proponent of American restraint or opponent of corporate greed do not reflect his pre-political career, never fit his first-term policies, and don’t describe his current ones. Rather, these bids to pigeonhole and appropriate Trump are best seen as efforts by intellectuals to impose order on what they don’t understand, or opportunistic attempts by ideologues to bootstrap their program to Trump’s ascendant brand.

There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and that they would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn’t and won’t.

This is why the more Trump’s presidency progresses, the more support he will lose. Back in November, Phetasy, the Spectator columnist, said that she was “voting for Donald Trump, but not really for Donald Trump—I’m voting against the left and many of the things that they stand for.” In 2024, Trump benefited from this dynamic. But come the 2026 midterms, he will have provided voters like her, who have been burned by their illusions, with something new to vote against. The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.

Here’s a warning story for the patriotic Americans who have gone to work for President Donald Trump.

President Richard Nixon recruited an eminent Republican lawyer, William P. Rogers, as his secretary of state. Over the ensuing four years, Nixon humiliated Rogers again and again and again.

The worst of the humiliations involved the negotiation of peace in Vietnam. While Rogers nominally presided over U.S. diplomacy, Nixon opened secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Rogers was kept completely in the dark. His only role came at the end, when it fell to him to sign the documents that doomed South Vietnam.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

That sad history now appears to be repeating itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Saudi Arabia pretending to be in charge of negotiations between the U.S. and Russia over the fate of Ukraine. Rubio is the perfect fall guy for this assignment. Confirmed as secretary of state by a 99–0 vote, he’s won praise from all sides for his commitment to American institutions and values.

Meanwhile, the real decisions are being made elsewhere. Trump yesterday blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. From the Oval Office, he is preparing a deal to give Russia the victory over Ukraine that it failed to win on the battlefield. The contemplated Trump deal would surrender Ukrainian territory to Russia and bar Ukraine from ever joining NATO. Trump wants an early end to sanctions on Russia, another unilateral U.S. concession to Putin. Yesterday, Trump accepted the Russian position that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should have to face reelection before peace talks begin. Again, no such demand is being made of Putin.  

Trump has demanded half a trillion dollars in economic concessions from Ukraine. If Ukraine says yes, its economic recovery will be wrecked before it starts. If, more realistically, Ukraine refuses, then Trump has gained his pretext for cutting Ukraine off from future U.S. security assistance. Meanwhile, Vice President J. D. Vance has scolded America’s NATO allies for trying to police the disinformation pumped out by Trump’s largest donor and de facto co-president, Elon Musk. Both Vance and Musk are outspoken opponents of Ukraine’s fight for survival. Trump is even considering a Russian invitation to join Putin in Moscow to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Russian “Victory Day” over Nazi Germany, which will now also symbolize Putin’s own victory over Ukraine and NATO.

This morning, Trump condemned Zelensky as a “dictator” and wildly exaggerated U.S. contributions to Ukraine’s self-defense by 400 percent, while also denying and denigrating Europe’s larger contributions.

Trump is surrounded by more normal Republicans trying to ingratiate themselves into his pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine inner circle. When Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, then-Senator Rubio abruptly reversed his previous support for Ukraine aid. In February 2024, Rubio numbered among the 29 senators voting against an aid package to Ukraine and Israel—a vote he justified in Trump-style language that falsely claimed that aid to Ukraine came at the price of enforcement efforts along the U.S. southern border. Then-Representative Michael Waltz, who is now Trump’s national security adviser, turned his coat at almost exactly the same time.

Both men may have imagined that they were exercising a tactical retreat to serve a bigger cause, preserving their credibility with Trump in order to protect America and its allies from Trump’s worst instincts. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special adviser on Ukraine, may entertain a similar hope.

But the evidence of past days suggests they are all deluding themselves. Trump wants to abandon Ukraine more than he has wanted to do anything as president, except possibly protect and pardon the January 6 criminals. His aides are playing the part of William P. Rogers, even as the real action is occurring all around them.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

If that’s not how they want to be remembered, they have to act fast. They have to begin by recognizing that this president wants to destroy Ukraine—and is surrounded by enablers who want to help him.

Perhaps Trump can be corralled, but if the pro-American faction within this administration wants to make itself felt, it has to be prepared to play as tough and rough as the pro-Putin faction from the president on down.

William P. Rogers was eventually fired by Nixon for his unwillingness to say and do all that Nixon wanted to defend Nixon during the Wagergate scandal. That’s the fate hanging over all those who joined this administration hoping to make it better. Trump is determined to make it worse. He’s the president, and he’s backed in his anti-Ukraine views by the people he most cares about. The noisy resignation is the ultimate weapon of the political appointee, and people inside this administration who care about America’s good name had best be prepared to use it. Otherwise, they will be used as fools and fronts in an administration that seems to be placing Russian interests ahead of America’s own.

The lawsuit filed last week to halt the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development stands on a bedrock constitutional principle: “Congress, not the President or the U.S. Constitution, creates and organizes the offices and departments” of the government—as a 2017 Heritage Foundation report accurately stated.

Good-faith arguments exist both for and against America having an independent USAID, or—to name another Donald Trump target—a stand-alone federal Department of Education. Over the decades, Congress has changed its mind about both. Constitutionally, however, that’s the point: The decision is up to Congress. Unilateral moves to dismantle USAID, to mothball the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or, if Trump’s advisers have their way, to disassemble the Education Department are beyond the president’s constitutional authority.

Since the Kennedy administration, foreign-assistance functions have been lodged in different agency homes. With authority granted him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a division of the State Department. Using powers delegated to him by statutes enacted in 1979, President Jimmy Carter moved USAID’s functions to the United States International Development Cooperation Agency. In 1998, Congress gave President Bill Clinton authority to either return USAID to the State Department or allow it to become an independent establishment within the executive branch; Clinton did the latter. Although presidential judgment thus informed the shape of USAID at every stage of its evolution, everything that presidents pre-Trump did with regard to the structure of USAID or the allocation of its functions was done pursuant to laws that Congress had enacted. No president asserted authority independent of Congress to create, reshape, or eliminate USAID.

This history reflects the Framers’ decision to give Congress, not the president, the authority to generate the executive-organization chart. The Constitution’s executive-branch charter, Article II, envisions what we now call the federal bureaucracy. The president is given explicit authority to “require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” But Article II says nothing else about those “departments.” Instead, Article I of the Constitution, the charter for the legislative branch, assigns to Congress the responsibility to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution … all … powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law, but law—including law that establishes and structures executive offices and agencies—gets made by Congress.

