'Driving without guardrails': Conservative outlet buries Trump over 'juvenile' mistakes

Conservative news site The Bulwark recently dressed down President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

“Every White House makes mistakes,” writes journalist Sam Stein. "… But the Trump mess-ups stand out both because there are so many of them and because of how indifferent the president and his team are toward pursuing fixes.”

Stein ticks down a long list of goofs, beginning with the administration’s unauthorized letter to Harvard University that was so loaded with onerous demands that the Ivy League institution had no choice but to fight it. Others include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being forced to delete items from a incorrectly compiled list of “savings” and having to rehire thousands of wrongly terminated employees who were working on nuclear weapons monitoring and Ebola prevention.

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But what fascinates Stein is not so much the widening list but the administration’s lack-a-daisy attitude toward it.

“Rarely, if ever, are remedial steps taken," Stein writes. "Often, Trump’s team will compound an error by refusing to acknowledge it at all, or aggressively defending it as if it had been the approach they’d wanted to take all along."

Stein pointed to the initial Signalgate scandal revealing the administration’s disregard for classified material. Instead of moving forward with corrections and safeguards, the administration acted to “downplay classification and rationalize the use of encryption apps.”

Instead of correcting the “math blunder" behind Trump's widely panned tariffs, the administration hailed it “as a properly aggressive means to rebalance trade deficits, nearly bringing the global economy to a free fall before Trump advisers resorted to desperate, juvenile measures to pause the pain.”

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Rather than calming Harvard leaders after the unauthorized letter, they “used the university’s shock at the demands … to rationalize hurting the university even more." And instead of bringing back Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia after mistakenly deporting him to an El Salvador prison, the administration “has taken extraordinary steps to keep him in El Salvador, in defiance of court orders. Trump would rather risk a constitutional crisis than fix this error.”

Stein also marvels at the number of people willing to “believe the White House isn’t making missteps at all—that these are all really just carefully crafted plans by the president’s team to push the lines of presidential authority,” and he expressed anxiety about the nation’s independent agencies, its laws, and a Congress that does not appear willing to push back. There is also the issue of staffers “with the courage to stand up.”

These guardrails, he writes, are either being “weakened or outright eliminated,” and without them Trump’s threats must be taken both seriously and literally.

"Governing without guardrails is like driving without guardrails," he argues. "You might survive just fine if you’ve got someone steady at the wheel. But with someone reckless in charge things are likelier to veer toward disaster."

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Read the full Bulwark article here.