Donald Trump's Agenda is to Dominate the News

Ezra Klein interviews Yuval Levin about the first year of the Trump administration. They are exploring the notion that Trump prefers "retail" to "wholesale" governance. For example, rather than try to pass a law mandating changes in how universities receiving Federal funding can operate, Trump perfers to do individual deals with each university in turn.

Klein: 

There’s an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn’t. People do not know one-tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for that matter. Much more change is happening in legislation than people realize.

But you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into a dozen. And people’s attention span — particularly as we’ve gotten down to social media — things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals — they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan — they actually fit. Maybe not everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable: They made a deal with this university, they intimidated this person, they launched an investigation here. Everything is the size of a news story, functionally.

I have never covered an administration before where the problem was not that we have a communication problem, where people don’t know how much we’re doing. Every administration — Biden, Obama, Bush — they all felt that way.

Whereas Trump, in a way, it’s almost at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, the opposite — that the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

Levin:

Yes, absolutely. There’s more said than done. There’s more above the surface than beneath the surface, and it is very well suited to a telling of the story.

One way I think about it is that the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. So if something going on in the world is troubling or challenging, at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem.

One way to think about that is he wants to do everything. He wants to control everything. But it’s actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do, and it’s not using most of the powers as the chief executive of the American government. But it’s absolutely true.

It’s not just legislation. Regulation, too, works this way. There’s never a moment when you can say: We’ve done this. When you’re moving regulatory action, there’s a proposed rule, and there are comments, and it’s years, and at the end of the day, you’ve done something that’s going to endure — but it’s not an easy story to tell, and it’s very dull and lawyerly.

If you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia, then you can just say it that day, and there’s the C.E.O., and he says it, too, and something big is going on.

So I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

Here is another reason to worry about the future of democracy. Governing a huge nation is hard and complictaed, and laws intended to make real changes are long, complex, and often take years to bear fruit. It seems like most of the voters who want more manufacturing in America went for Trump, even though the Biden administration made that its biggest focus, and the CHIPS and Science Act may end having very important long term effects. But you can't explain it in a two-minute news segment, or a tweet.

We may find out that a nation with a 5-second attention span gets governed only in ultimately ineffectual sound bites.