Jarring ideas

Political gravity is coming for some of Trump’s most jarring ideas

Analysis by Aaron Blake

President Donald Trump just keeps pushing the envelope — his appointment of a controversial housing official as the new acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday is the freshest evidence of that.

But recent events have also reinforced that political gravity still applies to the president. Some of his most jarring ideas have hit roadblocks in the courts and forced even Republicans to buck him, showing that his domination of Washington is hardly a given anymore.

On Monday, CNN reported that the administration signaled to GOP congressional leaders that it plans to drop its $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” after an adverse court ruling. The fund had caused a GOP revolt and threatened the party’s broader legislative agenda.

That followed Trump on Friday seemingly giving up on his efforts to Trump-ify the Kennedy Center. He said he would transfer control of it to Congress after a judge ruled that putting Trump’s name on the center was illegal and blocked a planned closure.

In both situations, it remains up in the air precisely how much Trump has capitulated. But he’s at least telegraphing retreat.

Both ideas were wild to begin with — and now the president appears to be dealing with the consequences.

The ‘anti-weaponization fund’

The legally problematic nature of the administration’s “anti-weaponization fund,” which was intended to compensate Trump allies who claimed they were victimized by the prior administration, was readily apparent from the moment it was announced.

It was created as part of a settlement to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS after a government contractor leaked his tax returns years ago. Trump was settling with the government that he effectively controls — a situation that led a judge to question whether the two sides of the settlement were colluding.

The settlement was also set to benefit third parties who had nothing to do with the litigation. The fund was due to have little transparency or oversight, and it was not approved by the judge.

The White House and the Justice Department tried to argue that this was a fund for anyone who was victimized by a purportedly “weaponized” justice system during the Biden administration — including potentially Democrats. But it looked a whole lot like Trump was just creating a slush fund to pay allies. The administration even granted that it could benefit some January 6, 2021, defendants who assaulted police.

And that gets at why this was so politically problematic.

While Trump’s pardons of nearly all January 6 defendants got somewhat overshadowed during the breakneck first days of his second term, polls showed how overwhelmingly unpopular those pardons were.

Both a Washington Post-Ipsos poll and a Pew Research Center poll showed at least 74% of Americans and a majority of Republicans disapproved of pardoning those who committed violent crimes.

And here was the White House — including Vice President JD Vance — being put in the position of defending potentially giving money to people who beat up police.

The optics quickly became a line-in-the-sand moment even for some pretty Trump-loyal Republicans in Congress.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune called for the administration to “shut it down themselves.” Others like Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and John Kennedy of Louisiana (no relation to the former president) are now saying their party needs to see the White House more explicitly rule out resurrecting the fund in the future, after the Justice Department gave a somewhat qualified statement on the matter.

It remains somewhat unclear what happens next. Trump has not committed publicly to terminating the fund, telling ABC in a phone call Monday, “We are subject to the courts.”

The Kennedy Center

Just to distill this down to its most-shocking basics: Trump plastered his name on a building memorializing a dead president.

He claimed he was surprised by the center’s board adding his name to the building, but he had previously proposed such a change and had purged board members to install loyalists.

It’s one thing to put the name of a living president on things — something that rarely happened before Trump, as The New York Times found in January — but it’s quite another to take a memorial to one of those dead presidents and append Trump’s name to it.

And he did so despite the law. The “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” name is a matter of federal law, which was not changed before Trump’s name was suddenly added.

His takeover of the Kennedy Center was already highly legally suspect and controversial; then he gave everyone a shorthand for just how drastic this gambit was.

It remains to be seen if and when Trump’s name will be removed from the performing arts center’s exterior; he has sent confusing signals about his intent to keep fighting. (And while he said he was transferring control to Congress, the legislative branch is already responsible for the center’s annual appropriations for operations and maintenance.)

But any situation in which his government would be forced to remove his name from the building would be an indelible — and telling — image.

A familiar pattern of political overreach

Trump pushing the envelope to previously unthinkable places and eventually having to pull back has become a familiar tale.

Perhaps the other best example of him retreating this year was his aborted push to get control of Greenland (an idea that polled about as popularly as black mold.) Trump gave up on that in January — at least for the time being — amid pushback from both Republicans and foreign allies.

Trump is also pressing his luck with his coveted White House ballroom, by repeatedly going back on the terms initially laid out. First he promised not to touch the existing East Wing, before suddenly demolishing it. Then he repeatedly said the ballroom would only be paid for with private donations, before suddenly asking Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars for security for it.

Republicans have panicked about the optics of using taxpayer money to build an opulent ballroom while Americans’ economic anxiety is damaging their 2026 election hopes. GOP leaders dropped the funding from an immigration enforcement bill amid an adverse ruling from the Senate parliamentarian and strong pushback from within their party.

In all of these cases, Trump was asking the courts and/or Republicans to sign off on what seemed to be impossible requests. He was asking them to stomach something drastic because he’s Trump, and they’re supposed to do what he wants.

That can accrue to his benefit when it works, because it shows how powerful he is. (Indeed, his successful efforts to knock off GOP incumbents in primaries have reinforced that loyalty to Trump is the easiest path for everyone in his party.)

But when his wild gambits push the envelope too far — and increasingly seem to jeopardize the GOP’s chances in November — they reinforce that Trump isn’t the unrestrained leader of his political movement that he’d like to be.

In fact, he’s a historically unpopular president who looks increasingly desperate to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

And judging by the appointment of Pulte, Trump is not stopping anytime soon.