Strategery: Did the Trump Team Think This Through?

Trump’s blitzkrieg assault on our federal government has revealed big vulnerabilities

Elon Musk attends the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Stephen Miller speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC on July 11, 2021 in Dallas, Texas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images

When I was younger—well, a lot younger—I was an avid chess player. At age four, I’d sit down every day with my father over lunch to play, and I was a proud second chair on my junior high school chess team. (Yes, I was that kid.)

Even as a young player, I understood the importance of having a clear strategy. And I learned to recognize, within moments of beginning a game, whether an opponent was a true chess player with an actual plan in mind.

On the surface, the full-on assault upon our federal civil service, the rule of law, and our constitutional democracy looks like the work of a strategist. It feels well-planned and swiftly executed, with the Trump administration coming out swinging and launching an effective attack at multiple levels.

Some of it felt straight out of a terrifying playbook, as orders went out firing a score of inspectors general and sidelining career professionals at Justice and the FBI. This proved diabolically smart. It limited effective pushback from within the Department as the White House transformed it from a source of legal protection into a dangerous politicized weapon.

Some of the initial assault felt outright sneaky, including surprise “DOGE” takeovers (on a Friday night, no less) of key computer systems at critical departments and agencies, including Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management. No one was expecting that, and lawyers for the unions and the blue state attorneys general had to scramble to respond.

And yet, now that the administration has executed its opening gambit, to this chess player’s eye the assault seems haphazard and even at odds with itself. The White House pushed out quickly and aggressively, but without sufficient thought as to what would happen next. Defenders, initially huddled against the onslaught, prepared counterattacks and launched them, predictably, in the form of dozens of lawsuits, sometimes referred to as “lawfare.” Despite having initiated this war, however, within days the White House appeared oddly unprepared to defend its legal positions.

But how could that be? Aren’t the folks at Project 2025 masterminding this? Isn’t Elon Musk an evil genius whose techno-coup will effectively end the Republic? And aren’t all the MAGA folks whooping and cheering as Trump “owns the libs” so hard?

Within those questions lies a key truth: This isn’t some grand strategy hatched in the mind of the “stable genius” in the White House. Rather, it’s a mad rush by three competing factions within the administration. These factions sometimes have overlapping goals, but often advance competing ones. Two of them—the MAGA right and the tech broligarchy—are already feuding as their interests diverge. Think cheap immigrant H-1B labor versus racist white nationalism.

Once we understand what each of these factions is after and how it tends to operate, it’s easier to understand the nature of the administration’s assaults on the system and where those vulnerabilities now lie exposed. So let’s walk through the factions, discuss what they’re trying to achieve, and how their ambitions may actually create new obstacles for the others.

Project 2025 and the unitary executive

The Project 2025 authors, including Russell Vought, now Director of the Office of Management and Budget, may be Christian Nationalist extremists, but they are also policy guys. Their blueprint exceeds 900 pages, after all. While it covers a great deal of ground, much of it straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, a core underlying tenet is the theory of the “unitary executive.”

The “unitary executive” theory is something we’ve written about before in The Big Picture. Here’s what we reported Project 2025 watchers were warning the public about last July:

As the BBC noted, Project 2025 is advancing a once fringe idea called the “unitary executive theory.” That essentially means placing the entire federal government, including once independent agencies like the Department of Justice, under direct presidential control.

That opens the door to drastic steps. The Lincoln Project provided some key talking points about what Project 2025 promises to do to our government in a second Trump administration:

• Pack federal agencies and courts with MAGA extremists who will do whatever Trump wishes

• Weaponize the Justice Department against Trump’s political opponents

• Politicize the military by purging all of Trump’s dissenters

• Eliminate the Department of Education

If those last four bullet points sound familiar, it is precisely what the Trump administration is doing right now.

As Vought wrote in the Project 2025 blueprint, describing his view of the authority of the presidency,

That enormous power is not vested in departments or agencies, in staff or administrative bodies, in nongovernmental organizations or other equities and interests close to the government. The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch.