[Read: The other fear of the founders]

Since the very first Congress, the legislative branch has jealously guarded its power over organization. When the first House bill creating the Department of Foreign Affairs was introduced in the Senate, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania suggested that the organization of the executive branch might be left to the president, as the holder of executive power. His scheme would have given to the president the power of a British monarch to create offices. The Senate rejected his position, and the First Congress enacted a round of statutes organizing the new departments—Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury. The statutory duties of the secretaries heading Foreign Affairs and War were largely to carry out presidential instructions; Congress recognized that Article II envisioned significant discretionary roles in foreign and military affairs for the president. The Treasury, however, was organized in detail. Not only did Congress assign the Treasury Secretary a significant number of specific legal duties, but it also created additional offices within the department—all requiring Senate advice and consent. These additional offices, as explained by the administrative-law scholar Jerry L. Mashaw, “were meant to provide checks on the Secretary and each other in the crucial matter of safeguarding the integrity of the fiscal and monetary affairs of the nation.” Congress went on to create a variety of other agencies, including the Mint, the Post Office, a Customs Service, and a national bank, tailoring the structure of each according to its sense of how best to fit structure to mission. No one doubted that this was Congress’s prerogative to decide.

Supreme Court jurisprudence recognized Congress’s role. In Myers v. United States, the 1926 Supreme Court decision most protective of broad presidential power over administration, Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft acknowledged: “To Congress under its legislative power is given the establishment of offices, the determination of their functions and jurisdiction, the prescribing of reasonable and relevant qualifications and rules of eligibility of appointees, and the fixing of the term for which they are to be appointed.” This proposition has never been open to serious question.

Congress has recognized, of course, that presidents may have valuable ideas regarding administrative organization. Beginning in 1939, Congress enacted a series of so-called Reorganization Acts, which gave presidents significant (but not unlimited) discretion to create, abolish, or restructure administrative agencies, subject to an important caveat. Presidential reorganization plans were subject to a “legislative veto”—that is, a resolution disapproving the plan enacted by both Houses of Congress, which could keep it from going into effect. This would be a concurrent resolution of the House and the Senate that the president could not veto and did not have to sign in order to make it binding. Through the threat of legislative vetoes, Congress kept control over what got created, abolished, or restructured.

In 1983, however, the Supreme Court held that legislative vetoes were an unconstitutional form of legislation. As a result, Congress took away presidential authority to implement reorganizations unilaterally. If presidential reorganization plans could not easily be blocked, Congress would no longer authorize them. Since 1984, presidents have been allowed only to propose reorganizations, which Congress could enact or reject through the ordinary legislative process. (A suggestion in 2023 by Vivek Ramaswamy that a 1977 Reorganization Act continues to empower presidents to abolish agencies despite the statutory changes Congress enacted in 1984 is an appallingly fanciful statutory interpretation.)

[Read: The Constitutional crisis is here]

In light of this legal background, the question is why Trump thinks a president can legally disassemble agencies on his own—assuming, that is, that he cares if it is legal. The likely answer would involve an especially ambitious version of an Article II interpretation called the “unitary executive theory.” The baseline premise of the unitary executive theory is that Article II guarantees presidents complete removal authority over every subordinate member of the executive branch. Bolder versions contend that he or she can also directly command how every function of the executive branch be performed—or even perform them personally.

The Supreme Court has never fully embraced the unitary executive theory. However, a broad reading of the Myers decision mentioned earlier—a reading the Court unanimously rejected seven years later—would invalidate any attempt by Congress to create independent administrators protected from presidential at-will removal. The Roberts Court has gone nearly all in on the broad reading of Myers, treating Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 opinion upholding the Federal Trade Commission, as a mere exception to Myers. (In the intervening decades, the Supreme Court had repeatedly reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor as the controlling authority, most famously in its 1988 decision upholding the constitutionality of post-Watergate independent counsels.) As a result, the constitutionality of agency structures such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board now hangs by a thread; the Court could conceivably uphold the firing of the NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

Of course, even a presidential power to fire an individual agency head would not necessarily translate into authority to shut down entire government departments. However, in its 2024 opinion granting former presidents all-but-blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, the Court seemed to signal something far more ominous. The majority described the president’s authority to supervise the executive branch as a power that Congress may not touch—a conclusion that flies in the face of constitutional text. As explained by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who had headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during part of George W. Bush’s second administration: “The ruling about the exclusivity of presidential enforcement discretion, especially vis-à-vis Congress, is entirely novel … And it has potentially massive implications, depending on its scope.” What the opinion now apparently implies to Trump is that the president, constitutionally speaking, is the entirety of the executive branch, and he can configure it however he wants.

That said, Trump’s record of legal success in the Supreme Court is a mixed one. But he presumably thinks it a good bet either that the legal challenges to his scorched-earth tactics will be too slow to stop him or that, if they reach the Supreme Court, that body’s right-wing supermajority will continue to improvise on behalf of de facto executive supremacy. Eyeing the latter possibility, the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has affirmed the administration’s position that Congress lacks authority to force the spending of appropriated funds—a position the Supreme Court has never endorsed, and which is constitutionally unfounded. But a majority that would proceed as vigorously and creatively as it did to protect Trump from prosecution might be willing to improvise some more.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

A government agency’s structure and location are not just abstract; they matter to the work the agency does on the ground. When Congress extracted a Department of Education from what was formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it was to give federal support for education greater emphasis. When Congress moved the Coast Guard from Transportation to Homeland Security, it was presumably to prioritize the Coast Guard’s role in security rather than safety. The reason proposals to merge the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service have always failed is that the organizational DNA of the Interior Department, which houses BLM, favors conservation, whereas the reflexive policy mood of the Agriculture Department, which owns the Forest Service, is pro-development.

Perhaps the most worrying development is that the administration’s commitment to obeying court orders may not prove any more reliable than its dedication to following statutes. On Sunday, with a soupçon of Trumpian deniability in his precise wording, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Taken literally, Vance’s statement is accurate; what it fails to acknowledge is that the judicial power includes authority to state just how far the executive’s legitimate power extends. In rejecting President Richard Nixon’s claim of entitlement to withhold the Watergate tapes, the Court held in a unanimous opinion: “Many decisions of this Court … have unequivocally reaffirmed the [1803] holding of Marbury v. Madison that ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” Should Trump ignore any court order to halt his demolition of the executive branch, he will have dismantled not just an agency, but the Constitution itself.

