Politics
April 21, 2025
Trump’s Weekend at Bernie’s White House is inherently chaotic.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after signing a proclamation in the Oval Office at the White House on April 17, 2025, in Washington, DC. Donald Trump uses the term “strongman” as high praise. “Sometimes you need a strongman,” Trump said last September of the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. In Trump’s usage, “strongman” connotes not just dictatorship but also what he sees as the admirable traits of decisive and effective leadership that does what’s necessary with no regard to the niceties of norms or even laws. If Trump is a would-be strongman, we must never forget that he is also at his core also a weak man: His chaotic presidency is a result of a shaky, unsure command of his own thoughts, which makes him easy prey to the conflicting agendas of his advisers.
Trump’s entire career is a triumph of image over reality. He’s sold himself as the masterful boss who is not afraid to say, “You’re fired!,” while all the available evidence shows that he has no executive control over his own impulses, let alone over his staff. This is true most of all of his two terms as president, where time and again he has been easily swayed and manipulated by more single-minded subordinates.
On Friday, a report was released on a striking example involving the Trump administration’s roller-coaster trade policy. Like other important issues, notably negotiations with Iran and Russia, the policy is inherently contentious because Trump has gathered around him advisers with wildly conflicting goals. This management style is sometimes described as a “team of rivals” approach—one employed by Abraham Lincoln, among other great leaders. But a “team of rivals” government only works if you have a commanding leader like Lincoln, who ultimately decides among the conflicting advice given and, having made a decision, sticks to it. With Trump, however, each decision often rests just with whoever is in the room with Trump at a particular time.
On trade, Trump is torn between two factions. One faction sees tariffs as an instrument for prying open foreign markets, while the other faction are hard-liners who want to use tariffs to make the United States economically self-sufficient.
Trump’s launching of a global trade war on April 2 was a victory for one faction, but it terrified both the stock and bond markets. A week later, other advisers decided they needed Trump to pause the trade war in order to calm the markets. A meeting was arranged with the president, and they made their case. They convinced Trump to pause some of the tariffs and to announce it immediately to calm the markets.
Students of Trump lore will remember that there were many stories of Trump’s first term depicting him as a weathervane who shifts direction depending on which adviser is filling the room with wind. Bob Woodward’s book Fear (2018) opens with a story about Trump dictating an order calling for the United States to withdraw its troops from South Korea—only to be outwitted by his economic adviser, Gary Cohn.
Ultimately, the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency is part of the larger crisis of American democracy. It is a direct outgrowth of polarization and partisanship in the age of the imperial presidency. Party elites seem to like the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency: There is a reason Democratic powerbrokers coalesced around a certain individual. A diminished president is one who can be more easily manipulated to serve the agenda of vested insiders. Trump’s presidency is only going go get more chaotic and could end in disaster, whether dictatorship or domestic strife. In criticizing this unfolding disaster, it’s necessary to go beyond Trump’s many personality faults and ask why he was twice elected. What are the flaws in the American political system that make the nation vulnerable to the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency?
