Donald Trump Is Picking Fights. Will Anyone Hit Back?

Is anybody prepared to stand and fight Donald Trump? On Wednesday, Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director whom Trump had vowed to fire as soon as he returned to the White House, announced that he would preëmptively quit in January, with nearly three years left in his ten-year term, rather than risk a public battle. Going out the door with him will be the crucial concept of a politically independent directorship, enshrined in law by Congress in the nineteen-seventies to protect against just such a scenario of a President seeking to install a partisan loyalist in the country’s most powerful law-enforcement post. “This is the best way to avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray,” Wray said in a statement, “while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.” He did not elaborate on how his self-defenestration would preserve the institution’s values and principles from the threats of its incoming director, the Trump loyalist Kash Patel, who said in an interview in September that his first act upon taking over the F.B.I. would be to shut down the agency’s main building “and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”

Wray is hardly the only official to fold in the face of Trump’s early threats. On Capitol Hill this week, after days of attacks by a MAGA media mob, Senator Joni Ernst said that she would support Trump’s controversial nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, through his confirmation process—a striking change in tone for the Iowa Republican, herself a military veteran and survivor of sexual assault who had previously expressed concerns about a Pentagon nominee who has said women should not serve in combat roles and has been accused of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and financial mismanagement. For what it’s worth, it’s not yet clear that Ernst will ultimately vote for Hegseth, who has denied wrongdoing, though Senator Tom Cotton, a key Trump ally in the Senate, now predicts that all of Trump’s controversial nominees, including Hegseth, will be confirmed. What is clear is that bullying by Trump, or on his behalf, works.

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. This week, his company, Meta, made its first-ever donation to a Presidential Inauguration fund, chipping in a million dollars to Trump’s January celebration, despite—or, more likely, because of—Trump’s bashing Zuckerberg as “Zuckerschmuck” and attacking Meta’s platforms as biased against him. With Trump still riding a post-election high, some of the people and institutions that seem headed for an inevitable collision with the returning President have so far been remarkably wary of clapping back at him, even when presented with the most provocative of Trump’s insults. Consider the fight that Trump has already picked with Canada, threatening to impose tariffs of up to twenty-five per cent on its imports along with those of Mexico—a potentially crippling blow to both their economies. Earlier this week, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, said that his country would “respond to unfair tariffs” but he had not yet figured out how—hardly a flaming insult. Nonetheless, Trump reacted to this by threatening to annex Canada as the fifty-first state and taunting the Canadian leader as “governor” in a social-media post. Trudeau, who often drew Trump’s ire in his first term as well, did not respond in kind. Instead, he was hard at work on a plan to mollify Trump’s concerns about the U.S.-Canada border, including adding police dogs and drones to a largely unmilitarized zone, apparently in hope of staving off Trump’s threatened tariffs.

Some of Trump’s presumptive targets are not even waiting for his expected threats. At NATO headquarters in Brussels this week, word came that the alliance, which Trump had once threatened to leave entirely if member states did not start contributing more to their defense budgets, was considering a new target for members: spending three per cent of G.D.P. on defense each year, up from the current two-per-cent goal. The move, which would come at a time when the heightened threats to European security from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine require significant new military investment, appears to be an effort to preëmpt Trump’s inevitable demand for three-per-cent spending—an idea his advisers floated over the summer—and which he’ll likely take credit for anyway in the event that it happens. And why wait? Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Pentagon official reportedly in line for a senior post in his next Administration, went ahead and claimed the win even before any formal decision: Trump’s “common sense policy is getting results,” he posted on X, on Thursday.

Are these all examples of preëmptive surrender—“obeying in advance,” as the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has put it—or is something more strategic going on here?

As much as Trump loves being fawned over, the specrtre of so many prospective rivals caving in so quickly creates its own sort of dilemma for a leader who craves conflict to sustain his Presidency and his political movement. Trump thrives on such fights, seeks thems out, and where they do not exist, he will move swiftly to create them. Conflict is integral to who he is, as a person and as a politician. No doubt, there will come a point when at least some of those he has targeted, whether neighboring states whose economic health is threatened by his protectionist policies or government officials whose integrity and independence are compromised by his extralegal demands, push back. (Republican senators, maybe not so much.) Every lawyer in Washington, it seems, is preparing to fight the new Trump Administration in court if lobbying and favor-seeking don’t work out first.

I suspect that much of what we’re seeing in the early response to Trump represents a collective conclusion that resistance to him eight years ago did little good, and often much harm, to those who did the resisting. The classic example of this was Angela Merkel, then the German Chancellor, whose statement congratulating Trump on his victory in 2016 essentially put Trump on notice that she would be watching for him to violate norms of democracy and common decency. Merkel, to no one’s surprise, became perhaps Trump’s least favorite Western leader. In 2024, it is entirely rational to conclude that lecturing Trump will hardly produce favorable results. It’s understandable, too, that many of his detractors are simply exhausted by the continual demands of standing against the man. And yet it’s striking how far many have pivoted to the other extreme. Is there no other course between going to war with Trump and accommodating him?

There is also a widespread view that Trump is more bluster than bite. Eight years on, even many of the President-elect’s fiercest foes now recognize that he presents them with a unique blend of incendiary hyperbole and actual menace. They know he did not build the wall on America’s southern border or get Mexico to pay for it. So maybe better to wait and mobilize against the threats that Trump seems specifically willing to follow through on. And yet I can’t help but worry that this post-election transition to Trump’s second term is merely another moment when hope seems to be triumphing over experience—whether it’s backers of Ukraine looking for evidence, however scant, that Trump won’t abandon them to a deal with Russia on Vladimir Putin’s terms, or opponents of “Mass Deportation Now” who think it will simply be too costly and complicated for Trump to execute. Just this week, he said he wanted to pardon the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on his behalf four years ago—and to lock up the members of Congress who investigated the riot. Is it really such a good idea to believe he won’t try it?

Don’t forget the reason Trump picks all these fights—because he wants to be a winner. Well, he’s beaten Chris Wray without a fight. Now what? For Trump 2.0, just as in all his previous incarnations, there will always be new enemies to slay. ♦