Elon Musk has brazenly dismantled government agencies because he can feel assured of his insulation from the law. By the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, he may well receive a pardon. That’s what many recent pardons (Paul Manafort, the Biden clan, the January 6 insurrectionists) suggest: Presidential loyalists and family members are, in effect, immune from prosecution. On the most disturbing scale, they have become like diplomats who can park wherever they want.

The dawn of this age of impunity can be dated to any number of administrations. In his new book, The Pardon, Jeffrey Toobin makes a compelling case that a primary culprit is the 38th president, Gerald Ford. Toobin’s thesis is brashly revisionist; Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon has gone down in history as a great act of beneficence. According to conventional wisdom, by immunizing Nixon from prosecution, Ford short-circuited years of polarizing legal proceedings against the former president that would have torn the nation asunder. But Toobin argues that this overpraised act of catharsis established a precedent of lawlessness. The road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon.

At a glance, the amiable Ford, a college football star and World War II veteran, seems impossible to villainize. Compared with Trump or Nixon, he was the picture of humble decency. On the day he became president, he lumbered out of his suburban-Virginia house in a bathrobe to pick up the paper. In the White House, he toasted his own English muffins. He told dad jokes, played in celebrity golf tournaments, and had a reputation for basically wanting to do the ethical thing.

Having stumbled into the Nixon presidency, as the replacement for the venal vice president Spiro Agnew, he stumbled into the presidency after Watergate. As Chevy Chase portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, dooming him in popular memory, he was always stumbling. The shtick drew on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous aperçu, “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson also declared, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, except that he played football too long without his helmet.”)

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Ford made it his mission to learn as little about it as possible. He defended Nixon in the vaguest terms, and essentially ran in the other direction when Nixon asked him to examine evidence in the scandal. Ford stubbornly, and somewhat inexplicably, refused to prepare for the possibility that he might become president. He had initially accepted the vice presidency in the hope that it would be a capstone to his long political career. Indeed, that was the reason Nixon picked him: He knew that Ford had so little appetite for the big job, and so little political guile, that he was unlikely to conspire to oust him.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

In the days leading up to his ignominious departure, Nixon hatched a very Nixonian plot to exploit Ford’s goodwill and naivete. He wanted to pressure the future president into pardoning him without ever making a direct ask—a strategy he conceived with the White House counsel Fred Buzhardt, under the cover of attorney-client privilege.

On August 1, 1974, Nixon told Alexander Haig, his chief of staff, that he wanted him to begin preparing Ford to assume the job. “Tell him what’s coming,” he instructed. Nixon knew that Haig would check in with Buzhardt before sitting down with Ford. This was the twist in his scheme: Buzhardt had prepared a memo for Haig, listing six “endgame” scenarios for Ford to consider. In classic Washington style, he arrayed the possibilities so that every plan entailed a messy, prolonged handoff except for one: “Nixon could resign and then Ford could pardon him.” This was the elegant solution, but it had the whiff of corrupt horse-trading.

The pardon wasn’t something that Ford had ever considered, so he peppered Haig with questions about it. Although they didn’t agree to anything in the course of conversation, Ford’s interest had been ignited. He came to believe that a pardon genuinely served his own interests. When he finally assumed the job, he wanted to be more than a pleasant placeholder, and he could never be his own man without first disposing of the looming presence of Richard Nixon.

And so Ford talked himself into the pardon. He read a 1915 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the acceptance of a presidential pardon is tantamount to admitting guilt, and convinced himself that the public would accept that legal logic. He would tell aides that he felt sorry for poor old Nixon, who he worried was in physical decline.

Ford pushed the process forward without really debating the merits of a pardon with his staff. His poorly argued, nervously delivered speech announcing the decision to the nation was so rushed that aides didn’t have time to prepare a teleprompter. Ford barely gave congressional leaders a heads-up, and none of them could quite grasp his reasons for haste. Tip O’Neill, the majority leader in the House, asked Ford, “Then why the hell are you doing it?” He posed that question minutes before Ford went on national television.

In the most outrageous passage of the speech, Ford declared the fate of Richard Nixon “an American tragedy in which we all played a part.” The public, having been accused of complicity, took its revenge. In a single week, Ford’s popularity plummeted 21 percentage points. His party suffered catastrophic collapse in that year’s midterm election.

[Jeffrey Crouch: O]ur Founders didn’t intend for pardons to work like this

With the benefit of time, however, Washington revised its opinion of the decision. Bob Woodward, of all people, eventually concluded, “Ford was wise to act. What at first and for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead designed to protect the nation.” Ford slowly remerged with the reputation of a healer, a man of grace.

That revisionism is nostalgic gloss. Toobin makes a damning, nuanced case against Ford. Nixon had, at that point, committed the worst crimes in the history of the presidency, vividly and irrefutably captured on tape, and he escaped without any punishment. He received absolution without displaying remorse. “The pardon was just a free pass handed from one powerful man to another,” Toobin writes.

Despite his earnest desire to undo Nixon’s legacy, Ford’s pardon was itself an assertion of the imperial presidency. That’s because the pardon is an inherently Caesarean implement. In every other facet of the American system, carefully installed safeguards are designed to limit the authoritarian exercise of power. But there is no curb on the pardon other than the conscience of the executive issuing one. Presidents tend to tacitly admit that they are misusing this authority when they sheepishly hoard pardons for the final hours of their administration, waiting for the moment when there’s no political price to pay and hoping that their shabby behavior is drowned out by the inaugural hoopla.

By absolving his former patron, Ford helped create a new Washington ritual: the moment when presidents release their cronies, friends, and family from the bonds of justice. George H. W. Bush sprinkled his magic forgiveness dust over Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, and Elliot Abrams, among others, letting them off the hook for the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton bailed out the financier Marc Rich, whose alleged crimes included buying oil from Iran in defiance of an embargo. (Rich’s wife was a generous donor to Clinton.) And then Joe Biden had the temerity to pronounce himself a defender of the rule of law before he used his presidential powers to insulate his own family from potential prosecution.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues. As Toobin depressingly shows, even upstanding nice guys like Gerald Ford played their part in the collapse.

In Wisconsin, where late last year Donald Trump said at a campaign stop, “I’m an environmentalist … I want clean air and clean water—really clean water,” many people want that too. Like Americans across the country, many Wisconsinites have in recent years come to understand that they have been drinking water contaminated by highly toxic “forever chemicals,” compounds known as PFAS, for decades.  

