When I worked at the White House, we used to say “governing is different than campaigning.”
You can make all kinds of claims and promises when running for office. But once you’re in charge, you have to watch your words. There are consequences and real-life implications for the things you say at the lectern in the Briefing Room or behind the Resolute Desk. Your words can easily become policy.
The second Donald Trump administration is already showing that it doesn’t understand this distinction.
You could see this dynamic in action on Thursday, as Trump made outlandish claims about a midair collision near Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. With the bodies of the victims still being recovered from the icy waters of the Potomac River, Trump blamed former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a diversity, equity and inclusion effort at the Federal Aviation Administration that had been on the books since 2013. There is no evidence to support these claims.
It would have been a fine performance for a hot-headed minor celebrity seeking attention.
It would have been a fine performance for a hot-headed minor celebrity seeking attention in a podcast interview. For the sitting president, it was an embarrassment.
The Trump administration has taken a similarly blasé approach to the Constitution, seeking to undermine a century and a half of precedent to argue that birthright citizenship — a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in the wake of the Civil War — could be undone by an executive order. The arguments presented for this wild claim are laughably thin, twisting the historical record to argue against the plain meaning of words.
In other cases, the Trump team doesn’t even seem to agree on what it’s saying. First, the Office of Management and Budget sent out a broad and poorly worded memo ordering trillions of dollars in congressionally approved federal spending to be frozen. Then, when a federal judge blocked that effort, the White House rescinded the memo, while arguing that the underlying effort was still in place. The new decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.”
The White House had hoped that rescinding the memo would undercut the court effort to block the move, but Leavitt’s bewildering social media post just became more fodder for the legal challenge.
And then there’s the plan for mass layoffs of federal workers hatched by Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk. On Tuesday, millions of federal workers received an email with a so-called “deferred resignation offer.” The email claimed that any employee who voluntarily stepped down before Feb. 6 would receive pay and benefits until the end of September. The email and the offer sounded so sketchy that some recipients reportedly thought it was a phishing attempt.
The offer was described by many people as a “buyout,” but that’s not really accurate. There are strict rules about what can be offered to federal workers for a buyout that this seems to violate. Instead, the offer seemed to be more like something from the movie “Office Space,” with the made-up Department of Government Efficiency posting on social media that it would be free time to vacation or “just watch movies and chill.”
That this offer was coming from a Musk-led commission supposedly charged with cutting federal spending made it all the more bizarre. What’s more wasteful than giving people taxpayer-funded salaries to binge-watch the new season of “Severance”? Why is Musk — who is not a government employee — anywhere near the Office of Personnel Management?
This campaign of distraction and obfuscation is intended to conceal the fact that the Trump administration is implementing an agenda straight from the pages of the Project 2025 conservative playbook. Back in June, we spoke to Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, on “The Weekend.” Roberts proclaimed, “The radical left has seen the administrative state as the fourth branch of government.” He also foreshadowed an effort to “devolve power” from government agencies. Back in 2021, JD Vance echoed the same sentiment. “We should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left,” Vance declared. That plan is now coming to fruition. Over the next four years, we will be constantly bombarded with these false claims, contradictions and reversals. The Trump administration is hoping to wear us down into compliance. We can fight back by insisting that words have meaning, that laws matter and that the Constitution means what it says. I, for one, will not comply. For more thought-provoking insights from Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC. Lynox Norman contributed.
Symone D. Sanders Townsend is an author and a co-host of "The Weeknight." 
