The 2nd Trump administration has begun tearing down the administrative state, firing thousands, cancelling contracts, and shuttering agencies. But they have also used the power of the state to ramp up summary deportations, crack down on universities, and threaten prosecutions of their political opponents. So is this the culmination of Republican efforts to scale back government or a sign that they just want to redirect its goals? Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis find that we have overestimated conservative efforts to reduce the size and scope of government and underestimated their usage of the enlarged state to pursue conservative goals.
Guest: Nicholas Jacobs, Colby College; Sidney Milkis,University of Virginia
Studies: “Building a Conservative State”; Subverting the Republic.
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: Is Trump redirecting or deconstructing the administrative state? This week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
The second Trump administration has been tearing down the administrative state, firing thousands, canceling contracts and shuttering agencies, but they have also used the power of the state to ramp up summary deportations, crack down on universities and threaten prosecutions of political opponents. So is this the culmination of Republican efforts to scale back government or a sign that they just want to redirect its goals? This week, I talked to Nicholas Jacobs of Colby College and Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia about their perspectives on politics article with Desmond King, building a conservative state, as well as their forthcoming Kansas Book, Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump, and the Perils of Presidentialism. They find that we have overestimated conservative efforts to reduce the size and scope of government and underestimated their usage of the enlarged state to pursue conservative goals. With the second Trump administration pursuing both DOGE’s destruction and Trumpified justice, it’s a good time to check in on Republicans true aim for government. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
Nicholas, during the first Trump administration, you all published article and perspectives on politics with Desmond King about the changing role of Republican administrations and how they are using state power. Remind us about the major findings and takeaways from that article.
Nicholas Jacobs: Yeah, I guess what we were trying to figure out in the middle of the Trump presidency, the first administration, or I guess what we were trying to say is that too much attention was being placed on his missteps. Now, if you remember, the dominant narrative about Trump in the moment was that it was chaotic, senseless. He was an aberration, and all the story was focused on the dumpster fire, [inaudible 00:02:01] turnover, palace intrigue. And yes, it was all true, but the three of us were just simply struck by really how programmatic the administration really was. And that rather than being a flailing amateur, in fact, maybe because he was an amateur, it was surprising how much Trump was executing a deliberate strategy. And so we call this the redeployment of administrative power. And so rather than traditionally thinking about conservatism as something that’s trying to roll back the state, we started to think about conservatism, modern conservatism as something we wanted to retool or redeploy the state to serve conservative ends.
So yeah, Trump’s approach was different degree and style, but not necessarily kind. I was built on what Sid has been writing about for 30 years now. Sorry to date you, Sid, called executive-centered partisanship.
Sidney Milkis: We’ll have to edit that out though.
Nicholas Jacobs: And by executive-centered partisanship, which is also the focus of our new book, we’re really interested in how both parties have increasingly viewed the presidency as the preeminent institution for making and driving policy. So conservatives aren’t anti-status at heart. They’re really just anti-progressive status.
Matt Grossmann: Sid, we’re obviously now in a new Trump administration with somewhat different characteristics. So what signs do you see that Republicans are continuing this redeployment of state power? And what signs do you see that they might be moving back towards something more like rolling back federal identities?
Sidney Milkis: I think, Matt, they’ve picked up where they left off at the end of the first term, and they’re continuing many of the causes and actions that were taking form before Trump left office in 2021. We have been particularly interested in the emphasis on tariffs and immigration reform. Both of those things have continued with a vengeance.
What we had not anticipated is the DOGE phenomena. I don’t know that anybody could’ve predicted that. And it’s interesting because just as the Republican Party seems to be culminating as a populist party, Trump forms this partnership with the richest man in the world, and he literally has a seat in the Oval Office. We can go into this in some detail as we continue the conversation, but the question is whether this chainsaw approach is really an effort to dismantle the administrative state rather than to redeploy it. And I don’t think we know that yet. We don’t know how things are going to sort out in the next months or next year, whether this is just destruction or to invoke Joseph Schumpeter, a creative destruction that’ll lead to a more radical redeployment of administrative state than we saw in the first term.
Matt Grossmann: So Nicholas, let’s talk about the continuity first or the supposed continuity. Obviously there is a redeployment of state power, especially in areas like immigration and law enforcement, also in tariff policy, but it, I guess, has been interpreted by others as a more Trump-specific executive power grab and only has some continuities with previous Republican administration. So how much is it really a Trump break from precedent versus a continuation of that long story?
