Opinion | Who Is Actually Running America?

Well, for all of his self-pitying, whining and complaining, he hasn’t actually made a great case to anybody who hasn’t already been drinking the Kool-Aid that he has rescued the economy. Even Susie Wiles, in her very juicy Vanity Fair piece this month, has been saying that the tariffs were even more painful than she expected. So all of this is not like a glowing testimony to Trump’s — what was it, A-plus-plus-plus self-graded economy. So what does he need to do? I mean, we can’t just keep Grandpa busy. Grandpa needs to do something. I mean, part of it —— So I wrote this week about how we have this strange confluence of a largely checked-out president. I think we can fairly describe Trump as checked out from the business of governance and a court that’s larding the presidency up with a ton of authority and power that it didn’t have before. But in practice, what these two things mean is that we don’t have so much like a unitary executive as we do have a unitary deputy White House chief of staff, right? All of the authority that the presidency has is being exercised by people who are not the president and who are largely unaccountable to anything, to political winds. And who can kind of just pursue their own narrow ideological political goals. It’s the “deep state.” -Using the president’s authority —— -Oh my God, the “deep state” is running the government.