After Techno-Populist Shock Therapy

The frenetic pace of Trump’s changes must eventually give way to something.

By Fred Bauer, writer from New England

The second Trump administration has opened with a round of techno-populist shock therapy.

Days have provided months worth of headlines. Last Wednesday alone, President Trump announced a plan to start negotiations with Vladimir Putin about the Ukraine war and raised the prospect of new reciprocal tariffs on trading partners—while fired inspectors general petitioned the courts to stay in their jobs and Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence.

That single day distills the frenetic pace of the new administration. The president has imposed and threatened a range of tariffs. High-profile deportation raids have rounded up illegal immigrants with criminal records. A flurry of executive orders—ending federal affirmative action, changing federal hiring guidelines, and restoring strong enforcement of the Hyde Amendment—have reversed left-wing social policies. President Trump has deputized Elon Musk and his team of DOGE disruptors to hopscotch from one agency to the next, like Douglas MacArthur going from island to island in the Pacific theater, cutting wherever they see fit. In addition to DOGE strikes on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other administrative entities, the administration has also begun a series of budgetary cuts and drawdowns. For instance, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has recently requested a quarterly appropriation of $0 for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  

This is president as CEO—as chief energetic officer. Broadly speaking, this shock therapy appears to have four prongs: empower the president as the prime mover in the executive branch, slash government spending, push back against identity-politics progressivism, and rebalance international commitments. Often, these aims overlap. For example, the defunding of USAID seems to be at the intersection of all four goals, while Trump’s tariff threats reinforce the power of the executive and revise the international trade order.

This intersection of ends suggests the strategic logic of this techno-populist shock therapy, which leverages the technological know-how of Silicon Valley whiz kids to challenge the entrenched bureaucracy. Trump was elected on the promise of change, and a variety of factions have consolidated around his figure as a vehicle for a fundamental reset of the American government. This shock therapy seems particularly directed at what neo-reactionary theorist Curtis Yarvin has termed “the cathedral,” the interlocking set of administrative, academic, media, and nonprofit elites.

This new clerisy has been the heart of the resistance to Trump and populism more broadly, and it has also been the redoubt of the identity-politics cultural revolution. In order to challenge this class, proponents of disruption have seen a unique opportunity for leverage in a turbocharged presidency. Executive orders can gut the vast managerial infrastructure of the past, while DOGE mounts a twin assault on the clerisy: by shutting down government departments and by strangling the funding streams upon which this elite relies (both inside and outside of government). The just-announced 15% cap for indirect expenses on National Institutes of Health federal grants seems calculated to tighten the belts of major universities and independent research laboratories that rely heavily on them; charging for indirect costs (such as office space) has helped the bottom line of both universities and labs, and—according to NIH—the average rate of indirect costs has traditionally averaged between 27% and 28%. Cutting that in half would be a financial squeeze for many of these institutions.

All this brings to mind the sociologist Orlando Patterson’s account, in Freedom, of Augustus and the early Roman emperors, who garnered support from a public that believed that the norms of the Roman ruling class were “a clear threat to the personal freedoms which they cherished.” The Roman plebs hoped for a leader who could “protect them from the violence and domination of the oligarchs” and relished those emperors who could humiliate the “senatorial class.” A prime irritant for many contemporary populists is the managerial elite, which they see as imposing a top-down revolution. These populists applaud Trump for shocking and humiliating this elite—through his smashmouth rhetoric, defenestration of managerial mandarins, and elevation of his outsider allies.

Voters clamored for relief from the spiraling chaos of the Biden years, so vigorous action by Trump is understandable and maybe even politically necessary. And the executive is perhaps the principal mechanism for achieving some of these ends, such as restoring immigration enforcement or tamping down on conflicts abroad. However, as the new administration goes from day-one objectives to the task of governing, this shock therapy program could pose political problems if its limits are not recognized.

The most obvious risk is this top-down disruption transforming into havoc. Voters in part soured on the Biden administration because of the tornado it unleashed on American life. Republican-led chaos would not be change but simply more of the same (albeit of a different partisan flavor). Voters are likely to tolerate, if not applaud, Republican efforts to push back against the left-wing cultural revolution. The normies are not exactly storming the barricades to protest Trump’s evisceration of federal policies on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and a recent CBS poll found that 61% of Americans thought that Trump was either doing enough or could do even more to end DEI. Radical economic disruption—a government shutdown, defaulting on the national debt, sending the stock market into a tailspin—might, however, exact more of a price from the public.

But perhaps an even greater danger for Republicans is not moving beyond shock therapy. An executive orientation is not the same as a political dispensation. Trump was elected not only to disrupt the system but also to deliver for working families. Driving down health-care costs, boosting median wages, rebuilding manufacturing, expanding opportunity for blue-collar workers, and checking corporate behemoths are not incidental window-dressing for a MAGA agenda, but are at the core of a populist realignment.

Failing to promote these working-class interests could make Trump the successor to the blown-majority presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. All three men seemed at one point on the verge of a realigning victory, but the parties of all three men suffered electoral repudiation instead.

Trump’s shock therapy comes amid the broader escalation of political conflict in the United States. Barack Obama embraced the “pen and phone” presidency, and Joe Biden began his time in office with an executive-order blitzkrieg that far outpaced his postwar predecessors. The growth of executive power testifies to the heightened polarization of American politics. Unable to come to a legislative consensus, partisans instead hope to govern by presidential energy. This has led to increasingly wild swings of the political pendulum and a series of contrasting “wave” elections. This is not a recipe for political stability or for prudent public policy.

One possible way of escaping that loop of escalating repudiations would be for a political coalition to show that it can actually govern by delivering economic resilience, social-policy sanity, and foreign-policy successes. Successive political victories (such as the triumphs of the New Deal years or the Republican presidential romps after 1968) reset the political conversation and established the contours of a new political dispensation. The narrowness of recent political victories has, perversely, added to the incentives for norm-breaking and political retaliation. Each side hopes that, if it pushes a little harder, it can at last win and usher in generational majorities. That overreach instead feeds a public backlash. The result has been iterative cycles of shock therapy.

But countless bouts of shock therapy can fry your brain. A major political opportunity awaits the coalition that can see beyond the storm.