Nicholas Jacobs: Right. If we were going to emphasize continuity, I mean, one clear point of departure is to think about how the capacities that allow a president to redeploy power are built up over time and are built up really with the emergence of the New Deal state. And this isn’t a reference to the classic alphabet soup of programs that makes government bigger, not just at the federal level, but also at the state and local level, but really those powers and those tools that center administrative responsibility in the White House.
So what Sid has called, what we write about sort of the organic statute of the modern presidency, the 1939 Executive Reorganization Act, and then a set of processes that emerge after World War II to manage the administrative state, but clearly gives the president some authority to steer it. That’s about as far back as anyone should go in a podcast interview for making sense of these historical developments. But if we’re really thinking about Republicans, I mean, controversially, I’d say we rooted in Reagan-era conservatism, which was laden with lots of rhetorical sensibilities to limited government and returning government back to the states, but also Nixon. And if anything, I mean, Trump has taken much larger cues from Richard Nixon’s philosophy of the presidency than anybody else.
So we do stress the continuity in that regard. I’ll be transparent though. It’s very easy to find the break from the past. And I think where Trump departs most dramatically is not necessarily in the use of power or even the ratcheting up in power of presidential power. It’s just the complete abandonment of constitutional reverence or what Madison described as veneration. When other presidents have ratcheted up power, they at least pay homage to some sort of constitutional symbolism. Yeah, Sid and I have written about Barack Obama’s ratcheting up presidential power using some of these tools. In fact, setting a very important set of precedents for the Trump administration during his first term during his we can’t wait campaign, but at least when Obama picked up the phone and the pen, he gave the pretense of overcoming gridlock and Republican obstructionism. Trump is doing this with united government once again. And that’s, I think, a revelation of just how far the institution has drifted from both its new deal origins and then longer standing constitutional ones.
Matt Grossmann: So Sid, you said we don’t know yet on the role of DOGE and Musk, but it is part of a broader network and decisions involving the OMB director and all of the pre-planning that took place at Heritage and the other think tanks. And it does seem to be among the most strident early efforts at retrenchment. We seem to be using any halfway plausible legal theory to fire anyone that we can or close anything that we can, and then dealing with the consequences later. So one might make the case that actually that we got a fusion between the two strands that you picked up on, and the folks that really did want to tear down the administrative state are now in power to do so. What do you think?
Sidney Milkis: Yeah. Yet, I don’t know whether to call it… I mean, who the heck knows at this point, right? Chasing the headlines has me exhausted, frankly, Matt, but I don’t know if I… It might be seen, in part, as a fusion. And there are still are some libertarian strains in the Republican Party that want to roll back administrative power, but it also might be seen as a more violent redeployment of power that is a more aggressive tack on the liberal centers of the bureaucracy and a more aggressive presidential effort, a personalized presidential effort to strengthen and amplify those parts of the administrative state that the Trump administration wants to use aggressively. And again, we’ve mentioned immigration tariffs. One would have to look at the Justice Department and what’s going on there. Not only a redemption campaign, but a redeployment of their efforts to focus on universities and what they’re doing.
And so, honestly, Matt, I don’t really know how things are going to play out. It seems reckless, but as you said, as you suggested, the Trump 2.0 had a four-year transition period, had a lot more time to plan, and they have the head of project 2025 at the head of OMB, Russell Vought. Nick and I have always been skeptical about this notion that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just reckless. And there’s usually we can find a method to the madness that’s going on. If I had to bet, I would bet that we’re going to find that method as time goes on.
Matt Grossmann: Nick, let me let you weigh in on this because I guess one reading is though that they’re learning lessons of the failures of previous retrenchments. They wanted to get it all done before the political appointees were even in place. Rather than the expected replacement of the previous employees with new political appointees like was envisioned in Schedule F during the first term, this is really tearing it down, firing everyone who could be fired. What do you think?
Nicholas Jacobs: Well, let me give one example of, I think, a way that Sid and I are maybe thinking about the language and logic of retrenchment as it relates to redeployment. And I’ll just draw on how it’s hitting us here in my home state of Maine right now. So on the one hand, you can try your best to follow the headlines and you’re seeing that there’s an executive order to abolish the Department of Education. We’re maybe already halfway through the payroll and gutting that department.
