Trump's Easy Wins are Over. Here's What's Coming.
From tech to labor, the list of problems facing the 47th president is long, and daunting, and full of complexities no elected leader has ever navigated before.
Scheduling note: I neglected to warn you that I’d be off on Monday for the holiday, I’m sorry about that. In honor of his birthday, and to apologize for the oversight, here’s a half-hour clip of a 38-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. patiently explaining the fight for equality to an NBC reporter 11 months before his assassination. Put it on while you do dishes tonight. It’s incredible.
A common piece of advice for the incoming CEO of a company, head of an academic department, or President of the United States is to notch a few “easy wins” right away. Nothing too fancy, but visible and rapid, such that you can project early competence and build some political momentum.
President Donald Trump ticked off a mountain of easy wins on Monday, as the memory of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. during an ostensible federal holiday was eclipsed by daylong wall-to-wall coverage of the inauguration, and then by the president’s pen. You likely know about the big executive orders, like the sweeping pardon of nearly 1600 January 6th rioters, the gutting of protections for transgender people, and the declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. Here are a few others that jumped out at me as being deeply destructive while also requiring no real presidential effort.
White house staff can now receive top-secret clearances without the vetting that roots out potential conflicts of interest or foreign entanglements. Meanwhile those who signed a letter suggesting that the national furor over Hunter Biden’s laptop might be Russian disinformation had their clearances revoked.
A national energy emergency declaration makes it possible to toss aside environmental protections and review processes.
A review of any and all federal regulations that might “burden” the development of energy sources like coal and natural gas could end many or most restrictions on them.
Withdrawal from the World Health Organization means leaving Earth’s preeminent scientific body for the study of everything from traffic deaths to emerging pandemics.
Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords means exiting a planetwide effort to save our species from death by climate catastrophe.
The creation of a new agency run officially and unofficially by a group of unelected billionaires and their acolytes will institute possible massive cuts to basic services across government.
Easy wins indeed.
And all of this after 24 hours of relentlessly casual yet jarring upheaval. On Sunday night, not-yet-president Trump offered cryptic thanks to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, for his knowledge of “those vote-counting computers” in Pennsylvania. Musk on Monday gave an exuberant Nazi salute on stage. Inauguration proceedings were held inside, away from any possible sights or sounds of protest. And in seats typically reserved for a president’s family members, the heads of Google, Meta, and Amazon were on the dais with Trump, who won on promises to champion the working class.
These are likely to be some of the last easy wins of the second Trump presidency, because an entirely separate mountain range of difficult wins — perhaps even impossible problems — is just out of sight.
As Barack Obama has described it, the nature of being president is that when a question makes its way to that person’s desk, it’s guaranteed to be almost unanswerable.
The black-and-white questions never made it to me — somebody else on my staff would have already answered them. And while few decisions in life are as complex as the ones you face in the Oval Office, I did walk away from my eight years as president with some thoughts on how to approach tough questions.…Rather than let myself get paralyzed in the quest for a perfect solution, or succumb to the temptation to just go with my gut every time, I created a sound decision-making process — one where I really listened to the experts, followed the facts, considered my goals and weighed all of that against my principles. Then, no matter how things turned out, I would at least know I had done my level best with the information in front of me.
By this advice, President Trump will soon require a round-the-clock board of experts for the problems about to land in his lap.
COVID is not the last pandemic we’re likely to see in our lifetime, or maybe even this decade. The day before Trump’s inauguration, the first case of avian flu was detected in a commercial flock of chickens in Georgia, roughly 100 miles from Atlanta. The pathogen — which is believed to kill one in two people it infects — has not yet gained the ability to move between humans, but every time it enters the biological vastness of something like a commercial facility, it gets that many more chances to mutate.
The labor market is rebelling against all normal measurements. The billionaires who flanked Trump onstage are laying off tens of thousands of the highest-paid and best-educated workers in the world, thinning the wellspring by which trickle-down economics is supposed to shower money on the people beneath, and destroying the expectations of a generation raised to believe that one could do well while doing good. But the narrative of unemployment is defying the traditional story arc. Since COVID there are somehow not enough people to work the available jobs in America. But simultaneously a rising number of people are still unsuccessfully looking for work for 27 weeks or longer.
The president of Russia has plans to invade and absorb nations beyond Ukraine, such as Belarus, according to leaked strategy documents from inside the Kremlin. And his recent willingness to use medium-range ballistic missiles in an attack on Kyiv have longtime observers wringing their hands over his increasing unpredictability. (As one BBC analyst put it, Putin is “a car with no reverse gear and no brakes.”)
And that’s just the first mountain range facing this administration. Hidden behind it are still more daunting monoliths, ones you probably won’t know about in advance. Here’s an overlooked one that has me worried:
China’s economy is in a tailspin, and the only respite for its apocalyptic real estate crash and the collapse of so many of its tech giants has been its exports, which allowed the country to claim 5% growth in 2024. Trump’s promised tariffs will, of course, cut into that one bright spot, and China’s economic hostility to the United States will likely only increase.
China will, as a result, even more jealously guard whatever dominance it can in vital future-focused industries, such as electric vehicles. In 2024, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ford CEO Jim Farley pointed out with alarm that 70% of the world’s electric vehicles are made in China, and that the country has utterly outpaced the United States when it comes to investing in technology and infrastructure around battery production and charging. In that appearance, Farley mentioned that China was beginning to dominate the production of lithium iron phosphate (LFP), a replacement for the current battery standard, lithium ion, that makes cheaper, more efficient batteries with no fire risk. American automakers are eager to build LFP into new EVs. But China controls nearly all global production of this essential future technology.
On January 10th, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce proposed rules that would restrict the export of the cathode powders that make LFPs possible, meaning that companies outside China could not produce LFP batteries themselves, and would be entirely reliant on Chinese companies to sell the materials to them. China would as a result be practically the world’s only source for those materials. President Trump is facing a world in which the raw materials of our most important future industries are controlled by an increasingly hostile economic enemy. And that’s not to mention the semiconductors that make everything from smartphones to toasters possible. We rely on Taiwan to produce 60% them (and 90% of the most advanced kinds). China has, of course, threatened to invade that nation for decades. The military analysts and advisors I’ve interviewed about that possibility say that life in Taiwan depends heavily on external sources of food and essentials, and that there is no way to defend our interests in the island nation without horrific casualties. A congressional report on the situation there suggests that surrender is perfectly plausible, as “it is not clear what costs—in terms of economic security, physical safety and security, and lives—Taiwan’s people would be willing or able to bear in the face of PRC armed aggression.”
President Trump has always been primarily a performer, rather than a policy maker, and his actions on inauguration day were brilliant theater. Declaring the end of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the federal level, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico are the kind of empty yet politically astute moves that give him easy wins and days of narrative-driving media coverage. But the job will never again be this easy after the celebrations and pen strokes of this week. The plane cannot fly itself, and the mountains over which his administration must pilot the country are big, and uncharted, and hidden from view.