This is a challenge for Trump the environmentalist, whose administration is widely expected to gut many environmental regulations and has already suspended work that would have put limits on PFAS. Yet Lee Zeldin, now the EPA’s administrator, said in his confirmation hearing last month that PFAS would be a “top priority” for the agency, and as a member of Congress, he sided with Democrats to back rules that would limit the chemicals in drinking water and make polluters pay for cleanup.

PFAS are the rare environmental issue that might evoke the bipartisan zeitgeist in which Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. By then, President Richard Nixon had already overseen the creation of the EPA but vetoed the landmark water bill, which he thought was too expensive. But 17 Republicans joined with Democrats to override his veto. “If we cannot swim in our lakes and rivers, if we cannot breathe the air God has given us, what other comforts can life offer us?” Senator Howard Baker, a Republican of Tennessee, said on the October morning of the vote.

In this century, some Republicans have argued that PFAS measures are costly and come with legal burdens for businesses; the chemical industry has lobbied heavily against regulation in the U.S. and abroad. But like the environmental disasters of the 1970s, this one is alarming enough that politicians who might otherwise oppose regulation want the government to do something about it.

In his first term, Trump’s EPA issued a PFAS Action Plan to designate the compounds as hazardous, set limits, and make cleanup recommendations. But the White House also opposed a PFAS bill in Congress after the chemical industry objected to it, and the closest the administration came to fulfilling its own plans was submitting a proposal to regulate PFAS in drinking water on its very last day. In the next four years, PFAS could test whether Trump’s version of the EPA—stripped of many career employees and staffed with industry lobbyists—can do the job millions of Americans may want it to.

PFAS, as I’ve written before, are the DDT of this era, though perhaps it is more accurate to say they’re worse: Where DDT was a single compound with a single use, PFAS is an umbrella term for thousands of compounds used in a plethora of quotidian ways. They are often the reason “performance” fabrics on couches can resist stains, a rice cooker wipes clean so easily, and boots are waterproof. They make paper plates grease-resistant and conditioner extra silky. In the places where they are manufactured or are used to manufacture other things, decades of effluent have contaminated groundwater and fed into municipal water supplies. No one has figured out how to destroy the compounds, whose fluorine-carbon bond is the single most stable in organic chemistry, at scale.

And so they persist, virtually forever, cycling through the water system and accumulating in our bodies. PFAS weren’t a known concern when the Clean Water Act was created, nor were they on anyone’s radar when the Safe Drinking Water Act came into force in 1974. By the ’70s, however, 3M knew that a PFAS compound it had invented, and sold to DuPont to make Teflon, was accumulating in employees’ blood.

Now nearly every American has PFAS in theirs. Over the past half century, these compounds have been used in dozens of industries to manufacture thousands of products globally, creating a noxious waste stream that has infiltrated countless communities. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS with kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, decreased fertility, and developmental problems in children, among other issues.

Last year, some two decades after the EPA began investigating these compounds, the Biden administration ordered water utilities to test for several kinds of PFAS in their water, and then begin all but eliminating those compounds, for the first time. The agency says that, much like for lead, there is no safe level of two of the most common of these compounds. It also released a report warning of the dangers of spreading sewage sludge—often highly contaminated by PFAS—on fields as fertilizer, a practice that continues in many states. And it was about to set the first discharge limits for PFAS in industrial wastewater—a rule the Trump administration has now put on pause. (An EPA spokesperson told me this action was part of “common transition procedures.”) This means municipal water systems will have to test for PFAS, but manufacturers will not need to measure or limit PFAS in the wastewater they release to those systems.

In the meantime, American towns and cities are trying to deal with PFAS’s threat piecemeal. In Campbell, Wisconsin, a town on a riverine island where people watch bald eagles hunt for fish, and raise their kids in the houses where they were raised, water samples from residents’ wells first came back positive for PFAS in 2020. Firefighting foam, made of PFAS, was used to put out plane-crash fires and to train firefighters at a nearby airport for decades. Residents now wonder if that explains the many unusual diagnoses among their neighbors, Lee Donahue, a Campbell town supervisor, told me: testicular cancer in a 20-year-old, or an ovarian cancer that usually strikes later in life in a woman in her 30s.

Nearly five years after those water tests, residents are still drinking bottled water while the town board works to reroute the drinking-water supply away from contaminated wells and toward a new source. That switch is partly funded by grants from President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has put on pause, and partly by EPA grants secured by Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and the town’s representative, Derrick Van Orden, a Republican. “This isn’t the most popular Republican position, I don’t really care,” Van Orden told the local ABC affiliate at the time the grant was announced. “When you turn on your faucet, it doesn’t ask if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

Campbell is a microcosm of a swing state: It split its vote almost exactly 50–50 between Trump and Kamala Harris, Donahue, who is also a town election worker, told me. On the other side of the state, Marinette, a city of 11,000, is an “extremely red community” that is dealing with its own PFAS problems, Cindy Boyle, a former town-board chairperson, told me. At 53, Boyle realizes she may have been drinking water tainted with PFAS her whole life: Tyco Fire Products tested its firefighting foam on land a half mile from the house where she raised her three sons, and its effluent was spread as sludge on fields within a mile of the house she grew up in, she said. The company was sued by the state, public water systems, and some residents in the area. Boyle was not one of them; still, the company is now providing a whole-house filter at her home, and distributing bottled water. (Tyco settled the suits with the water systems and residents without admitting wrongdoing; the state’s suit is on pause.)

But damage may have already been done. She had her thyroid removed in her 30s; her sister has thyroid disease now, and her mother had kidney cancer. Her husband has Parkinson’s disease; recent research shows that PFAS can accumulate in the brain and links them to neurological disorders. Boyle is registered independent from a conservative family, and she’d “take a Bush any day now,” she told me. But she says she can’t vote for anyone who isn’t interested in clamping down on PFAS.

In Wisconsin, Democrats and Republicans are currently locked in a battle at the statehouse over how to do that. Republicans have been holding up a proposed fund for testing and remediation out of fears it could force landowners to pay for cleanups of pollution they didn’t cause; on Tuesday Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, announced a state budget meant to resolve their concerns and release the funds—if the legislature passes it.

In the absence of federal regulation, states’ efforts to address PFAS have been patchwork and politically unpredictable. In West Virginia, which voted for Trump by a ratio of 7 to 3 and is arguably the birthplace of the PFAS crisis in the U.S., former Governor Jim Justice, a Republican, passed legislation to curb it. In North Carolina, where an estimated 2.5 million residents have PFAS in their tap water, Republican appointees to a state commission have stalled rule making that would set clear limits on PFAS’s presence there. Maine, which has a Democrat-controlled legislature and a widespread PFAS crisis, has passed some of the most stringent PFAS bills in the nation. New York was among the first states to declare certain PFAS hazardous substances, but it also plans to double the volume of sludge it spreads on fields by 2050.   