And then on the other hand, the Department of Justice is going at a microscopic level, school board to school board. This isn’t even engaging necessarily with the state Department of Education where intergovernmental relationships are thick. This is investigating local schools to see whether or not they have transgender, not even policies, just sort of on the ground evidence that they’re accommodating students who are transgender, and are threatening to take them to court and pull their funding. Now, it’s not happening in the Department of Education, but is that the federal government setting education policy? Absolutely, and doing it quite aggressively. There’s retrenchment in some places, but then there’s an escalation of state power in others. And this is just one example and I think we’re just at the beginning.
Your question reminds me of something that the Nixon administration learned. And Richard Nathan, who was in the White House and became a great presidential scholar in his own right, talked about that Nixon, they sort of had many similar ideas about not necessarily rolling back the great society state they inherited, but using it for different political purposes. And what the Nixon administration realized is that they tried to do this more through a decentralized logic, lots of political appointees throughout the bureaucracy and even so-called loyalists. And they bemoan the fact that, in Nathan’s word, they “all went native,” and the only time we saw them was at the Christmas party in the White House. And it was just impossible, even with people that shared your ideological goals, not to have these political appointees eventually become captive to the needs of the bureaucracy, the institutions they’ve led.
And even in comparison to Trump 1.0, you’ve seen a much stronger hand exerted by the West Wing and the executive office of the presidency over the things that Trump cares about. I actually doubt that they care much about what Robert Kennedy’s doing over in HHS, but they certainly do care about what’s going on in Ed and DOJ. So an increasing number of loyalists, yes, but also just central control, and that’s a little bit different than Trump 1.0.
Matt Grossmann: Sid, you mentioned that there’s still some libertarian strands in the Republican Party. So one way of seeing this is just that we’re still working out a big ideological disagreement. You could view it through the reconciliation package this year where we appear to be about $4 trillion apart between the Freedom Caucus and the Senate Republicans that need to come to agreement to get something done. That is to say, is this just a case of there’s disagreement? There are some, the Republican Party is now a big enough coalition to include some people who want real retrenchment and some people who want very aggressive redeployment.
Sidney Milkis: Yeah. Well, Nick and I’ve been watching very closely the Trumpification of the Republican Party, which has been very systematic. The systematic, for example, takeover of the state parties, as well as the national party institutions, the RNC for example. So although I think there are some libertarian strands remaining, and certainly there are some traditional conservatives who believe in limited government and institutions, those forces have become decidedly marginalized in the Republican Party. And the Republican Party has been made over pretty fundamentally. I guess I should get rid of the adjective pretty, has been made over fundamentally in the Trump image. The Never Trumpers who represent some of the libertarian cause and traditional conservative cause are virtually without power right now. Probably have as little power as the Democrats do, even less because they’re kind of in a no man’s land.
So I think the more, the Make America Great strand of the Republican Party, this desire to build a kind of national sectarian conservatism dominates the Republican Party. And I think that’s been evident, Matt, in the where are we, how far into the Trump… It seems like a year, but what? It’s a couple months into the Trump 2.0. The Congress has been completely supplant, starting with the appointments to the cabinet. So I think there’s some Horatius at the Bridge, but I really think the party has been remade in a way that makes it very unlikely that there can be a revitalization of the kind of traditional conservatism that respects limited government and constitutional norms and institutions.
Matt Grossmann: So Nick, you said we don’t know what’s going to happen in a few months, but we do. We know that you’re going to launch a new book called Subverting the Republic that tries to put Trump in the context of the longer rise of Presidentialism. So give us a preview.
Nicholas Jacobs: Well, thanks for the plug.
Sidney Milkis: We don’t have a cover, do we, Nick?
Nicholas Jacobs: I forget where we landed on. Oh, I think it’s Trump stepping out of Air Force One. Yeah. So right, Sid, this would be our second book on Presidentialism and it focuses a little bit more directly on Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump was the concluding chapter of the first one. And this is really a comprehensive take through mainstream political science perspectives on what we can learn and how we should think about the institutional politics of the Trump administration 1.0.
And by institutional politics, I mean Sid and I are interested, surprise, in the things that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of minutes. One is the development of the institutional capacities of the White House, the actual ability to get things done. And then the second would be the evolution of party dynamics that have made presidents central actors in partisan life.
