How the battles Trump loves to wage explain his presidency – Egypt Independent

CNN  — 

To understand Donald Trump’s second term, just look at the fights he picks.

The president and his top officials spent this week escalating confrontations over mass deportations, elite universities and transgender athletes on emerging fronts of his “common sense revolution.”

Each is obviously an attempt to please the loyal MAGA political base and other elements of the coalition on which Trump anchored his two election wins.

Trump’s team may also be trying to change the subject from his trade war chaos and his stalled Ukraine peace effort. But the idea that he’s engaged in an endless cycle of distraction to hide his failures became a cliche in his first term. In his second, it’s a lazy critique that fails to encapsulate his often-fateful acts of far greater substance aimed at transforming American life and the world.

The administration fought on multiple fronts on Wednesday. It sued Maine for refusing to apply its transgender high school athlete ban. Top officials furiously worked to discredit an undocumented migrant mistakenly sent, without due process, to an El Salvadorian mega-prison who embodies their ruthless immigration policy. And they doubled down on an attempt to shape the policies, faculty, and student body at Harvard University as part of a crackdown on a bastion of liberal power.

The controversies share some common traits that offer insight into Trump’s leadership. They demonstrate the president’s attempt to apply vast presidential power, often based on questionable constitutional grounds. All are likely to feature protracted legal battles that could ultimately test whether the country will tip into a constitutional crisis if the White House ignores judges’ rulings.

Almost every showdown reflects the essential dynamics driving Trump’s character and politics: He chooses fights that demonstrate his strength over potentially weaker opponents. And his team adopts the relentless win-lose mindset that has defined Trump’s life as a real estate baron, reality star and president.

There’s always an element of “owning the libs” about Trump’s approach in the choreographing of battles designed to crush progressive sensitivities. Often, they leave his opponents forced to defend unpopular institutions or constituencies that offer few political payoffs – like undocumented migrants – leading to hours of mockery on conservative media.

But the administration’s plans aren’t just tactical. There’s also philosophical strategy at work. While the president sometimes seems uninterested in policy, some of his most influential second-term operatives are deeply ideological. Beyond Trump’s craving for disruption, there’s a coherent effort to destroy the pillars of the liberal establishment, to turn back civil rights and progressive liberal social victories, and even to reverse demographic change with immigration policy.

And these fights also show that three months in, Trump’s sweeping claims of presidential authority risk taking the country down an authoritarian slope. There was a whiff of totalitarianism in the air this week when Trump played along with El Salvador’s self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” in the Oval Office.

And a wrecking-ball president unleashing economic upheaval and carving even deeper national divides is posing a critical political question: Is this what voters thought they were getting or wanted from an election in which the country’s main concern seemed to be lowering prices after a punishing surge of inflation?

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has the misfortune of becoming a human pawn in a titanic political clash that those waging it cannot afford to lose.

The sheet metal worker and undocumented migrant is incarcerated in a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador after being expelled in defiance of a judge’s order that he not be deported to his native country. At first, the administration admitted in court that it made an administrative error. But it is now misrepresenting a Supreme Court ruling that it must “facilitate” Garcia’s return amid a brewing constitutional showdown.

Immigration was foundational for Trump’s political career. He’d barely descended the golden escalator in his New York skyscraper in 2015 to launch his campaign when he began slandering Mexican immigrants. In his 2024 presidential bid, he falsely claimed foreign nations were emptying prisons and asylums to create an alien “invasion” of the US to exploit the Biden administration’s failure to initially recognize and address surges of undocumented migrants.

Trump’s demagoguery on migration has often worked. It animated nativist elements of his party and built a coalition that led to his GOP domination. And in a CNN/SSRS poll last month, 51% approved of his handling of immigration. It was the only one of a suite of issues in which he had majority support.

That strength explains why Trump often returns to this magic formula when he’s facing heavy political weather. And it explains the politics of the White House’s refusal to back down on Abrego Garcia.