Tackling PFAS contamination meaningfully will require federal effort. During Trump’s previous term, he appointed a former chemical-industry executive to oversee toxic chemicals at the EPA, where she rewrote rules, making it harder to track their health impacts. Back then, Americans in some states were just beginning to understand the threats PFAS posed. Now, eight years later, the landscape is very different—and states are watching. In his time as a congressional representative from New York, Zeldin was in favor of getting rid of PFAS contamination, going so far as to urge the EPA to move faster to regulate it. At his confirmation hearing, he gave no details of how he would proceed on PFAS as EPA administrator, and when I asked the EPA for more specifics, a spokesperson pointed me to the action plan from the first term. Whatever steps Zeldin does take will show what making an issue a priority looks like for Trump’s EPA in this term, and define how far this administration’s environmentalism actually goes.

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Sometime on Tuesday evening, the USAID website was taken down and replaced with what looked like a beta page from the internet of the 1990s. There were no affecting photos of American government officials distributing food and medicine overseas. Instead, a box of text explained that nearly all USAID personnel would be placed on administrative leave, globally. With administrative assistance from Elon Musk, President Donald Trump seems to have wiped out the world’s largest donor agency in just a few days. It was a radical act, but maybe not as politically risky, in the domestic sense, as other plans in the grand project of dismantling the federal government. USAID has important beneficiaries, but most of them are not Americans and live overseas.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we discuss where Trump and Musk seem to be headed and the obstacles they are likely to encounter in the future. What happens when Trump starts to face challenges from courts? What happens when Musk goes after programs that Americans depend on, particularly those who voted for Trump? What new political alliances might emerge from the wreckage? We talk with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics. And we also talk with Shane Harris, who covers national security, about Trump’s campaign to purge the FBI of agents who worked on cases related to the insurrection at the Capitol.

“I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends,” Harris says. “I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Today is the deadline for some two million federal employees to decide if they want to type resign in response to the now infamous “Fork in the Road” email. The email, of course, is one in a list of things that Elon Musk, empowered by President Trump, has been doing in order to “disrupt” the federal government.

Donald Trump: We’re trying to shrink government. And he can probably shrink it as well as anybody else, if not better.

Rosin: For example: gain access to the U.S. Treasury’s payment system—

News anchor: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granting Elon Musk’s DOGE team access to the federal government’s payment system, which handles trillions of dollars in payments.

Rosin: —dismantle USAID, of which Trump is not a fan—

Trump: And we’re getting them out. USAID—run by radical lunatics.

Rosin: —and neither is Musk.

Elon Musk: If you’ve got an apple, and it’s got a worm in it, maybe you can take the worm out. But if you’ve got actually just a ball of worms, it’s hopeless. And USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing.

Rosin: All of these efforts are unusual, maybe even unprecedented, norm-breaking—even for Trump. But are they unconstitutional? And could they fundamentally change the character of the country?

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

[Music]

News anchor: At the FBI, some agents have started to pack up their desks as fears of mass firings grow.

Rosin: In the second half of the show, we’re going to focus on a special case inside the government, which presents a different set of potentially history-changing problems—the FBI—with staff writer Shane Harris.

But first, we are going to discuss what’s at stake, more broadly in this overhaul, with staff writer Jonathan Chait, who covers politics for The Atlantic.

[Music]

Rosin: Jon, welcome to the show.

Jonathan Chait: Thank you, Hanna. I’m delighted to be here.

Rosin: So, Jon, of all the unorthodox things that Trump has authorized Elon Musk to do with the federal government, which one strikes you as pushing constitutional limits the most?

Chait: Attempting to eliminate or cut spending for agencies that have been authorized by Congress. This is just a totally revolutionary step in terms of the structure of our government. And it’s kind of shocking, to me, how far he’s been able to go, and how much permission he’s received from the Republican Party.

Rosin: And is there another time in history when a president tested this limit between what Congress authorizes and what the president can do with that? And how has it worked out in the past?

Chait: That’s a great question. You had a struggle with Andrew Jackson over the Bank of the United States. That was a real constitutional struggle between him and his enemies as to how much power the president had vis-à-vis Congress and whether the president had just total authority to do what he wished. And Andrew Jackson was sort of known for pushing the boundaries of the office to or past their limits, and saying if the Supreme Court ruled against him, he would just do what he wanted, anyway. He did the same thing with his attempts to ethnically cleanse Native Americans to take their land. He just fundamentally didn’t care if he had authority from Congress.

That’s the kind of struggle we’re, I think, heading into right now. And Richard Nixon tried a smaller version, I think, of what Trump is doing now. He basically said, Congress has authorized certain kinds of spending, and I’m just going to impound it. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and Congress passed the Impoundment [Control] Act that formalized the fact that Congress has this authority, and the president doesn’t, and if Congress authorizes spending, with very limited exceptions, the president has to carry it out. And if the president objects to certain forms of spending that Congress enacted, he has to persuade Congress to pass a law to change it.

Rosin: Got it. Okay. So that’s the line we’re working with. So it’s the Impoundment Act. It’s been defined by the Supreme Court. Can we talk about examples of, say, how far an administration can go in resisting a previous administration’s policies, but not pushing against this constitutional line? What would be something we’ve seen before? And what would prompt what people would refer to as, say, a legal or constitutional crisis?

Chait: Just in the big picture, the executive branch has been asserting more and more authority, over decades, as Congress has gotten more and more dysfunctional. The use of the filibuster has risen. Congress has gotten less and less able to fulfill its constitutional obligation to really direct national policy the way the Constitution imagined it. And so the executive branch has really kind of filled in this gap in a lot of ways. So you’ve seen presidents of both parties creatively exerting their authority.

You had Trump doing this with immigration, where he, you could say, couldn’t or just barely even tried to get Congress to fund the wall that he wanted. So he just basically redirected funding from the Pentagon to the border by calling it an emergency. And Trump is doing the same thing with tariffs.

Now, Congress basically ceded the president emergency authority to declare tariffs for various national-security emergencies, thinking that this would just be used in the case of something like a war or an international conflict, but it let the president decide what an emergency is. And so Trump can just say, well, an emergency is whatever he wants, and that’s on Congress.

And Biden has kind of pushed the limit in a lot of ways, I think most controversially with student loan forgiveness, where the executive branch has control over student loans, and so Biden just kind of forgave those loans on a kind of sweeping basis. Now, he was challenged legally. But when you’re in power, your party has a pretty strong incentive to interpret executive power in the most sweeping way.

