Trump is replacing the nanny state with a daddy state

Now President Donald Trump has arrived for a second term, and he is indeed attacking the Nanny State. But rather than eliminate it, he is turning the idea in a populist, even authoritarian direction. He is replacing the meddlesome Nanny State with an aggressive, paternalistic Daddy State, based on the deference and devotion of his underlings.

Trump is cutting down the size of the bureaucracy with a vengeance. But he isn’t dispersing power; he is consolidating it in the Oval Office and using the considerable weapons at his disposal—tariffs, government grants and contracts, the power of law-enforcement agencies—to pursue the goals he believes he was elected to achieve.

Far from withdrawing federal power from American society, Trump is asserting it in a raw, unpredictable and often unprecedented way. The difference is that the president personally, rather than government agencies, or Congress, or the courts, is its driving force.

Trump supporter Tucker Carlson previewed this philosophy at a pre-election rally last October, when he likened the excesses of American society to the actions of unruly children and then declared: “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home."

In this emerging model, a more muscular president—in effect, the head of the government household—assumes powers once exercised by lawmakers and by independent agencies. He reaches deeper into law enforcement and the decisions of the Justice Department. Perhaps most controversially, he challenges the rights of courts to overturn his actions and even punishes law firms representing those who question him.

The underlying assumption of the Daddy State is that Americans want a president who is large and in charge—and that they asked for one when they re-elected Donald Trump.

Trump allies argue that Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also used executive powers aggressively to impose a liberal agenda on schools, businesses and local governments. Overall, conservative legal scholar Jack Goldsmith said in a recent podcast, the U.S. is “in a period of significant expansion" of executive power spanning presidents of both parties.

But what Trump is doing represents a dramatic acceleration of the trend. “This is unlike anything that has ever occurred in all of American history," says J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who worked to expand presidential power while serving in the Justice Department under President George H.W. Bush. Because Trump has coupled his offensive with attacks on judges who question his authority, Luttig argues, “we’re in a constitutional crisis already."

What is striking about Trump’s onslaught and the support it is receiving within the Republican party is how much it represents a change in conservative thinking. Matthew Continetti, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a history of the conservative movement, says that conservatives once preferred legislative power to executive power and saw Congress as a brake on activist presidents, particularly Franklin Roosevelt.

That started to change during the Watergate scandal and toward the end of the Vietnam War, he says, when conservatives began to think Congress was shackling weakened presidents. They complained about the emergence of what they called a “fourth branch" of government: independent agencies created by Congress and housed in the executive branch but whose powers and leaders were beyond the president’s reach. That, in turn, led conservatives to espouse what they call the “unitary executive theory," which holds that the president should, in fact, exercise full control over all those agencies and their personnel.

Trump has followed that lead. He has fired the head of the National Labor Relations Board, for example, and attempted through executive order to cripple other congressionally authorized agencies. But Trump’s push goes a lot further. He is taking action across a much broader range of issues, advancing an agenda of the right to replace what he sees as an agenda of the left.

He is using the coercive power of federal grants and contracts to force universities and businesses to drop DEI programs and even to get rid of controversial professors and student activists. Though he has ordered the disbanding of the Education Department and declared he wants to return control of education to the states, he has also tried to tell them how to treat transgender students.

Last week he signed an executive order requiring voters to show proof of citizenship to register, moving into an area usually controlled by Congress and the states. At the same time, officers of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement service have been picking up immigrants in localities across the country at an accelerated pace, often with little due process.

While reducing the size of the Internal Revenue Service, Trump may also increase its power in some respects. He has signed an executive order that legal experts say could open the way for the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of charitable organizations if they continue DEI programs, much as it once did for schools deemed racially discriminatory. He is also inserting himself into the marketplace by taking an exceptionally expansive view of his authority to impose tariffs without consulting Congress.

And sometimes he is following a more personal agenda. In recent days, Trump has threatened to remove security clearances and contracts from law firms employing lawyers he believes have improperly pursued him. In perhaps the ultimate assertion of personal power, he has talked repeatedly in recent days of possibly running for a third term, even though that is expressly prohibited by the Constitution.

How this approach is going to work out politically is an open question. The president’s job approval ratings are the highest he’s seen in his two terms, and voters are more likely to say the country is moving in the right direction than they were at the end of Biden’s term.

But there are warning signs. Republicans saw disappointing results in elections this week, with a loss in a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and narrower than expected margins in two special elections in GOP strongholds in Florida. The president’s approval rating, while high for him, is lower than for any other modern president at this stage of his term.

There are also signs of public skepticism about the Daddy State approach. In a poll taken in the early days of Trump’s term, the Pew Research Center found that 65% of Americans said it would be “too risky" to give him more power to deal directly with the nation’s problems. Only a third said that the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if Trump didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.

There is also the political reality that any power Trump establishes for himself will likely be used down the road by a Democratic successor. Perhaps as a result, a kind of backhanded bipartisanship may be emerging. Leaders in both parties have expressed concern about the powers exercised by presidents of the other side—a consensus that might just open the door to rethinking how much untrammeled authority any president should have.

“Yes, we absolutely would prefer a model of more restrained executive power," says Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, a conservative economic think tank generally supportive of Trump. “But the path to that is not going to be one in which Democrats do whatever they want when they are in power and Republicans turn the other cheek and behave responsibly when they are in power." He adds: “It seems to me there is room at this point for some bipartisan rethinking of a dynamic that is approaching mutually assured destruction and would benefit from an arms-control treaty."

Gerald F. Seib is a former executive Washington editor and Capital Journal columnist of The Wall Street Journal and the author of “We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump, a Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution."