The Easy Stuff

The art of politics is balancing the hard stuff with the easy stuff.

A candidate for office makes outlandish promises on the trail then finds himself obliged to make good when he wins. Mass deportation, budget-balancing tariffs, peace in Ukraine, cheaper eggs: That’s the hard stuff.

The hard stuff takes time and Americans are impatient. The candidate’s supporters need to feel that progress is being made while they wait for their hero to deliver on his grander policy vision. To tide them over and stave off disappointment, he resorts to the easy stuff.

Think of the easy stuff as policy lagniappes, little bonus goodies that no one expected or really wanted but which are offered as a token of gratitude to one’s customers.

The easy stuff supplied by the second Trump administration in its first 48 hours consists mostly of revanchist nomenclatural nonsense designed to give “America First” nationalists a thrill. Going forward, the executive branch will refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” Denali as “Mount McKinley,” and foreign nationals as “aliens.” It’s all very freedom fries, jingoism on the cheap.

Trump’s infatuation with annexing Greenland can be understood that way too, although of course there’s more to that than linguistic rigmarole. Menacing a small Scandinavian ally whose population is smaller than New York City’s over an island territory whose population could fit inside Old Yankee Stadium is the dictionary definition of jingoism on the cheap.

The hard stuff takes time, so the new president is doing the easy stuff early. 

Another easy thing he did this week is to make it meaningfully more likely that his former national security adviser, John Bolton, will be murdered.

Bolton has spent the last five years under threat of death from the Iranian government. Shortly before he left the first Trump White House, he urged the then-president to order the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the immensely powerful head of Iran’s Quds Force. A few months later, Trump followed through. Iran has borne Bolton a lethal grudge ever since.

The Iranians are serious about it too. In 2022, the Justice Department indicted a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for plotting to have him and, allegedly, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo killed. By that point, due to the gravity of the risk, Joe Biden had already ordered round-the-clock Secret Service protection for Bolton. That protection continued until this week, when Bolton got a call from the agency informing him that the new president intended to end his security detail.

“Disappointed but not surprised” is how he described his reaction to the news.

When reporters asked Trump about his decision, he framed it as a sort of efficiency measure. “I think that was enough time,” he said of Bolton’s Secret Service protection. “You take a job, you want to do a job—we’re not going to have security on people for the rest of their lives. Why should we?” He then proceeded to inform the press that Bolton is “dumb” and a “warmonger.”

Let’s unpack this.

Retribution.

It bears emphasizing that the reason Bolton’s life is in danger in the first place is because of something Trump did.

He may have targeted Suleimani on Bolton’s advice, but the decision as president to pull the trigger was his—and he’s never regretted it, as far as I’m aware. Taking out the Quds Force chief is a key item in his presidential CV, in fact. Whether you’re a traditional pro-Israel hawk or a right-wing populist who relishes seeing your idol push bad guys around, Trump liquidating a figure as sinister as Suleimani was an act of audacious “strength” worth cheering.

For years, Democrats have criticized Republicans for being too bellicose toward Iran, with Bolton himself often cited as a paradigm example. But when Bolton’s life came under threat from the regime, Joe Biden took the true “America First” approach by treating the former NSA’s safety as a priority for his administration. Bolton himself gratefully noted on Tuesday that his Secret Service detail remained in place despite the fact that he disparaged Biden’s foreign policy repeatedly since 2021.

You might think that a president whose policy landed Bolton on the hit list to begin with would feel at least the same degree of responsibility to guarantee his security. At a minimum, whatever animosity the new White House harbors toward Bolton should be dwarfed by its animosity toward Iran, enough so to want to deprive the mullahs of the moral victory they’d enjoy by successfully exacting an eye for an eye for Suleimani.

You might think. But we all know better, don’t we?

Another remarkable angle in Trump’s decision to yank Bolton’s Secret Service detail is the timing. This was a Day 1 priority for him.

According to the New York Times, Bolton got the call about his security being rescinded sometime on Monday evening, less than 12 hours after Trump was sworn in. That would have been around the same time that the new president was signing shock-and-awe executive orders on major priorities like ending birthright citizenship for children of migrants and rescuing TikTok from ruination. Amid a flurry of activity involving the “hard stuff” of his presidency, in other words, and at a moment when he was being feted by Washington and his fans, his longstanding bitterness toward Bolton still occupied enough space in the forefront of his mind that he made sure his former adviser wouldn’t feel personally safe for so much as a single day of his new term.

To him, giving an order to expose Bolton to physical danger was the easiest of “easy stuff,” I’m sure. He promised retribution and here it was, blood red, bright and early on Day 1.

And it was retribution, notwithstanding Trump’s press-conference babbling about the supposed financial burdens of providing lifetime security to federal officials. This is a guy who called for the total elimination of the debt ceiling just a month ago, remember; he’s not sweating the budgetary implications of having to add a few more Secret Service agents, I promise.

He did the same thing to Bolton that he’s done many times to Liz Cheney, dressing up a personal vendetta as a quasi-principled disagreement over policy. He never cared that Cheney was a “warmonger” until she embarrassed him by voting to impeach him for January 6. He cared even less about Bolton’s long history of “warmongering” when he made him his top adviser on national security. He hates Bolton for the same reason he hates anyone, because Bolton has a low opinion of him and isn’t shy about expressing it—which he began doing in the thick of the 2020 presidential campaign, damaging Trump’s chances of winning.

The closest the president and his supporters have gotten to articulating a legitimate grievance against his former aide is objecting that Bolton was reckless in handling classified information. If you don’t find that ironic to the point of hilarity, you’re probably a Fox News viewer.

The last time Bolton had any official interaction with a Trump administration, it involved the Justice Department trying to silence him in dubious ways to spare the president from his criticism. His latest interaction with the new Trump administration can be understood that way as well. If Trump can’t force him to shut up, maybe the Iranians can.

Protection.

“Ending John Bolton’s security detail (not clearance) has one major consequence,” my colleague, Sarah Isgur, wrote on Tuesday. “Either nobody sane will be willing [to] go into [government] or those that do will refuse to stand up to the bad guys if a future president is going to let them be killed [because] of political differences.”

There’s good sense there. Various Trump toadies on social media have been screeching at Bolton, who’s well off, to pay for his own security, but that misses the point of having the feds supply it. Protecting Bolton on the taxpayer dime is a way to reassure future government employees who might not have the same means that they too will be protected if the need arises.

So Sarah has a point, in theory. But is it really true that Bolton’s fate will discourage capable people from joining the government?

Michael Waltz, Trump’s newest national security adviser, may be a cretin, but he doesn’t strike me as insane and I doubt he’ll refuse to stand up to the bad guys. My guess is that he expects future presidents, Democratic or Republican, will behave the way Biden did toward Bolton, notwithstanding the precedent Trump just set. And he’s probably (probably!) right.

The lesson for government officials from the Bolton episode isn’t that they might fear for their lives someday if they dare to make enemies of Iran or Russia or China or North Korea. The lesson for them is that they might fear for their lives if they dare to make an enemy of Trump.

It can’t be a coincidence that Bolton’s security detail was pulled at about the same time on Monday that Trump was signing an order granting clemency to the January 6 insurrectionists. Per Axios, that decision also appears to have qualified as “easy stuff” for him despite the obvious risk to the public in freeing a group containing hundreds of violent offenders and a few handfuls of seditionist militiamen. “F— it, release ‘em all,” Trump reportedly said to aides when deciding how sweeping his pardons and commutations should be.

“Release ‘em all.” That’s how easy it was. I don’t know what else the angry cops who voted for him expected after he spent months on the campaign trail telling anyone who’d listen that he aimed to free the “hostages.” What did they think an authoritarian meant when he wheezed about “law and order”? That he would prioritize fighting crime over his own power to commit crime and get away with it?

He just pardoned the guy who created the dark web’s hub for drug-dealing, for cripes sake. He doesn’t care about crime.