But if the “unitary executive” is one of the key, ultimate goals of Project 2025, you’d think its proponents would be methodical about achieving it. According to their own playbook, they should have first sought to consolidate power within the executive branch. They shouldn’t open massive new fronts against the other branches of government that could undermine this goal. An open war with the legislative branch, for example, would likely trigger judicial review, weakening or hamstringing the White House right out the gate and drawing attention to its plans.

Had the Trump White House quietly taken control of critical agencies, for example by “offering” retirement for career civil servants and replacing them with MAGA loyalists, this would have probably succeeded in transforming the federal bureaucracy over the course of a year, and few would be the wiser.

Instead, the White House approved a blitzkrieg approach, issuing a government-wide freeze on all federal assistance and grants, including on all foreign aid, and authorizing full-out assaults on departments and agencies by Elon Musk and DOGE.

This is the very opposite of a strategic, deliberate approach to amassing power for the executive branch. Now they are buried in lawsuits and, sure enough, the judiciary has already stepped in and is busily trying to put a stop to it.

So why did the White House do that?

MAGA and flooding the zone

Steve Bannon has infamously advocated for a “flood the zone” approach as a way to destabilize American democracy. If you come out blazing, Bannon advised, the media won’t be able to cover all of it, but it will try.

In so doing, the media will wind up normalizing all the terrible things the administration is up to. Each new horror will just be one more awful headline in a sea of awful headlines.

Similarly, the thinking goes, defenders of the rule of law will feel overwhelmed, not knowing where or how to respond. And the American people will be so exhausted and bewildered after so much chaos that they will simply give up out of frustration.

It’s a brutal and potentially effective plan. Yet there’s a critical flaw in its reasoning. When you open those floodgates, everything in the zone will be inundated. This includes your own presumed allies in the White House, who are fighting to consolidate executive power while avoiding a legal fight that might hobble their efforts.

There’s a clear example of this already. The flood of horribles unleashed by the White House included a horrifying executive order sure to produce copious liberal tears: ending birthright citizenship. MAGA white nationalist Stephen Miller pressed hard for an executive order eliminating this right. It’s an idea adored by the MAGA base: It gives them a powerful new sense of racial superiority as well as grounds to bully and second-guess the legitimacy of anyone who looks like an immigrant.

But this “own the libs” move is a loser of an argument in court. The Fourteenth Amendment literally guarantees birthright citizenship, and there’s a Supreme Court case from 150 years ago that remains directly on point.

Issuing that order anyway as part of “flooding the zone” drew the federal judiciary into the fray early. It forced Justice Department lawyers to go into court only to be chastised by judges, including one 84-year-old Reagan appointee in Washington state who wondered openly where the lawyers were when the birthright citizenship termination order was drafted.

“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” Judge John Coughenour remarked just three days into the second Trump presidency. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” He scolded the lawyer standing in front of him, too. “I am having trouble understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this order is constitutional.”

Since then, two other judges have also issued blocks on the same executive order, which is now preliminarily enjoined nationwide.

Judges read the news. They know about the kinds of unconstitutional orders the Trump White House is issuing as though they were mere traffic tickets and not alarming attempts to shred basic civil rights. Credibility still matters in the courtroom, and the new administration has squandered valuable capital out the gate, all to please the MAGA racist wing of the party.

The floodwaters championed by Bannon will also wipe out many of the MAGA villagers’ homes. These folks may have initially cheered when the White House took an ax to the floodgates. But many don’t yet realize, for example, that a cut of $800 billion to Medicaid, which the GOP gleefully announced yesterday as part of its budget plan and handout to the wealthy, will devastate rural red state communities.

As Popular Info reported yesterday, hundreds of poor rural utility customers in Alabama saw their electrical bills rise by $100 because the federal government had frozen grant funds that would normally subsidize them. That is but one example out of hundreds or even thousands that will begin to play out nationwide.

