In back-to-back reversals, the Trump administration folds under pressure
The story that the White House expects Americans to believe is that Donald Trump and his team are impervious to pressure. The president does what he wants, when he wants, and the more people urge him to choose a different course, the more likely he is to stand his ground.
The narrative, however, isn’t true. The Republican administration reverses course under pressure with some regularity.
We saw several examples of this on trade policy last year, for example, giving rise to “TACO” mockery (“Trump Always Chickens Out”). More recently, the White House took steps to back off plans for a $1.776 billion compensation fund, after officials in both parties condemned the idea as an unprecedented “slush fund.”
As last week neared its end, however, Americans saw back-to-back reversals on the same day that helped underscore the larger point.
As June got underway, Trump administration officials announced plans to dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that, as The New York Times reported, “was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.”
There was no real point to the move. The money had already been spent, and the deep-sea instruments were already anchored. But members of Team Trump decided that they simply did not want the information the observation system offered, so they said they’d destroy it.
At least, that was the original idea. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators took steps to block the administration from dismantling the system, insisting that the move would be both illegal and damaging to coastal communities. One day later, Team Trump announced that the observation system would remain in place after all.
As it happens, it was not the only such reversal to reach the public on Thursday afternoon. The Times also reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year moved forward with plans to purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses, which would be used to detain and effectively imprison undocumented immigrants, as part of the administration’s mass-deportation agenda. In all, ICE spent $1 billion in taxpayer money to buy 11 such facilities.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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