So there’s a way in which both parties have really been engaged in this, but I really think what Trump and Musk are doing now has totally breached the walls of normal and is just turning the Constitution into a farce.

Rosin: Okay. So the reason that’s true is mostly because of appropriations? Because from what you’ve said, presidents are pushing this line constantly. So what are they doing that doesn’t just break norms or traditions, but actually is pushing into constitutional crisis?

Chait: Article I of the Constitution, which is really just, like, the guts of the Constitution, says that Congress has authority over spending.

So Congress establishes an agency. Congress sets its spending levels. And throughout our history, with the exception we’ve described for Nixon, which was slapped down, the presidents have to follow that because that’s the law, right? Now, the president has a role in that. The president can veto some of these laws. If Congress proposes spending that the president doesn’t want, the president can veto it, and then Congress can override it, or Congress can make a deal with him. But whatever emerges from that is the law, and the president has to follow the law.

Rosin: Okay. And does the Trump team have any creative arguments for how to get around this Impoundment Act?

Chait: So far, Elon Musk is just operating in this totally chaotic legal gray zone. So his first target has been the United States Agency for International Development. And one thing they’ve made this argument is that, Well, that was just established by an executive order by the president, John F. Kennedy, 1961, so it can be ended by an executive order. The problem is: After it was established by executive rule, it was later established by Congress. Congress voted to make the United States Agency for International Development an agency.

So after Congress established the United States Agency for International Development, it had the force of law. And so saying, We’re going to eliminate this agency, is just a violation of the law. It’s pretty simple.

Rosin: Okay. I can see the argument. So can we play out both scenarios? The first scenario is: The courts push back on Trump. You know, they enforce the Impoundment Act. They say, You cannot do this. You can’t end USAID. Elon Musk has to stop roaming around the federal government and making these decisions that violate this constitutional balance of power. What happens then? Does it call Trump’s bluff?

Chait: It might, but I wouldn’t count on it, for a couple reasons. Number one: Musk is moving much faster than the legal system can move. And it’s a lot easier to destroy something than it is to build something. So once you’ve basically told everyone they’re fired, and they can’t come to work, they can sit and wait for the courts to countermand that while they’re losing their income and their mortgage is going under, or they could just go find another job somewhere.

Rosin: I see. So it’s just, like, facts on the ground change, so that even if the legal reality doesn’t budge, you’ve already disintegrated the actual infrastructure.

Chait: You lose the institutional culture. You lose the accumulated expertise. And by the time the courts have stepped in, rebuilding it is difficult to do, even if the president wanted to. And obviously, they’re not going to want to anyway. Second of all, it’s not totally clear that they’re going to follow the law, that the law has any power over them.

I mean, remember: Donald Trump established on the first day of his administration that he believes that people who break the law on his behalf can get away with it when he pardoned the entire—or commuted the sentences of the entire—insurrectionists, right?

Rosin: Yeah.

Chait: So Elon Musk knows full well that if he violates the law, Trump is going to have his back. So I think that’s also shaping the behavior of everyone involved in this episode.

Rosin: Right. So it sounds like you pretty strongly believe there is no brake to this. b-r-a-k-e. There is no stop to this. I was thinking that maybe the courts or something to, you know, put some hope in to stop this. But it sounds like no.

Chait: Well, in the long run, the courts can have an effect by saying, You don’t have the authority to eliminate this agency. It still exists, meaning that when the Democrats win back the presidency, if that ever happens, it’ll still be there, and then they can actually rebuild it.

Rosin: So in other words, in that scenario, there’s temporary dismantling, but the balance of powers remains in place, is affirmed by the courts, and things get slowly rebuilt.

Chait: Right. Although, you know, you’ve lost all your talent, you’ve lost your institutional memory, and then you’re probably rebuilding this agency from scratch.

And keep in mind, USAID is just the test case. I think they’re just picking on the most politically vulnerable agency. It deals with foreign aid, right? So most of the people affected by this right now are mostly living in other countries, who won’t get, you know, drinking water and food. And people are going to starve and die of diseases, but they’re not going to be Americans. They can’t vote, so they’re politically weak and vulnerable.

So that’s the target that they’ve picked to establish this principle that the presidency can pick and choose what spending is real and what isn’t. So then they’re going to start to go on to do domestic targets. But then, I think, once they’ve started attacking domestic targets, then they’re going to start dealing with political blowback in a way they’re not facing when they’re going after foreign aid.

Rosin: I see. So that’s a different political—so if that starts to happen, if we enter a period where you have people who have stake in this in the U.S., can you see any interesting alliances that could come out of that moment?

Chait: It’s really hard to see where they’re going, because Elon Musk is not proceeding from an accurate map of reality.

So to just explain what I mean by that, he said that he wants to cut—first he said—$2 trillion from the fiscal-year budget, from one year. Then he revised it down to $1 trillion. So right away, you know, when you’re just picking these random round numbers, you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. But he said, like, basically, there’s a trillion dollars in just, you know, waste and improper payments—and there just isn’t. There’s nothing close to that by even the most expansive possible definition. So Musk thinks he’s going to just go through the budget and find waste, and just kill it and add up to a trillion dollars. And he’s obviously not.

So the question is: What happens when his fantasy starts to run into reality? Does he start to just attack social-welfare programs and end payments of food stamps and Medicaid reimbursements and programs like that to people? Does he realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about and he’s in way over his head? We don’t know how it’s going to go, but I think that is the question you’ve got to answer before you start to figure out what the politics look like.

Rosin: Right. And there’s also military budgets. Like, if you think where the giant spending is, you’re running up against budgets that will face a huge amount of resistance if you slash them in the way that he’s slashed other things.

Chait: Right. Yeah. If they start going after the Pentagon, I think you, obviously, cut pretty deeply into the Republican coalition pretty fast. I even think they’re probably starting to accumulate small amounts of domestic political targets with USAID, right? They cut off funding to a Lutheran charity, but, you know, those are midwestern religious conservatives who are operating those programs who are being targeted. Now, most of the money is going overseas, but you’re still hurting people in the United States of America. And I think that pain is going to start to spread more widely if they keep going.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so you’re describing a realistic scenario in which this whole operation does encounter resistance. There are many policy researchers—on the left, even—who have argued that the government does, in fact, need an overhaul and, more specifically, isn’t equipped for a digital age. Is there a chance that in all of this, you know, Elon Musk could usher in a more efficient, tech-friendly kind of government?

