Donald Trump as strongman, riling up his base and investigating his enemies

Fox News

15 hours ago

It's almost a cliché to say that Donald Trump has accumulated enormous power in the last six months.
He has busted through what used to be guardrails, come close to defying the courts, collected big bucks from ABC and CBS, not to mention $200 million from Columbia, cajoled elite law firms into settlements, and taken over law enforcement in Washington.
One example: Trump fired Erika McEntarfer as commissioner at the Bureau of Labor Statistics when he didn't like the Biden appointee's weak jobs number, 73,000 for July.
He has now hired the chief economist from the conservative Heritage Foundation, E.J. Antoni, who has been an outspoken critic of the BLS and has a PhD in economics. He worked on Heritage's Project 2025, the plan that became a blueprint for the second Trump term, and wants to reform BLS – but his numbers will obviously be pleasing to the White House.
Trump's takeover of the D.C. police, which will report to Pam Bondi, is legal under the city's limited home-rule powers, and others have used such power for different ideological goals. The move has been denounced by area Democrats and whether it succeeds is an open question.
The president's insistence on meeting Vladimir Putin in Alaska without knowing whether he's serious about a peace deal, or even a cease-fire, is a classic roll of the dice. Trump has been downplaying expectations, saying he may have to walk away.
While Trump thrives on the spectacle of these leader-to-leader negotiations, they don't always pan out. Despite his loving exchanges with Kim Jong-un, North Korea never reduced its nuclear arsenal.
In fairness, Trump has pulled off cease-fires with a number of warring countries, the latest being Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The president has ordered up so many criminal investigations of his opponents – his perceived enemies – that we've lost sight of the fact that this kind of interference with the Justice Department has long been considered way off-limits.
The latest is New York AG Letitia James, who brought the civil suit against Trump that resulted in a $350 million penalty but is now being appealed. Also Sen. Adam Schiff on a question about mortgages.
And he has ordered up criminal probes of the Obama administration for allegedly targeting him over Russian hacking that turned out to be unsuccessful, and accused Barack Obama of "treason." Never mind that a special counsel from the first term investigated this and brought no charges. Trump has also demanded a probe of his first cybersecurity chief, Chris Krebs, and Miles Taylor, better known as Anonymous.
The president does this out in the open. You don't have to rely on, well, anonymous sources.
National Review's Rich Lowry said recently that Trump is the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. "Even if Trump's second term ended tomorrow, he would have left a significant mark." It's hard to argue with that.
All this amounts to an image of a strong president, a fighter determined to stoke his base and smite his enemies. The average D.C. resident doesn't feel safe with this frightening wave of carjackings – "only" 16 of them in July. The average American is just glad the border has been shut down. Trump's opponents are on notice that he'll use lawsuits and legal threats to get his way.
And his war on the media is constant, with him calling for some individual journalists to be fired, and yet – irony alert – unlike Joe Biden, he speaks to them virtually every day.
Whether you like this president or not, whether you approve of his policies or not, he keeps declaring states of emergency to justify his blizzard of executive orders.
And that's why he continues to drive the media agenda.