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned on Wednesday that he’s “not coming back to our country.” Officials accuse Abrego Garcia of being a terrorist, an MS-13 gang member and a threat to the safety of Americans, although he has no criminal convictions and they haven’t produced public evidence of their claims.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted a protection order obtained by Abrego Garcia’s wife in 2021 after he allegedly assaulted her. She cranked up the political histrionics, accusing Democrats of rushing to defend “an illegal criminal, foreign terrorist, gang member, but also an apparent woman beater.” She added, “Nothing will change the fact that Abrego Garcia will never be a Maryland father; he will never live in the United States of America again.”

Garcia Abrego’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told CNN in a statement that she hadn’t pursued the matter in court, that they were able to work through their difficulties and that their marriage “only grew stronger.”

This all reflected a potentially defining moment for Trump’s immigration policy. To bend would provoke questions about whether some of the other hundreds of migrants sent to El Salvador were also denied due process because of flimsy evidence that they are gang members. It could potentially undermine public support for Trump on a rare issue where he polls well. Abrego Garcia’s return could also lessen the culture of fear the administration has been creating with detentions and deportations designed to vastly slow arrivals at the border.

And perhaps most importantly, a climbdown could puncture the conceit that the courts lack authority to constrain or compel the president’s behavior.

At the same time, however, the plight of Abrego Garcia also risks become a broader political issue around perceived White House cruelty that could begin to erode Trump’s relatively strong ratings on immigration.

Bondi, a star of the MAGA movement, also led another key administration push Wednesday, suing Maine over its refusal to comply with Trump’s ban on transgender athletes in high school sports. The lawsuit alleges the state is violating Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools that receive federal aid. A clash is now set between presidential authority and state power. Maine says Trump’s order conflicts with its own Human Rights Act.

The lawsuit could be a harbinger of similar efforts by Trump to use presidential power to enforce social policy in other states.

This is another fight the White House loves.

The president raised the issue in his meeting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Monday. “We have people that fight to the death because they think men should be able to play in women’s sports. And some of those sports, it wouldn’t matter much, but it still matters, but some of them are very dangerous for women,” he said.

On the campaign trail, Trump frequently mocked trans athletes and bemoaned what conservatives say is the destruction of girls’ sports, despite instances of transgender athletes competing in women’s competitions being relatively rare.

Trump is tapping into an issue that is perceived as a moral outrage in his own coalition, including among evangelicals and social conservatives. He’s also making a mainstream play with a crossover issue for some more moderate voters, like the suburban independents who helped him win all seven swing states in November.

When Trump argues that he’s voicing “common sense,” he’s pitching suburban moms and dads worried about potential lost opportunities for their daughters if transgender athletes somehow come to dominate women’s sports. And by initiating classic backlash politics, he’s tapping into perceptions that progressives have gone far too far on social issues – in a way that has alienated some voters.

But as with immigration, Trump’s approach victimizes individuals, creates a culture of fear among a marginalized community and raises the question of whether a president has the personal power to dictate the scope of individual rights.

The standoff with elite US universities is another classic example of Trumpism in action.

He’s targeting institutions that conservatives believe are dominated by progressive extremists. Top colleges are also a source of the expertise and intellectual pursuits to which Trumpism is a reaction. And the clash raises suspicions of presidential overreach.

The populist commander-in-chief seems delighted that Harvard – perhaps the nation’s greatest citadel of elitism – fought back, unlike some other top schools that fueled his power grab by bending to his wishes.

“Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called ‘future leaders,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday, encapsulating his political incentives in a dispute in which he’s threatening to cancel the university’s tax exemption.

But there’s also a deeply ideological goal underpinning the attack on higher education. The White House is using anti-Israel protests that saw antisemitic incidents on some campuses to crack down on university administrators. But the president is also pursuing policies that could deliver for ideological conservatives, who have spent years pushing back on affirmative action policies and efforts to diversify faculty and student populations in the wake of the civil rights movement.