We root these developments, actually we go further back than even the New Deal in this one. We really do try to think about the underlying constitutional logic and how that gets subverted over a long period of time. Yeah, and some ideological ways conservatives and progressives have made, in their own right, each their own contributions to the rise of Presidentialism and sort of the increasing fragility of our presidential centered system.
But we also recognize that in a comparative sense, and we draw on the work of one lens to make this point, that presidential systems in a global historical perspective don’t have a great track record. And the two things that seem to work in favor of the United States to make our presidential system function, sort of moderate public opinion on some of these issues and a really robust party system that constrained presidents to act or at least made them justify their positions in a collectively responsible way. Trump is symptomatic of developments that just show how much these two constraining forces in our politics no longer work. It’s not a happy story. Don’t read it before bed if you’re looking to relax.
Matt Grossmann: So Sid, how do we assess the rise of Presidentialism? And we know it’s both, but talk about how you are seeing the relative influence of this as being an institutional story about the White House, the power of the White House, our constitutional system versus changes in the mass media and the party system, with parity between these two parties in kind of bringing about Presidentialism at the peak that we’re seeing.
Sidney Milkis: Yeah, it is a, as Nick just articulated very well, Matt, the institutional story is a profound one, the rise of presidential dominion or Presidentialism. But Nick and I evaluate this in a broad context that tries to take account of the fascinating interplay between top-down and bottom-up politics.
We don’t study the media as much as a lot of people do. Maybe we should pay more attention to the rise of social media, which certainly is very important. But we do pay, I think, uncommon attention, and I’ve been doing this for a long time and Nick has really strengthened my efforts to study this, we look at the relationship between the presidency and the party system, and how Presidentialism has weakened parties as collective organizations, with a past and a future. How parties have become dependent on presidents to pronounce messages, to raise funds, to mobilize their base, and to advance their programmatic initiatives.
The other thing that we’ve been interested in, Matt, is the legacy of the ’60s. That’s an environment in which this kind of Presidentialism and the toxic winner-take-all politics that it spawns has taken place. And the cultural wars of the ’60s, the rise of movement politics on the left, and then the very strong counter-mobilization on the right has led to a battle for the foundational question in American politics, who belongs? Who are we, the people? Right now, immigration is right at the center of that battle. And this has always been present in American politics, but Nick and I argue that the changes in the ’60s and ’70s put it on the agenda in a way that it’s now become normal part of our politics. And that accentuates the polarization and it accentuates the desire of the president to be the vanguard of this kind of partisan struggle.
Matt Grossmann: Nick, how inevitable was this? And how inevitable is it that it will continue in its current direction? We’ve talked about how much historical turns we might have seen differently without Trump, but what about the longer arc? Is this just something that was set to be there in our institutions and that we don’t have a lot of checks left on? Or is this something that was dependent on particular historical turns?
Nicholas Jacobs: Yeah. It’s a good question. You keep trying to get me to predict the future, which is gotcha journalism [inaudible 00:25:48].
Matt Grossmann: It’s just telling us the story of the past. But hopefully, if we see it as inevitable from a long time, then I think maybe it forecloses our alternatives from reversing more than otherwise.
Nicholas Jacobs: Yeah, it’s hard to say that it was inevitable. And I guess when I started to think about that question, how inevitable is anything, I just go to sort of moments in the historical record or that we trace in the development of this thing that surprised me, these moments in time. And I’m like, oh, the institution wasn’t as bad as I thought, or power wasn’t being used in a common way.
And you go to the New Deal and everybody listening to this knows the long story of the New Deal as this moment where America sort of comes into a sense of state leanness, right? Before the New Deal we didn’t have a state, after the New Deal we have a state sort of more European style and we’ve arrived. And yet in doing some research for the first book, I think both of us were surprised just how often Roosevelt was constrained. Constrained by the demands of his party, by congressional leadership, by local and state party officials that he had to attend to and those relationships that didn’t not make him a powerful president, didn’t challenge necessarily Roosevelt’s capacity to implement big new programs in the name of a new country and certainly didn’t constrain his rhetorical leadership, but did change the logic of who he had to listen to, what type of coalition or how broad, I guess you could say, of a coalition he had to build in order to exercise that power.
