Trump's Executive Orders Serve One Sinister Purpose

Inside Team Trump's Shrewd Strategy to Kill Democracy

Many times I’ve asked you to imagine what it would be like, what your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about contemporary America would be like, if you were one of the 100 million plus Americans who can’t name their own state’s senators.

Vox dropped a recent piece that is firewalled, but I want you to read this short excerpt from their reporting:

Now, don’t focus on the particular demographics of this particular disenchanted voter.

She could be anyone: a man, a woman, old, young, Black or White. Believe it or not, there are even college educated Americans who have this kind of limited, simplistic frame for interpreting political events.

Anyhoo, that is a long wind up to get to what I want to talk to you about today which is the sensitivity of the low information public to lies intended to radicalize them.

Team Trump has a shrewd strategy to use obviously illegal executive orders to prepare the MAGA base for rebellion when they are inevitably struck down.

An important concept from Introduction to American Government courses is something called the Expectations Gap.

The Expectations Gap refers to the gap between what a president must promise to win election (especially to win their party’s nomination) and what he or she can actually deliver through a system intentionally designed to make governing very hard.

Unless a president is extraordinarily lucky, like FDR who governed through two crises and used both to reshape the size and scope of government, a president is doomed to over promise and under deliver. All of them.

And that is during the best of times.

These are not the best of times.

Back in late 2009, early 2010, Republicans developed a keen strategy to try to make Barack Obama a one term president. That strategy was designed to increase the expectations gap by purposefully obstructing major legislation to deny Obama legislative wins.

Its a strategy that benefitted Republicans politically so much, it became their go-to strategy throughout the full 8 years of Obama and for 4 years of Joe Biden, with one recent exception: Biden’s Infrastucture bill.

They architects of the GOP’s opposition strategy had no idea at the time, but their strategy to starve the public of good government went on to play a key role in creating both the MAGA movement (right wing populism) and the Bernie Sanders movement (left wing populism).

When people see their government can’t deliver solutions to their problems (or are told hyperbolic lies like Death Panels) they go a little crazy. And as demonstrated above, few voters have the sophistication to understand that Barack Obama failed to deliver on immigration reform because the Republican House simply refused to allow a vote on it.

For most voters, Obama promised to deliver immigration reform and he failed.

Its just as simple as that.

So here we are in 2025 reaping what was sowed in the 2010s, and its a bad crop indeed.

That said, its about to get a lot worse.

Since the start of Trump 2.0, Team Trump has been very busy, but not at making new legislation. In fact, despite unified control of government, the 119th Congress has been even less production than the 118th session, which played out during divided government.

Republicans are such a hot mess they can’t even seem to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill out of a committee.

But ask your average MAGA and they'll tell you Trump’s first 100 days have been transformational.

It certainly has been transformation in terms of corrupting the rule of law and institutionalizing gross corruption.

But what MAGA is referring to are Trump’s executive orders and all the great stuff he’s “delivered” for America through them.

From caps on prescription drugs, to promises to purge schools and universities of liberals, to deportations of “illegals” to gulags, Trump’s base has spent the same 4 months we’ve spent horrified, reveling in all of Trump’s “victories.”

There’s just one problem: most of the executive orders Trump has issued to “finally achieve results for the American people” are illegal. Some are so grotesquely illegal they have Supreme Court justices gasping at the lunacy of the arguments coming out of what were once well-respected government lawyers.

MAGA doesn’t know it yet, but most of Trump’s executive orders will never have the force of law. They will die quick deaths by a judiciary that overall seems inclined to protect the Constitution’s separation of powers system and maintain the power of the courts to review and determine the legality of actions taken by the Congress, the President, and the states.

Unfortunately, Team Trump has been radicalizing the MAGA base for weeks in terms of the legitimacy of the courts.

From the Lord of the Shadows Stephen Miller to Puppy Killer Kristi Noem, MAGA has been hard at work convincing their base that the courts have no authority to decide if a president’s actions are legal and thus should be ignored if they rule against the MAGA agenda.

For those of us whose jobs it are is to monitor the pig trough that is online MAGA, we’ve seen hundreds of tweets from MAGA influencers repeating one talking point: the courts are acting unconstitutionally to destroy Trump’s agenda.

That brings us back to Sharita White.

When Team Trump decides to ignore the “unconstitutional” Supreme Court and go rogue, millions of Americans will get Big Mad.

When Trump tells them the Supreme Court is making an unconstitutional power grab, they will believe him just as they believed him in 2020 about election fraud despite it being an obvious and easily disprovable lie.

When Donald Trump tells his base to ignore the courts, it undermines the rule of law—the foundational principle that no one is above it. It sets a dangerous precedent where political loyalty trumps legal authority, edging the country closer to authoritarianism and civil unrest.

And its all by design.