Chait: Yeah, well, that was the initial hope that some people who specialize in government reform were hoping for. Jennifer Pahlka is an expert in what’s called “state capacity,” which is just the ability of government to function and to bridge the gap between its ambitions and its actual ability to meet those ambitions.

And part of that is fixing the way government hires and fires people.

But the problem is: Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be interested in that in any way whatsoever. He’s just holed up with a bunch of engineers who don’t seem to have any expertise in government or state capacity whatsoever. And they’re just finding programs that people within this kind of right-wing bubble in which he resides think sound radical and just, you know, saying, Delete it! Delete it! and getting cheers on social media for it.

It’s just so completely haphazard. There doesn’t seem to be any interest in actually making the government, you know, operate better.

Rosin: Yeah. And I suppose Twitter did not become a better, more profitable, you know, smoother-functioning company after Elon Musk took it over. It just became a kind of tool of the culture war—like, an effective tool of the culture war.

Chait: Right. It became smaller, less profitable—jankier, but more conservative.

Rosin: Right, okay. All right. One final thing. So project far into the future. Let’s say that your blowback scenario is real. What political alliances can you see reforming? Like, if you had to predict a political realignment some years down the road that includes a reaction to everything that’s going on now, what does it look like?

Chait: Well, the Trump coalition has really been built on winning multiracial, working-class voters back from the Democrats—and those voters are disproportionately to the right on social policy—and they’ve exploited some of those progressive stances on social policy that the Democratic Party has adopted over the last decade, but they’re still relatively to the left on economics. Maybe they don’t believe in government, in the abstract, but in the specific, they really rely on programs, like nutritional aid and Medicaid, Obamacare.

And every time the Republicans have gone after those programs, their coalition has splintered. That was really a major element in killing George W. Bush during his second term. He decided to privatize social security, and that was a major cause of the decline of his popularity that made him politically toxic, along with the Iraq War and Katrina, social security privatization.

You know, you could see a version of that happening with Trump, but I wouldn’t take for granted that it’ll play out that way because we live in a different world in a lot of ways.

[Music]

Rosin: Thanks again to Jonathan Chait.

After the break: Donald Trump also has his eyes set on the FBI. We hear from The Atlantic’s Shane Harris about what that might mean.

[Break]

Rosin: Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane Harris: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Rosin: Sure. So the president asked the FBI to turn over the names of every agent who worked on the Capitol riots. What do you read into that request?

Harris: Well, I think you don’t even have to read that closely between the lines. You can just read the lines as they were sent in the order that we now have seen publicly, that went from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, of course, who had been one of Donald Trump’s lawyers as a private citizen, telling the acting director for the FBI, Look—we want the names of these people because they believe in the words that he has put, that they can no longer have trust that these FBI employees will implement the president’s agenda faithfully.

So what they are saying is that these are individuals who they don’t think are on board with Trump administration policies. And then of course, you know, we can do a little bit of inference, which is, you know, why would he go after the people who investigated January 6 and his role in it? Which was, by the way, the biggest FBI investigation in the country’s history. You know, these are the agents who interviewed and ultimately gave evidence that created the charges for the Capitol rioters—who were sent to prison, who Trump then later pardoned and who are now free—who investigated his own activity around January 6 and efforts to impede the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration.

So these are the FBI agents who did that case. And you know, what Trump is making very clear here is that, you know, he wants to identify them. He doesn’t trust them. He doesn’t trust the leadership that oversees them, and either wants them removed or moved, or we’ll see what the disciplinary action is. But some of them, he’s actually said he wants them fired immediately. He’s made pretty clear how he feels about these people and why he’s going after them, I think.

Rosin: Now, that must have landed in a very particular way at the FBI. You know the agency better than I do. As far as I understand it, I mean, you are assigned a case; you work on that case. So how have leaders in the agency responded to that request?

Harris: I think it’s been really interesting. I mean, there’s been this mixture from people I’ve talked to of: On one level, people are not surprised that Donald Trump went after FBI personnel, because it was expected that he would go after senior-leadership-level type people. I mean, he had essentially pushed out the FBI director, Christopher Wray, who—remember—became the FBI director when Donald Trump fired the previous FBI director, James Comey, in his first term.

But people were genuinely stunned by the scope of this demand to know the names of all of these agents who worked J6—and then there’s one other related case—because it’s, you know, potentially 4,000 to maybe even 6,000 personnel if you’re taking in FBI agents, analysts, people who play a support role.

But then something really fascinating has happened: There has been this—I hesitate to say the word defiant—but there are senior leaders at the FBI, including the person who is serving as the acting director right now, who essentially are saying, No, you cannot just fire agents for this reason, for no real cause. These people have protections under civil-service rules. They have due-process rights. And what’s more, some of the advocates for these folks are saying, Look—you can just read the plain language of the order that I just read to you and see that this is a retaliatory response, that what the president is doing is going after people because he doesn’t like their opinions or what they did.

As you pointed out, these thousands of agents didn’t pick to be on the case. I mean, it’s not like they raised their hand and said, Yes, please. I would like to investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. They were assigned these cases. So the leadership has actually really kind of dug in here, some of them, and essentially is saying, There’s a process for this. This isn’t fair.

Now, we’ll see how long they can resist the White House on this, but we’re seeing some real institutional pushback from the FBI, which personally, I think, is encouraging.

Rosin: I want to get more into the pushback, but I’m curious what we know about this group of agents. There’s a few thousand. Because, yes, I followed the January 6 cases. I know that it was the biggest investigation in history, but who are they? Like, if you think about losing these 4,000, is why I’m asking, what’s their expertise, and what do they generally do?

Harris: If we take that group of the J6 investigators, the agents themselves, these could be people who were pulled in from all over the country. So this could include agents that were investigating national-security-related matters, counterterrorism matters, transnational crime, narcotics. The universe of these agents, as you know, was so big because the case was so big and demanding.

Trump, though, has zeroed in, more particularly, on some individuals, including some very senior-level officials that have the title of executive assistant director, and he actually named some of these in this order. And those people were involved in things like, for instance, the Mar-a-Lago investigation, when Donald Trump took classified documents from the White House and stored them at his estate in Florida—offenses for which he was later charged under the Espionage Act.

Some of these people—one of them was the special agent in charge of the Miami Field Office, which participated in the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Others had supervisory and leadership positions on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. It was a counterintelligence squad at the Washington Field Office in D.C. that handled the Mar-a-Lago case. So, you know, he understands that there are people who, individually, separate from J6, worked on the Mar-a-Lago case, as well, and those people are being singled out too.

