A bombshell new report on high-ranking administration officials calling to suspend a constitutional right and invoke the Insurrection Act shows how far President Donald Trump's authoritarian ambitions have retreated since the start of this year.
New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in their forthcoming book that Stephen Miller pushed the president to suspend habeas corpus for accused illegal immigrants, while Vice President JD Vance called on him to use military troops to crack down on protesters in Minnesota, but The Bulwark's Andrew Eggers spotted a silver lining in that "jaw-dropping" report.
"Trump is, above all, a showman," Eggers wrote. "While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately. More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt."
The new reporting on those alarming efforts at the highest level of government serves as a graphic illustration of that, he argued.
"Reading this report was a shocking experience for two reasons," Eggers wrote. "First, obviously, are the merits — it’s insane that any White House would contemplate such measures in peacetime at all. But the piece also yanks the reader back to a time last year when pretty much everything was like this."
This time last year, Eggers wrote, Trump was running roughshod over a government battered and bruised by DOGE, migrants were being disappeared into foreign torture prisons, the National Guard was marching on cities, law firms and universities were fighting administration lawsuits, and the president was threatening to invade Greenland and the Panama Canal.
"This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year," he argued. "It has stayed dead since. Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him."
Courts have blocked man of his plans, and even compliant Republicans are gumming up the works for some of his legislative priorities, and the president has instead focused on slapping his name and coats of paint on buildings around Washington, D.C., or concoct new ways to raid the treasury.
"All this could change, of course," Egger wrote. "It’s far from impossible that Trump — his war concluded, his ICE re-funded, his White House UFC fights all brought to a satisfying conclusion — could seriously reapply himself to recapturing his god-emperor domestic-policy mojo. It’s safe to say that he intends to do this in at least one seriously chilling way: by monkeying with the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections."
"It’s not fun, exactly, to see him and his people squee and gibber while a bloodsport fighter hoots that 'MICHELLE OBAMA IS A MAN!' from a fight cage erected preposterously on the White House lawn," he added. "But these circuses aren’t just intended to trigger the libs and titillate his base — they’re designed to distract both camps from how little the president is actually getting done these days. Compared to where we were last year, it’s a damn good start."