Look at photos of the crowd on January 6 and you’ll find the “thin blue line” flag on display amid the cop-punching, seemingly without irony. That’s because Trump and the thuggish postliberals in his base value the police in the same shallow way they value patriotism and the military and religious faith, as bulwarks of traditional authority against cultural enemies rather than as neutral enforcers of social order. When the cops at the Capitol dared to take sides against them by protecting Congress, the mob could beat them while brandishing the “thin blue line” banner without seeing any contradiction. When brandished by nationalists, that flag doesn’t represent respect for law or for the police. It’s a battle standard of traditional authority against any modern element that would usurp it.

Impunity for the J6ers and insecurity for John Bolton amount to Trump adopting a similar ethos of raw authority for presidential power. Whether you did violence to the state by trying to overthrow it or face violence from a foreign state trying to murder you, how the executive branch treats you will depend on whether the president personally regards you as a cultural friend or enemy. There’s no sense of duty—patriotic in Bolton’s case and legal in the case of jailed insurrectionists—that will compel him to protect his enemies or to punish his friends. There is only authority, to be wielded as he deems fit in his supreme discretion.

And so, if your personal safety depends on the support of an Article II agency, the events of the last 48 hours amount to quasi-official notice to adjust your friendliness toward Donald Trump accordingly.

It seems bad that an unstable demagogue who commands devout loyalty from violent goons should have the power to order law enforcement not to protect those he dislikes from violent goons, but I suppose we litigated that on Election Day. Vox populi, vox dei.

Risk.

A thought experiment in closing. How do we imagine Trump will react if Iranian terrorists really do murder Bolton?

Having that happen after he pulled the victim’s Secret Service detail would potentially be quite a pickle for the new White House. It also might explain why Joe Biden was so generous in providing Bolton with security. He must have realized that he would have been pummeled by critics if he had refused and the man had ended up dead. For all their animosity toward Bolton, Trump and MAGA surely would have exploited the matter as proof that the then-president and his party of liberals were disgracefully weak on protecting Americans from Iran.

The same sort of risk is present for the new White House, arguably more so since Trump is withdrawing protection that’s already in place and plainly doing so to satisfy a grudge. That he’s willing to needlessly run that risk can only mean that the pleasure of possibly seeing John Bolton killed is worth enough to him that he’s prepared to absorb a certain degree of political damage to try to make it happen. He doesn’t care how it looks.

I mean, does this sound like a guy who’s worried about public perceptions? Centrist voters might cringe a bit at Trump’s vindictiveness toward Bolton, but c’mon: They know what they signed up for.

There might not even be much political damage. Democrats and Trump Republicans both despise Bolton for different reasons; certainly, many righties who would have lashed Biden for not protecting him will revel in the demise of one of Trump’s most “disloyal” former deputies. And true-blue postliberals would celebrate the murder of a notorious hawk unabashedly, I suspect. Tucker Carlson’s inevitable monologue extolling the Hezbollah fanatic who did the deed and offering suggestions on which “deep stater” should be next will be an all-timer.

Besides, in fairness, blood lust towards one’s opponents isn’t strictly a MAGA thing. Probably the single most disgusting political spectacle of the last six months is Luigi-mania, and that’s mostly (but not entirely) a left-wing phenomenon. Americans have gotten used to unhinged bipartisan political viciousness. The difference between left and right in matters like these is mainly that on only one side does that viciousness trickle up to the very top.

I doubt President Trump would feel inclined to retaliate against Iran for Bolton’s murder, any more than he’s inclined to punish China for getting millions of American kids addicted to its dopey social-media propaganda op. Trump likes TikTok because he benefits personally from TikTok; presumably he’d like to see one of his harsher critics on the right dead for the same reason.

In the end, maybe that’s an argument for Iran to leave John Bolton alone. They want to avenge Suleimani and punish Trump? Forget trying to kill him and start trying to book Bolton on American cable news shows. Having to watch him on television every day belittling his intelligence, morals, strategic acumen, and worldview will drive Trump batty.