When MAGA voters do come around to the realization that the White House and the GOP’s plans involve taking away their social safety net, their enthusiastic support may begin to ebb. And in an evenly divided country, all it takes is a few percent to turn away for the whole MAGA project to fail.

Moving fast and breaking things

Trump decided to grant Elon Musk free rein to slash and burn his way through the federal bureaucracy. There were two somewhat overlapping goals in mind for this part of the assault: Choke off the flow of money and fire as many career civil servants as you can.

Musk talks a big game of finding and eliminating fraud to justify his draconian moves. But it’s really all a charade. For all his access to government systems, he hasn’t produced any evidence of actual fraud. When asked specifically about that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt merely waved screenshots of government contracts around and said they didn’t align with Trump’s priorities and agenda. But that doesn’t mean there was fraud.

Musk’s fraud claims are a smokescreen for what he’s really after. As a big government contractor, he benefits if he can gut the very agencies that oversee and regulate his numerous projects, including Tesla, SpaceX, and Neurolink. These conflicts of interest are not theoretical; Musk is now actively shutting down government regulators who were investigating his businesses. And he’s in a big hurry to do so.

Musk indeed moved quite fast with his team of young coders, who ensconced themselves within key departments and agencies and plugged into critical systems, such as federal payments and Human Resources. And not long after, they began breaking things: rewriting code and gaining access to things they had no right to read or overwrite; sending out mass emails to federal employees illegally urging them to resign; and canceling payments on billions in already authorized and contracted programs.

What these DOGE teams didn’t have, apparently, was any competent legal counsel. Maybe they just didn’t care. Their violations of basic protections under the Privacy Act, legal rights for civil servants, the Internal Revenue Code, and the Administrative Procedure Act, just to name a few, left a clear opening for federal workers, nonprofits and blue state attorneys general to strike back in court.

There are now over 50 lawsuits addressing various illegal actions by the Trump administration, most of them involving DOGE. These glaring legal violations, along with the clear harm DOGE teams were causing, opened the door for federal judges to step in on an emergency basis and issue temporary restraining orders.

Further, the failure to vet key members of the DOGE team led to embarrassing headlines and even the resignation of a key coder embedded at Treasury. DOGE itself is also under intense scrutiny, having followed none of the required organizational and transparency laws required of actual government agencies or departments.

And now there’s another problem of the White House’s own making. By turning on its own Justice Department, the White House has created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. As Ellen Blain of The Contrarian observed, this could have a negative impact on morale and effectiveness:

While DOJ’s criminal prosecutions get a lot of attention, sometimes we forget that DOJ also represents the United States, its agencies, and its employees in lawsuits when they are sued. So DOJ lawyers have dutifully fanned out across the country attempting to defend the more than 40 lawsuits that have been filed against the administration, all the while seeing friends, colleagues, and supervisors flee or get summarily fired.

It’s also fast becoming clear that even the Justice Department does not have a handle on what DOGE members actually have done and the kind of access they have to critical systems. For example, the Department has now had to come back before judges to correct misinformation it provided about the role of DOGE coders at Treasury.

As The Washington Post reported yesterday,

The Treasury Department had previously stated that [Marko] Elez was only granted “read-only” access to the payment system, although reporting by Wired and the financial newsletter Notes on the Crises had questioned that assertion.

The Justice Department had to appear specially to correct the record before the judge in a nine-page affidavit by a deputy commissioner at the Bureau of Fiscal Service. That affidavit stated that the

DOGE staffer Marko Elez was “mistakenly” given “read/write” permissions over part of the Treasury Department payment system responsible for disbursing trillions of dollars every year. Those permissions were “promptly corrected,” and a subsequent review found Elez did not modify the existing Treasury database when he had access.

Given that the first hearing was about whether the presence of DOGE members could cause irreparable harm to the system, this “mistake” by the Justice Department was a material one. And it should go without saying, but judges don’t much like it when parties misrepresent the truth when appearing before them.

