Andrew Prokop

Like all of Washington, I was surprised by the “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Most anticipated Elon Musk’s spending-cutting effort would be a toothless advisory panel, not a wrecking ball smashing the federal workforce. Musk was surprisingly savvy about seizing control of the levers of government power, like the ability to place civil servants, cancel contacts, or send threatening emails to every civil servant.

The eventual outcome was less surprising, though: He hit a wall. Trump’s Cabinet secretaries became frustrated that Musk had usurped their power, and demanded he be reined in. Trump complied — and DOGE was leashed.

Abdallah Fayyad

In his first term, Trump’s “malevolence,” as the legal analyst Benjamin Wittes put it, was “tempered by incompetence.” One of the pro-democracy advocates’ biggest fears of a second Trump term was that the president would be more experienced, competent, and prepared to execute his antidemocratic agenda. Surprisingly, so far, there hasn’t been much evidence that this Trump administration is any more competent than the last.

In its first 100 days, this administration kicked off its feud with Harvard University by sending the university a letter by mistake; deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia because of an “administrative error”; slapped tariffs on an island of penguins uninhabited by humans; inadvertently filed documents outlining the flaws in its plan to end New York City’s congestion pricing; and accidentally looped in a journalist on a Signal chat plotting airstrikes in Yemen.

The problem is that this time around, the Trump administration has not been tempered by incompetence. In each of these cases — and in others — it has only leaned into its anti-democratic tendencies. So the danger posed by the second Trump administration, it seems, isn’t competence, but an unwillingness to admit mistakes and a penchant for doubling down.

Christian Paz

The public gave Trump the benefit of the doubt on immigration throughout February and March: According to averages of his job approval by the pollster Adam Carlson, he had mostly positive marks.

That trend held until mid-April. Over one month, Trump’s rating on immigration dropped 7 points — largely aligned with the time in which the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant, dominated headlines.

Still it’s not the kind of mass disapproval Trump saw on immigration during his first term. There may be a simple explanation: The country has changed since 2017, becoming much more hostile to immigration in general.

The durability of Trump’s polling on immigration — at least compared to other issues, where he’s deeply underwater — is surprising. Despite weeks of negative press coverage, high-profile deportations of migrants and students on visas, and a negative Supreme Court ruling, immigration remains the most popular of Trump’s issues: 47 percent approve, while 51 percent disapprove, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll from this month.

Essentially, the public does seem to be — finally, gradually — turning against Trump on immigration. Whether that continues is hard to say, however.

Nicole Narea

During Trump’s first term, Democrats took on the identity of a vocal opposition party. Now, despite campaigning on the idea that a second Trump term was an existential threat to democracy, Democratic lawmakers seem to have receded into the background.

There have been some notable singular efforts to push back against Trump, including Sen. Cory Booker’s record-long Senate floor speech in April, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s anti-Trump nationwide tour. But the party as a whole has yet to find a unified strategy for opposing Trump.

Democrats’ inaction might be deliberate. Trump is already implementing unpopular policies that are tanking his poll numbers, without any meaningful assistance from Democrats. But in letting Trump be Trump, Democrats appear to be allowing him to dismantle key institutions and trample on civil liberties unchecked. It’s an approach that could risk permitting the country to sleepwalk into authoritarianism — and that’s a risk that I’m surprised they’re willing to take. 

Zack Beauchamp

The FBI has, historically, been one of the most potent tools of political repression in the United States — look, for example, at its ruthless campaign to get Martin Luther King Jr. to consider killing himself by threatening to expose his infidelity.

But in the Trump administration, the FBI has mostly been an inefficacious sideshow, with the most aggressive crackdowns on civil liberties conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (an agency that necessarily has a more limited scope).

This is one of the biggest “dogs that didn’t bark” in the second Trump administration, and I think it’s for two reasons.

First, Trump’s leadership picks — FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino — are basically incompetent. Both are Trump loyalists, who no doubt would be willing to deploy aggressive tactics on his behalf, but neither seems to possess the skill set necessary to turn the FBI into a tool of authoritarian repression (at least, not this quickly).

Second, the FBI has professionalized since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, and many of its professional higher-ups and field agents do not want to be party to power abuses. Those two factors are, at least for now, keeping a potentially significant threat to democracy at bay.