It's not just that a federal judge has blocked Trump's freeze on federal aid spending until Monday. It's the deep skepticism demonstrated by some in the media as it became clear that programs such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and suicide prevention programs for veterans were being frozen. The Trump surrogates in the clips below are arrogant, but they're on the defensive. It's a start.
There has also been pushback by Democrats -- more is needed, but this week already looks very different from last week, not to mention the two months following the election. In my update to yesterday's post, I showed you Chuck Schumer's response to the spending freeze. That was good, and so is Tim Kaine's response to Trump's offer of a buyout to all federal workers, by means of which the president and his allies hope to create a government free of everyone except right-wing zealots (I don't think the buyout is intended to make the government non-functional, although it's likely to have that effect if it succeeds):
Can any of this stop or slow Trump? That's not clear yet -- but until yesterday, Democrats and the mainstream media seemed cowed, and the conventional wisdom was that Trump critics were sad throwbacks who needed to understand that the times had passed them by. A cover story in New York magazine depicted young Trump fans as society's new trendsetters:
And this seemed to be the conventional wisdom about Trump and his opponents:
You might regard all this as trivial. But I think it contributed to Democrats' belief that the public didn't want them to attack Trump forcefully (or at all).
Now it feels as if some Democrats are willing to fight, and some journalists are willing to ask whether Trump's actions are beyond the pale. That has the potential to send a message to apolitical normies that Trump is controversial, just the way he was in his first term.
Or perhaps the people who needed to see opposition to Trump as thinkable were those Democrats and journalists. They appeared ready to let Trump roll them, but the outrageousness of his latest moves overcame their fears, and their preference for meekly going along. This Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that the public really hasn't embraced second-term Trumpism:
There's a lot of work to do. But suddenly it's harder to sell Trumpism as a gregarious podcast-ready insult comic leading a merry band of bros and Mar-a-Lago plastic surgery cases in a hilarious war against humorless woke scolds. It's now clear that if Trump has his way, many ordinary people will be hurt. If that becomes the new conventional wisdom, we have a chance to limit the damage he does.
UPDATE: Wow, that was fast.
The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants....
In a memo dated Wednesday and distributed to federal agencies, Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, states that OMB memorandum M-25-13 “is rescinded.” That order, issued Monday, instructed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligations or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.”