Resorting to cat and mouse games

As court losses stack up, the administration has begun to play games to try and evade the sweep of the restraining orders and injunctions. While under specific court orders not to freeze federal assistance and grants, the administration appears to have ignored the mandate in most cases, with recipients from across the nation reporting that the money Congress allocated to them has still not been paid out.

That led Judge John McConnell, who is the Chief Judge of the District of Rhode Island, to raise the specter of criminal contempt, emphasizing in a second order that he really means it:

[It is a] basic proposition that all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly . * * * Persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.

In other words, Judge McConnell doesn’t really care what the government thinks of the merits of the case. He wants the money flowing as it was before the assault so that people aren’t harmed while this is all sorted out. And he’s willing to find individuals in criminal contempt if they continue to block the funds.

The orders are having some effect in some agencies, giving officials a legal hook on which to hang their arguments that grants and assistance should flow, or that DOGE access should be limited. At the NIH, for example, which has seen nearly all of its grant money frozen since Friday, a memorandum issued yesterday ordered held-up grant money to be paid out. And at the Department of Education, in response to a suit filed by students of the University of California, access by DOGE team members has been restricted by agreement of the Department.

But in other cases, the government is arguing that sweeping restraining orders shouldn’t limit legitimate holdbacks or clawbacks of funds by specific departments. For example, after having argued successfully for just such an exception, on Wednesday FEMA yanked back $80 million that had been authorized to compensate New York City for the housing of migrants. This caused angry city officials to go public with the news, followed by demands that the city’s legal rights be respected and the money restored.

And despite broad court orders to the contrary, funds for USAID remain undistributed, creating panic among recipient aid organizations and even leading already to the death of an elderly woman refugee who was fleeing the chaos in Myanmar for safety in Thailand after she was taken off of her oxygen supply for lack of funding.

The next few weeks will likely see a continuation of this pattern, where the government claims it is funding grants and assistance as ordered, but the plaintiffs need to come back before the judge with more evidence of noncompliance. The race will be between efforts to get judges to escalate threats of contempt and implement stricter mandates on the one hand, and the government’s efforts to fire civil servants and starve recipients of their funds, effectively leaving nothing left for the courts to save, on the other.

At the heart of it all

At some point, likely not very long from now, the question over the White House’s assaults upon its own departments and agencies will reach the Supreme Court. The dozens of cases already filed nearly all boil down to a key pair of legal questions: Does the executive branch have the right to usurp the traditional role of Congress in 1) controlling the nation’s pursestrings and 2) establishing the laws and procedures for protecting the rights of civil employees? Or do these powers still rest with Congress as they have since the founding of our Republic?

It would be a wholesale rewriting of our Constitution for the Court to grant the President this level of power and authority. Even with this 6-3 conservative majority, such a radical departure and resetting of the separation of powers and system of checks and balances seems unlikely, particularly with respect to which branch controls expenditures.

Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas recently wrote an 7-2 opinion upholding the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau where he began with a simple reminder that “Our Constitution gives Congress control over the public fisc” so long as the funds were appropriated correctly. He would have to eat those words to rule for Trump—not an impossible feat, but still unlikely.

But what about the elephant in the room? What happens if Trump just ignores the direct orders of the federal courts?

The Trump White House so far has publicly stated it will abide by court rulings and appeal them if they disagree. It indicated this, however, even while Trump made off-the-cuff threats against the judges who have ruled against him. On Tuesday, he was clearly frustrated at the legal setbacks his administration was already facing. At a press conference at the White House, he issued a veiled warning:

“We want to weed out the corruption. It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so, maybe we have to look at the judges. I think it’s a very serious violation.”

Whether Trump would dare say the same about having “to look at” Supreme Court justices who rule against him remains unknown. But it doesn’t take a chess player to see that Trump is slowly inching toward a full-blown constitutional crisis. Perhaps he somehow remains blithely unaware he’s acting in so many illegal ways that, sooner or later, the Supreme Court likely will have to shut one or more of them down.

At that point, we’ll see if Trump simply gives up or overturns the entire table.