Why is the Trump administration so vague?
Vagueness long has been seen as a clear divide between democracies run by laws and autocracies run by strongmen, leading U.S. administrations of both parties to routinely criticize foreign governments for using vague laws to suppress unwanted speech and behavior, says longtime New York Times reporter Matthew Purdy in The New York Times Magazine.
“But vagueness has become fundamental to the way Trump operates,” Purdy says. “It is not so much a legal strategy as a power dynamic.”
Declaring war on “woke culture,” President Trump has shaken education and private industry with threats of financial penalties or investigations for “promoting gender ideology” or “illegal DEI,” two terms that judges have criticized as ill defined, Purdy says.
And inside the government, aides have applied Trump’s executive-order terminology to cut through the federal bureaucracy and slash thousands of government grants, Purdy says. Trump has threatened to financially punish law firms that he declares are operating contrary to the “national interest,” an undefined standard he bases partly on their association with cases he doesn’t like and lawyers he sees as enemies.
“In a sense, Trump is creating a system of rules and punishments all his own,” Purdy says. “And when those rules are vaguely defined — unlike, say, a speed limit or even complex financial regulations — there is no assurance that anyone can be safely outside the zone of violation. Therefore, there is no telling who might be found out of bounds next and what punishment might be imposed.”
Tom Ginsburg, an international law professor at the University of Chicago who’s written about the decline of democracies around the world, says: “You get a lot of anticipatory compliance, which is cheap. And vagueness is part of the tool kit.”
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