If Trump is So Unpopular, Why are Institutions Capitulating?

During the first Trump administration, I worked for a think tank. Those were odd years for think tanks, because the GOP, under Trump, largely abandoned its interest in public policy, and so largely abandoned its interest in public policy analysis. Instead, it was about posturing and power.

Maybe a year or so in, there was an extended conversation about how to talk about Trump and Trumpism. As a think tank, you engage in policy analysis, not grand theorizing about the state of political culture. So should think tank scholars be saying things like, "Trump is an authoritarian and desires to destroy democratic institutions to instantiate an autocracy?" Or should you instead just say, "This policy the Trump administration has proposed would lead to bad results?"

Bound up in that was a question of access. If you want to influence public policy, you need the ear of the people directing policy. And that means a lot of people—in the legislature, the administration, and the administrative agencies—who are in the president's party and support his vision of America. Telling them you don't think their policies will have positive results is one thing. You can say that while maintaining access. But having your scholars out there saying Trump and the GOP instead want to destroy the foundations of our liberal society, overthrow the constitution, and rebuild America as an autocratic personalist regime? That's likely to lose you some of the friends you need to move the short term policy needle.

Hence the debate. It was a genuine one, and hardly unique, playing out in versions around DC. It's also what came to mind when I read the two news stories about Apple and Google pulling apps from their app stores which were helping people alert each other to ICE agents in their neighborhoods. Because here was a capitulation—and the language made it clear that's what happened—by two of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world, and I understood why they did it. And that why, I think, is a version of the debate think tanks had during Trump's first administration. (I've been out of that world now for going on four years, so I don't know what kinds of debates are happening during Trump's second administration, but I imagine the "He's destroying the constitutional order and we shouldn't be afraid to say so" side has even more weight behind it this time.)

First, Apple.

Apple pulls ICEBlock from the App Store

ICEBlock reportedly has 1.1 million users.

Today, Bondi took credit for the app’s removal, saying to Fox News Digital, “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so. ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed.”

Pam Bondi is certainly taking this as a capitulation, and the app's developer agrees.

ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron is quoted in the same report saying, it counts over 1.1 million users, and that “Apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ICEBlock served to harm law enforcement officers. This is patently false.”

Next, Google.

Google Calls ICE Agents a Vulnerable Group, Removes ICE-Spotting App ‘Red Dot’

The move comes as Apple removed ICEBlock after direct pressure from U.S. Department of Justice officials and signals a broader crackdown on ICE-spotting apps.

Google told 404 Media it removed apps because they shared the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group that recently faced a violent act connected to these sorts of ICE-spotting apps—a veiled reference to ICE officials.

What's going on? It's fear, yes. The president wields unimaginable power, and this president in particular is less constrained in its abuse than his predecessors. But it's not all fear. Others have pushed back and won. What I think is also going on is that organizations—corporations, institutions—are habituated into a mode of thinking that isn't really up to meeting the moment.

Rather than the zoomed-out thinking needed for a threat this large and immediate, these organizations share a zoomed-in perspective. A narrowing of the range of concern. What matters is what happens, or might happen, in my policy area. What matters is what happens, or might happen, to my institution, or to those factors most relevant to my continued success within that institutions. What matters is what happens, or might happen, to my company's bottom line.

You get to be a policy analyst, or a corporate or institutional leader, because you hyper obsess about such things. Otherwise you'd drift into boredom, or other pursuits, long before you rise to that level of expertise. You have one ball, and you don't take your eye off it, no matter the world's distractions. This works in normal times. It works when the game you're playing is meaningfully distinct from everything else. When it can be compartmentalized.

But ours is not an era of compartmentalization. It's an era of systemic threat. It's an era when the correct perspective is a holistic one. The entire order is under threat of overturning, and what seeks to replace it isn't marginally worse, but so bad that, much as you'd like to pretend otherwise and take advantage where you can, if the people in charge win out, their victory will mean the end of your game. Whatever it is.

Most of us see this. Most of us recognize the magnitude of what's happening. (Too many, unfortunately, cheer it. But they still recognize the stakes.) Those with this zoomed-in perspective don't, or don't want to. They're trapped, at least until things get really bad, by the paired forces of mental habit and professional incentive. It is challenging to zoom out. And it's doubly challenging when zooming out might mean taking actions that are needed at the macro-level to protect society and its institutions of freedom, but might cause you setbacks, now, at the micro-level.

So we see institutions, corporations, and others with this perspective capitulating because capitulating feels like relief. Even if they know (and many pretend they don't) that the bully won't give up and this capitulation will inevitably lead to future and increasing demands for more of the same. Capitulating feels like gain. It feels like you're doing your job of moving the needle in the interests of your organization. Remove the app and ICE will leave your company alone. Agree to ditch some students or shut down some academic disciplines and the rest of your university will be okay. Agree to fire that voice against the regime and the rest of your journalists will be fine.

It's myopic, but that's the point. The people making these decisions wouldn't be where they are if they weren't, in some sense, myopic. You don't rise to these positions by being a generalist. But ours is a time that calls for people who can see that bigger picture and make the decisions needed. That means calling the regime's bluff. It means filing the lawsuit. It means thinking of yourself as a democrat, as a defender of liberalism, over and above the one or two finer points you've built your career on. Not because your company no longer matters, or your institution is expendable, or any given tributary of public policy doesn't have real impact on people's lives. But because they do, and the only way to protect them, to ensure things getter better for them, along with everything else, is to take your eye, temporarily, off the one ball, and even off the game. To instead pay attention to the whole, to the society and the culture and the polity. And do what you can, even if it's uncomfortable and professionally out of character, to save it.