And so even compared to the great Roosevelt big, strong president, I mean the logic has spun out of control. And so on this question of inevitability, the past does sort of give us a sense of what is possible even in a strong presidency centered constitutional democracy. I don’t think we can turn back the clock and go back to the age of the smoke filled rooms. We’ve certainly past the point where changes to the nominating system of the presidency that would reduce the mass public’s influence, allegedly mass public’s influence on the selection procedures, any attempt to claw that back would be viewed as illegitimate.
So on the one hand, I guess I’m saying it wasn’t inevitable. There are these moments where we made very deliberate choices to restructure our institutions that had profound consequences in the long run, often unintentional. But that said, I think a lot of those decisions, the bed has been made. I don’t think we’re going to reverse them. But maybe new checks will arise. Federalism always sort of rears its wonderful head here and there and is hated when you’re the party in power trying to get stuff done and realizing that you need cooperation from a bunch of uncooperative governments. We’ll see how the courts begin to interpret a lot of these decisions and whether the White House will listen to the courts.
Matt Grossmann: So Sid, we’ve been talking a lot about Republican administrations, but Republicans obviously would point to the Democratic administrations as also consolidating power. Most recently, Biden couldn’t get student loan forgiveness through Congress, tried to declare it on its own, was rebuffed by the courts and went back to various efforts to do so with pretty large budgetary implications. Biden attempted to declare a constitutional amendment that was passed the ratification deadline at the very end of his administration with the Equal Rights Amendment. And even in the use of federal power on universities, they’re using the expansion that democratic presidents created to threaten funding with civil rights law and micromanage quite a few procedures at universities. So how much of this is a story of the arms race and what’s the role of democratic presidents?
Sidney Milkis: Yeah. I think it’s a great question, Matt, and Nick and I have been, I think a little contrarian on this and that most of our colleagues see partisanship. And in fact, you too, Matt, to some of your work I’ve read, see polarization as asymmetrical, that the radicalization in terms of policy and institutions has been on the right. We’ve been talking about that. But the Democratic Party is more of a coalition of interests that is more moderate. And some people see the Democratic Party as a kind of last bastion of liberal democracy.
But Nick and I, although we don’t want to gauge in false equivalency because the insurrection is a dramatic example of how this radicalization, and then Trump’s reemergence in the wake of that, is asymmetrical to a point. But presidential dominion, as we’ve been talking about, begins on the left. It begins with the progressive era. It’s consolidated during the New Deal. It’s accentuated in the ’60s by progressive Democrats. Liberal Lyndon Johnson’s presidency is a kind of culmination of progressive executive aggrandizement.
And so I think the Democratic Party hasn’t gone as far as the Republican Party, Matt, because there are lingering commitments to the structure of the bureaucracy, a kind of neutral competence that was associated with the administrative state from the post-World War years until the late ’60s, and they are a more diverse party than the Republican Party. But on the whole kind of liberal pragmatism, we saw exercise up through the Kennedy administration has been increasingly challenged by social activists on the left against the kind of pragmatic, what did you call them before, Nick? The vanguard of the parties that have lost considerable power since the 1970s.
And so I think now the trend in the Democratic Party particularly, and this is part of the Biden of use of administrative power, is to fight fire with fire. That we can’t defeat Trumpism by strengthening traditional institutions. We have to exercise the same kind of aggressive administrative power that we’ve seen in the Trump White House. And in fact, during Biden’s presidency, it all wasn’t usurpation of power, Biden was pushed very hard by the Congressional progressive caucus, which is now pushing very hard against people like Schumer who want to compromise in certain instances.
So I really think that arms race is a apt way to put it, Matt. That currently what we see is not the old fault line framed by the desire to expand administrative power, roll it back. Now there’s a battle for the services of the administrative state that was forged by progressives, but has been embraced even more enthusiastically by conservatives.
Matt Grossmann: Nick, what’s the possibility that the courts will be able to, if not save us, at least, reset some of these bounds? John Roberts has articulated a major questions doctrine, which was supposed to sort of say that if something should have been decided by Congress, then the President can’t decide to do it on its own or the administration cannot. Obviously, some decisions have gone in favor of Trump in a conservative dominated Supreme Court, but the courts are acting quite frequently to slow or overturn actions in the second Trump administration. So what do you see the role for courts in kind of resetting this boundary?
