The End of a Hard Week

Posting has been light. It's mostly because the news has been so bad and so copious.

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to apologize for the relatively light posting this week. This has been due to a number of reasons. Commencement ceremonies at Tufts University and the Fletcher School culminated last weekend, for example. I have a newfound respect for the deans and college presidents who have to gladhand students, parents, alumni, and everyone else over the course of a week. That is truly a marathon and not a sprint. Furthermore, with the end of the semester comes the beginning of a whole new heap of administrative responsibilities coming my way.

So I took a few days to recover. And that is a mistake in 2025, because after even a brief respite the news starts dogpiling on one’s cerebral cortex faster than can be processed.

In other words: as someone who is an international relations professor, a university administrator, and a Jew, this week has been a fucking horror show.

The news coming out of DC has ranged from mostly awful to truly awful. Just to list the bullet points:

• The Trump administration seems bound and determined to eviscerate all semblance of state capacity outside of immigration enforcement;

• The Supreme Court issued a somewhat under-the-radar ruling that will make rebuilding that state capacity extremely difficult;

• The House of Representatives passed a bill that, if signed into law, accomplishes little beyond distributing wealth upwards while spectacularly widening the deficit;

• President Trump decided to knock the gold-plated “Number Of Days Since Berating A Head of State in the Oval Office” sign back to zero. With a premeditated video display, Trump went after South African president Cyril Ramaphosa alleging “white genocide.” It was a horseshit claim backed up with horseshit evidence — but hey, at least it was super-racist!

• The Trump administration went ahead and formally accepted the white elephant plane from Qatar — at the same time that his administration has targeted U.S. universities for accepting money from foreign governments.

• The administration further escalated its war on Harvard in myriad ways. This is part and parcel of a wider war on higher education that will destroy American soft power, one of the country’s leading export sectors, and American economic productivity.

• The worst part, the most infuriating part of this all, is that the Trump administration’s war on higher education is being done in the name of the Jews. Every effort has been made to link the horrific shooting of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington, DC with events on campus, a link that social scientists would characterize as ranging from “tendentious” to “nonexistent.”

• Trump decided to reignite his trade wars, conflicts that will either end with higher stagflation or Trump backing down — or, by 2026, both.

Now is normally the time when the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World points to the hidden good news: the way that courts have repeatedly struck down the Trump administration’s craziest actions, or how institutions that have bent the knee to Trump’s extortionary behavior are suffering, or even how the idiots who paid to dine with Trump experienced their very own Fyre Festival.

After this week, however, I am afraid that the UnPopulist’s Andy Craig is saying what I am feeling:

It’s easy to get bogged down in the mire of so many crazy and dangerous things happening at such a rapid pace—the “flood the zone with shit” tactic, as Steve Bannon memorably put it. It is important to resist the big picture being crowded out by the nearly impossible task of responding to each outrage individually and in isolation. And the big picture is we now have a federal executive, the most powerful official on the planet, acting on the firm belief that he is not constrained by the rule of law and determined to run roughshod over the other two branches of government.

America has been flung into a constitutional crisis in the most massive and fundamental way imaginable, ruled by a regime which is not merely doing unconstitutional things but is anti-constitutional at its very core….

The interaction of our various institutions will be disjointed and irregular, and in many cases will lead to unusual and unexpected outcomes. What matters in many cases will be which actors and institutions have the strongest popular backing and, with it, the most credible threat of superior force. The ultimate backstop, as always, is the social sanction which assigns legitimacy to those who wield the state’s monopoly on the use of force.

With no agreed-upon framework to mediate these contests, executive, legislative, judicial, and state-level actors will clash based on sheer political capital, not deference to a unified constitutional system defining their respective roles. These struggles won’t necessarily erupt into violence, a possibility still remote and hopefully to be avoided, but the threat of force will loom over every interaction. Each decision will hinge on the perception of popular support and legitimacy—who can muster more real or virtual mobs—rather than adherence to written constitutional law and settled constitutional norms.

If this populist age implies a battle for public opinion, the good news is that almost everything Trump does is pretty unpopular among the people paying attention. The bad news is that, as with the 2024 election, Trump retains the support of those not paying attention.

A month or two ago, a friend who occasionally reads Drezner’s World suggested that I needed to be more optimistic in this newsletter. It is true that my brand is an optimistic one — heck, I still think we would survive a zombie apocalypse. This has been a bad week for America, however, and I am not going to sugarcoat that fact. No dollop of optimism will help.

I’ll get back on the horse again after Memorial Day comes to a close. Until then, enjoy the end of a hard week and a hopefully better weekend.