Rosin: Right. I mean, there are two things here. One is, we’ve talked about this in terms of other agencies, like USAID, which is: What vast institutional knowledge would you lose? So these people worked on individual cases, but also, they have a lot of expertise in counterterrorism. They just must have a large, you know, body of knowledge and experience that you could lose.

Harris: Absolutely. So let’s just take, for instance, the squad at the Washington Field Office that did the Mar-a-Lago investigation. They work in the counterintelligence division of the FBI. So when those folks are not investigating, you know, Donald Trump’s removal of classified documents, they’re looking at things like spies operating inside the United States trying to maybe steal government secrets or recruit agents in the United States. They’re looking at people who might be mishandling classified information. They look at people who might be leaking to journalists as well.

These are folks who work on highly specialized counterintelligence cases. This isn’t just something that you, you know, kind of step into, and on day one, you know how to do it. These are different kinds of tradecraft. They’re very sensitive. These people all will have high-level security clearances. They will have been vetted for these jobs. So folks who are in positions like that, when you eliminate them, you know, it’s not entirely clear to me that there is just then, like, a backup bench of people who can come in to do these really important national-security cases.

And the same would go for anyone who’s working actively on counterterrorism, you know. I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about his concern that there are, you know, terrorists making their way inside the United States, taking advantage of, you know, weak border security or other ways of getting into the U.S. Well, it’s FBI agents who do counterterrorism cases that investigate things like that.

So if you’re suddenly moving people with this level of expertise off their jobs, or you are creating a real disruption and distraction while they’re trying to do their jobs, I think that arguably weakens national security, it creates vulnerabilities, and it distracts the FBI from doing its job, which is to go out and not just investigate crimes but to try and stop violent crimes and bad things from happening to Americans and to the U.S. government.

Rosin: Right. So you can see the future crisis. Like, you can project a future crisis where we are vulnerable to terrorism or something like that because we’ve lost a huge amount of this expertise.

Harris: I think that’s right. Yes. It doesn’t seem to me like he is thinking through the consequences of hobbling the FBI at this moment. What he is interested in is retribution. He’s interested in payback. And he is putting, you know, not only the country, but he’s putting his administration at grave political risk by doing that.

Rosin: Okay, Shane. Here’s something else that I was wondering about. Since when did the FBI come under so much suspicion from the right? I’ve always thought of the FBI as an agency conservatives can get behind, and Trump’s attacks feel like they upend all that. It’s confusing.

Harris: Oh definitely. And this has long been one of the more baffling aspects of Donald Trump’s critique of the FBI, as he’s painting them as this kind of leftist deep state.

I mean, the FBI—I’m speaking in general terms, of course, I mean—it is a generally conservative institution, both because I think that the people who work in it are often politically conservative or just sort of dispositionally conservative. It’s a law-enforcement agency. I mean, it does everything by the book. There are jokes in the FBI about how it takes, you know, five forms that you have to fill out before you can make a move on anything. It is a very hidebound, bureaucratic, small-C conservative organization. I mean, these are cops.

Rosin: Right. Right.

Harris: Okay? It’s a bunch of cops, right? This is like, if you want to think in generalities, like, you know, USAID is like, Oh, yeah, it’s people who want to get to charities, and they worked in the Peace Corps, and they’re all about humanitarian causes. And that, too, is kind of a broad brush.

But, you know, when I talk to people who have worked in the bureau, if you knew these people, these are not people who you would associate with progressive causes. That doesn’t mean that they are sort of reactionary right-wingers. I don’t want to make that impression either. They’re very much following the rule of law. It’s a conservative institution. It is very hidebound and steeped in tradition and in regulation.

And, you know, Trump just has this image of it as this out-of-control left organization. And he has persuaded large numbers of his followers and Americans that this is true. And I have to tell you, in the 20-plus years that I’ve covered national security, one of the most fascinating and bewildering trends that I have seen is this change in political positioning, where now, people who tend to be on the left, sort of—I don’t want to say revere the FBI and the intelligence agencies but—hold them up as models of institutions of government that we need to have faith and trust in, and they’re there to try and protect people. When it was a generation ago, people on the left who were deeply skeptical of the CIA and the FBI because these agencies were involved in flagrant abuses of civil rights and of the law in the 1950s and ’60s.

And now it’s people on the right who, particularly after 9/11, used to be so reflexively defensive of the CIA and the FBI and counterterrorism and Homeland Security, who now have sort of swapped political positions with the critique on the left that see these institutions as, you know, run through with dangerous, rogue bureaucrats who want to prosecute their political enemies. I mean, it’s just like the people have switched bodies.

Rosin: Let me ask you a broader question about this. As someone who’s been tracking Trump’s attempts to rewrite the history of January 6 for a while, I could say I was a little surprised by the blanket pardon of insurrectionists, maybe a little more surprised by this effort to go after the agents who investigated them. Because—and tell me if this is an exaggeration—to me, that could send a message to supporters: If you commit violence on my behalf, not only will you not get punished, but anyone who tries to go after you will be in trouble. Which, if I continue that logic, seems like, potentially, a blank check to commit violence on the president’s behalf. Is that paranoid?

Harris: No. It’s not. It’s not. That is, I think, one of the clear risks that we face with the president behaving in the way that he has. And I would take it one step further, which is to say: The message is that if you are an FBI agent, or maybe more to the point, an FBI leader, someone in a management position, there are certain things that you should just not look into and investigate.

And not to say, like, now that the president enjoys, you know, presumptive immunity for all official acts. I mean, who knows what the FBI is even going to investigate when it comes to Donald Trump. But how good would you feel being assigned a case to look into Elon Musk or, you know, Trump campaign donors who may have engaged in illegal activity or influence peddling, the whole universe of people connected to Trump?

What he is saying by pardoning these J6 rioters is that If you are on my side, I will come protect you. And I think that will send a clear message to FBI personnel that there are whole categories of people and therefore potential criminal activity that they should not touch, because it gets into the president, his influence, his circle of friends. I think that is just a potentially ruinous development for the rule of law in the United States.

The FBI is there to investigate crimes objectively, regardless of who may have committed them. And what the president is doing now is essentially saying there’s a whole category of people who, if not outright exempt, are people that are going to fall under his protection, and for the people who might dare to investigate them, there will be consequences.

Rosin: Well, Shane, thank you, but no thank you, for laying that out in such a clear and chilling way. I appreciate it.

Harris: My pleasure, Hanna. Thanks for having me.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.