Nicholas Jacobs: Right. And major questions emerges as a Supreme Court doctrine precisely because of some of the administrative overreach during the Biden administration that Sid was just describing. And yeah, it does promise to be a pretty sizable check on the administrative state. I do think there are bounds to how much that is going to fundamentally reset presidential power and more importantly, challenge our expectations for what presidents should do and how they should lead and what the partisan faithful expect. So I mean, one possibility is it just throws us deeper into constitutional chaos and sets up opportunities for presidents to willfully ignore what a court describes.
But that said, in setting out a threshold for when executive agencies require explicit congressional authorization, that will limit, that takes an important tool from presidentialism’s toolkit, narrows the space in which presidents can delegate ambitious policymaking to agencies like we saw with student loan cases and some environmental issues. At the same time though, and this is, we’re working this out in real time, the Roberts Court has been central to expanding presidential power in other domains, especially those tied to national security, the declaration of emergencies, and especially in immigration where, the line that we always use, it’s a policy area that exudes deference to the president at every turn of the law. And so in these areas, the court has deferred and been very much a key player in expanding executive discretion.
So it’s not a consistent attack on presidentialism. The court is absolutely skeptical of administrative proxies for presidential action. But as we document in the book, if you look the track record for Trump 1.0 in the courts. The courts, yep, they strike down a number of ambitious policies. The census count, DACA rescission, the Muslim ban. But what the court did was find fault with the administrative process that the White House took. And in each of those instances, the opinion basically says, and I don’t need much poetic license to summarize it in this way, if you followed the process, if you, for example, didn’t say one thing as your rationale prior to doing it and listing this as your rationale before the court you would’ve stayed within the latitude of the Administrative Procedures Act. Go get a better administrative lawyer. Guess what they did? They staffed up in the last four years. They have a better sense of what these processes look like. So we’ll see.
Sidney Milkis: Could I, Matt, just add one, I promise it’ll be quick. But one case I’m watching, one issue I’m watching is the President’s control over independent regulatory commissions. I mean, the court resisted Roosevelt’s effort to take complete command of the bureaucracy in the Humphrey’s case where he fired a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Humphrey and the court said the president could not do that. It’s not just a coincidence that Trump has fired two federal trade commissioners. I think they want to bring the Humphrey case to the Supreme Court. And you mentioned the unitary executive doctrine before. It’s hard for me to see that the Roberts Court will uphold the Humphrey decision. And so the hope of some progressives that there is some resilience to the civil service and the Bureaucracy’s independence, I think is going to be severely challenged in Trump 2.0.
Matt Grossmann: What about the other institutions? As you mentioned, said, Congress has not fought back much, even the media and public protest were more kind of actively animated during the first Trump administration. So how do you see how things are shifting, but also what is it because there’s not really a big potential role for the opposition party now or for the other institutions if they’re aligned with the president?
Sidney Milkis: Yeah, I think right now the Republicans control the whole national waterfront, the House, the Senate. They have a majority on the Supreme Court and a very centralized White House. Nick has always been great at looking at what’s going on at the state level and what kind of resistance the stakes can put up. The Republicans control most of the states, but just as we saw during the Biden administration when state attorney generals in Republican states challenged the Biden administration. So we’re seeing that already. And this is, I think, a story that needs to be focused on more. Nick has really focused on this in a really impressive way. We have to see what Democratic State Attorneys General are doing in putting up some resistance to the excesses of the Trump administration. It’ll be really interesting to see, Matt, what the democratic minority in the Congress does over the next couple years.
For a while, there seemed to be some tension between, well, should we cooperate? Should we try to reach some agreements given what happened in the 2024 election? Or should we fight tooth and nail? Should we be a somewhat less loyal opposition and resist the Trump presidency and decidedly push the progressive wing of the party to be the more dominant part of the AOC, Bernie Sanders wing, which is now on an oligarchy tour around the country, which is drawing large audiences, who knows what percent of the country that is. And I think the Democratic Party is moving towards a stronger, a much more strident resistance to the Republican Party. I think the very strong resistance we saw in Trump on 1.O, which was kind of dormant for a while, given the disappointment that 2024 election is awakening.
