How Trump moves political norms – both slowly and suddenly

0:00President Trump told a gathering of world leaders that, for now at least, he won't take Greenland using military force. Because people thought I would use force. I don't have to use force. I don't want to use force. I won't use force. That was in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum. Trump later said, in fact, he had met with NATO's secretary general and has, quote, a framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland. So a transatlantic crisis that threatened the very existence of NATO is perhaps on pause. But the mere fact that the world was talking about the U.S. coming to own Greenland in any capacity says a lot about the Trump administration one year in.

0:36And here I am in a place called the White House. It's a beautiful place. Who would have thought, right? In his second stint in the presidency, Trump has repeatedly said and done things that were previously assumed to be unacceptable to voters. In a surprise 80-minute appearance at the White House on Tuesday, Trump celebrated several of them. We cut millions of people off the federal payroll. I don't like doing that, but the good news, I don't feel badly because they're getting private sector jobs and anti-American activists. Can you believe it? Began the process of abolishing the Federal Department of Education and returning education back to the states.

1:12And Linda McMahon is doing a fantastic job. Halted all refugee admissions to the United States, including from Somalia, which is a terrible, terrible place and other dangerous places. There have been lawsuits, protests, a record-breaking government shutdown, resignations at top levels of government and the military. But in general, the Trump administration continues undeterred on almost all of its agenda. Consider this. One year in, Trump's most notable move might not be in foreign policy or his federal prosecution of his political enemies or his deploying troops to cities amid protests. It might be in how he has discouraged effective challenges to his power.

1:53From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

2:05It's Consider This from NPR. In just one year, the Trump administration has pushed the window of what is possible in politics so far that his opposition just seems exhausted. Ashley Parker wrote about this for The Atlantic. Ashley, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I want to start with the title of your essay. The president has had this term for critics for years now that they suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. And you wrote that there's been so little meaningful resistance this term that we might think about Trump exhaustion syndrome instead. Can you tell me more about what you're thinking about with that?

2:38Yeah, what I was really trying to explore with this piece one year into his second term was sort of the boiling frog theory of American politics. And I should say up front that this theory is apocryphal. It's not actually true, but I think it works for our purposes. Yes. Which is the way it goes is that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will hop out. But if you put a frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will not know to jump out because the changes will be so incremental and gradual and it will boil to death. I think you also gave a really good example when you talked about the boiling frog.

3:14You walk through the series of events leading up to the seizure of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Kayla, can you recap kind of how we got from point A to point B without any of the steps feeling overly dramatic? Sure. So it really starts back when in 2015, when Trump comes to national prominence as a politician in a campaign launch speech that demonizes immigrants broadly as, you know, criminals, rapists, not the best among us, people who are bringing drugs across the border. So he has been getting the country comfortable for a long time with the idea that undocumented immigrants are dangerous and they're a problem.

3:57But going to this term with Venezuela, he uses a fairly obscure wartime powers act, the Alien Enemies Act, to essentially declare that we are at war with Venezuela, specifically a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. And because we are at war with them, we're able to take certain wartime liberties to deport Venezuelans. And a lot of opinion polls along the way showed that, by and large, a lot of these steps did have broad, if not a majority, you know, from time to time, a good chunk of Americans were on board with each of these steps. Exactly. Now, there might be images they see of what this actually looks like that they kind of cringe at.

4:38But, yeah, broadly, they support this. Then he begins a series of strikes on boats in the Caribbean and East Pacific Oceans off the coast of Venezuela. And yes, a lot of these boats that are targeted, there are drugs on them. But it is not, as the president has claimed, you know, a huge mob or cartel boss headed to the United States. In some cases, these are small fishing boats, people who are petty criminals bringing small amounts of cocaine not to the United States but to neighboring islands like Trinidad. But again, I was talking to someone in the White House and they said, look, if you ask the average American, should we blow up a boat with drugs on it headed to the United States, they say yes.

5:26And that all sets the stage for the most recent seizure of another country's president who's brought to the United States and put on trial. And maybe as Steve Bannon put it, a lot of people who read The Atlantic are upset about this. But maybe Americans are actually on board with a lot of this. And the pushback to steps toward authoritarianism is a lot different than maybe what we thought it would be in high school social studies. Yeah, that's exactly right. A slide towards authoritarianism, when you talk to experts about this, including some of my colleagues, is people sort of imagine it like the movie version where there's men in jackboots marching in the streets and tanks rolling.

6:06And that's not really how it often starts. It's sort of a slow slide of getting people comfortable with things that they never thought they would be comfortable with. I mean, what is your sense a year into the second term, reporting this story and many other stories? Do you have a sense of what you think Trump's end goals are? Is it I want to tear down democratic norms? Or is it something more straightforward of I want to be a notable famous president? Or, or is it even more moment to moment and topic to topic than that? Like, how do you think about this? I don't think he has a particular pointed desire to tear down democratic norms.

6:46Essentially, he wants to do what he wants to do, unconstrained by laws and norms in the Constitution. And when he took office the first time, Congress could prevent that from happening. Sometimes a single senator, sometimes a single senator from his own party could foil something he cared deeply about. and that things like the Geneva Conventions and NATO alliances could get in the way with what he wanted to do. And in many ways, these guardrails worked. And in his second term, he is just unconstrained in doing what he wants to do. And if it means shattering democratic norms, he's more than happy to bulldoze through them.

7:28But that's sort of an inadvertent symptom, not the end goal. Yeah. Ashley Parker is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. This episode was produced by Alejandro Marquez-Hanse with audio engineering by Tiffany Vera Castro. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadanana. Our executive producer is Sammy Ettingham. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.