I want to take a moment to reiterate and explain an idea I’ve discussed many times here but which is particularly relevant in this moment: all power is unitary. What does this mean? Basically it means that a political actor’s relative power is the same everywhere. It’s not divided up into different buckets. You’re not losing power on one front and maintaining or increasing it everywhere else. That’s not how it works. Losses and gains in one place show up everywhere else. So Trump taking hits on the economy weakens him in the courts and with DOGE, Congress and everywhere else. It applies the same on the upside. If Trump is winning big battles in the courts, that empowers him everywhere else, even in areas that have nothing to do with the courts or the particular legal issue in question.
This is basic to understanding this political moment because Trump and the Trump White House are engaged and playing for keeps on so many different fronts at once. They are dismantling major parts of the state; they are launching an aggressive trade war with every country in the world at once; they are also challenging and trying to bring to heel the federal judiciary, which he has to a significant degree already corrupted. There’s a ton of other things they’re doing. But they mostly fall more or less into one of those buckets. Other things are clear on the horizon but not yet an immediate focus. The big thing there is what I’ve now written about several times: the effort to bully the state governments into compliance with Trump’s demands by threatening total cut-offs of federal funds into specific states.
You can’t understand this larger battle, one of the most important in American history, without understanding this inherent integration. Is it relevant operationally? Other than just understanding more rather than less? I think it is. With everyone and everything being bludgeoned at once, there’s an inherent, inevitable battle over whose issues get precedence, become the central point to fight on. What I think this tells us is that that question is not as central as it may seem. A win on embattled issue X redounds to the benefit of issue Y. An opposition can’t fight everywhere at once. But it doesn’t necessarily have to.
What the implications are, however, is a secondary issue. The key is that all these moving parts — often with no inherent, mechanical connection — are all part of one thing, the power of the White House vs those who oppose it.