And of course there’ll be a contest in New Jersey and Virginia at the state level this year, and I think that’ll give us a good sense of what’s going on in terms of pushback against the Trump administration. It would not surprise me because Nick and I feel that the divisions in the country are pretty intractable, very hard to move to build a majority coalition right now. It wouldn’t surprise me, and it wouldn’t surprise Nick and myself or probably you, Matt, if the Democrats take control of at least the house in 2026.
Matt Grossmann: So, Nick, that was your cue to talk about the states, but I want to put it in a somewhat different form, which is one way of seeing this is high presidential power, but if you’re not going to hold power for longer than four or eight years, maybe it isn’t that much power because implementation takes a long time and your capacity to actually change the course of the state might be limited. Maybe what we’re seeing is that Obama, Trump, then Biden’s power to actually change things was limited because the people who actually have to put it in place can keep resisting. Certainly there’s no reversal of the large number of actions filed by state attorneys general against new administrative actions.
Nicholas Jacobs: And I think regardless of what side you stand on politically, I mean, what sums up the last 8, 12 years is just policy whiplash in some major important ways. I don’t know if anybody that has suggested that that’s a necessarily good thing. Even if you’re sort of the minimalist state vein or the maximalist state vein, the constant back and forth, the mutability of the laws doesn’t really build us confidence in government or create a marketplace for steady investment and entrepreneurship.
One thing that I’m particularly struck by with the states right now, well, one, there was the significant number of state governors that did not come out swinging like they did in 2017, unless they were immediately and directly provoked at a National Governor’s Assembly to do so, like Maine’s governor. But there was a mentality of we’re going to see what’s good for us, we’re going to work for them. The sort of rawness of an unexpected Trump victory had faded, and there’s a couple of notable instances of governors not being as aggressive as they once were, and in fact, actively avoiding that word resistance. And part of that, as you know better than anybody, Matt, because of your excellent work in this area, is where have the Democratic Party’s losses been over the last few elections?
More than few. It’s been among those that have less than a college education who look at the sort of resistance agenda as unproductive, sort of knee-jerk, uncooperative. That is something that only individuals in privileged positions with comfy academic contracts and tenure can afford to do. The rest of us are just trying to survive. The groups I talk to and the people I know that are trying to reimagine what that potential majority could look like for the next midterm elections, they’re all saying, “The Dems are going to retake the House, if the Dems are going to retake back the Senate, it’s going to be by bringing back working class, less than college educated voters,” and they’re not on the resistance bandwagon.
Matt Grossmann: So you said this is not a positive read, but it obviously does come from somewhere. People are frustrated with the amount of status quo bias when they’re in power, and in some ways this is what political scientists ask for. We have a clear difference between the two sides. We have elections where people make determinations between those sides. Is there a positive case for presidential power being the one place where we can kind of actually move policy change?
Sidney Milkis: Matt, I’ve been teaching my presidency class this semester, and we’ve been looking at all these major periods where presidents were in the eye of the storm. As we’ve undergone major transformations in American politics, Steve [inaudible 00:47:20] calls these presidential reconstructions and they’re sort of a positive thing about those developments. As Tocqueville said, “It refreshes American politics from time to time.” But what bothers me and Nick is this presidentialism once episodic has now become routine in American politics, and I’ve been a defender for a long time of parties and polarization. Why I’ve stopped being a defender of that is because it’s become so dominated by presidentialism. I’ve gone back and read Juan Linz and his warning of the perils of presidentialism, which he thought the United States was immune from, but recent years shows that hope has not borne out.
And so the most dangerous thing about Trumpism right now is the way the base maybe I appreciate Nick’s view that there’s some reason why the working class isn’t jumping on the resistant bandwagon. What I worry about is there’s this kind of what [inaudible 00:48:33] called a charismatic personality phenomenon going on where the relationship between Trump and the base is a visceral, almost religious one. I mean, the failed assassination attempt is God that brought that to a head. And so I think political scientists have to be very careful about celebrating things they thought would be good, unless they look very closely at the institutional dynamics in which this partisanship now takes place.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The science of politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website, How the House Freedom Caucus Gains Power in Congress, How Presidential Appointments Reveal Policy Goals and Elite Interests, Do Presidents Have the Power to Act Alone, Will Trump Have Unilateral Power or Just Pretend He Does and Have Conservatives Transform the States? Thanks to Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkis for joining me. Please check out Building a Conservative State and look for Subverting the Republic and then listen in next time.