The second term of Trump is not just the ascent of a man but what some call a “policy revolution.” Trump’s support of tariffs has disrupted a roughly 70-year trajectory of trade liberalization. His policy of mass deportation and hard borders reverses 50 years of liberal immigration policy. Trump’s foreign policy reverses 80 years in which America gave security guarantees to democracies around the world stretching from Japan and Australia to NATO. Domestically, Trump has interrupted 75 years of unquestioned support for scientific research and the universities that house it. He has reversed policies of embracing racial and ethnic diversity. And he has toppled more recent initiatives in liberal social policies on transgender rights.

The second Trump presidency may represent what the late V.O. Key called a “critical election,” where a new coalition comes together to dominate national politics for a generation – akin to the Jacksonian Era, or the New Deal itself.

The New Deal public philosophy – liberalism – was exhausted by Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. It could no longer reliably magnetize a durable national coalition of voters. But its opponent – conservatism – was equally unable to fully disestablish the New Deal coalition. For the past 45 years, no party and no leader has been able to make the Constitution work by reliably electing presidents and friendly majorities in the legislature. It has been an era without a public philosophy – only polarization and contestation.

Perhaps Trumpism – a blend of George McGovern’s foreign policy, Bernie Sanders’s trade policy, and Pat Robertson’s social policy – is the start of something new. And it might be, if Trumpism were primarily about policy.

But at its heart, it is not about policy at all.

Consider Trump’s challenge to the universities. Part of the attack is focused on policies, especially the Administration’s suspicion that selective universities cloak the use of racial quotas under the heading of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals. To police this, the Administration has asked universities to annually report data on race, sex, grade point average, and SAT scores to the Department of Education, and directed the Department to “overhaul” the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. But the President has also ordered the Secretary of Education to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

Which is it? Use the Department of Education to serve new policy goals? Or destroy it?

The attack on the administrative state does not stop with one Department. Under the guise of deficit-cutting and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” it touches on every office, every bureau, and every department of the federal government. And the point, of course, was not cutting the deficit but incapacitating the state – especially those repositories of expertise, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Federal Reserve, that possess authority and legitimacy independent of the President’s power of personal command.

This is what Nancy Rosenblum and I call “ungoverning.”

The destruction of state capacity is not normal, even for authoritarians – though others have done the same (see Hugo Chavez). But it does have an authoritarian logic. Any policy – conservative, liberal, pragmatic, whatever – limits the personal power of the executive by the simple fact that policies require commitment. That is what policies are: a commitment of resources in the present to achieve specified goals in the future. To have a policy means not changing your mind, at least for a while.

Ungoverning is the destruction of the policy state – a state developed in the U.S. with the New Deal. And it is the creation of a power the U.S. Constitution was designed to proscribe: the power of what Locke called the “inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.”

The destruction of the policy state and a government of limited powers – constitutionalism – is never announced. It is only suggested by a new kind of presidential rhetoric.

Before Trump, presidential speech was meant to be stately and solemn. “Presidential” and “dignified” were synonyms. Contrast that with Trump’s posts to Truth Social – unfiltered, undigested, and full of invective. Authenticity is the substitute for seriousness.

But the unserious posts have a serious point. They demonstrate an ability to say anything regardless of norms and expectations. Which is a demonstration of power.

Commentators and policy experts search for the real purpose behind Trump’s statements and actions – what, for instance, is the plan guiding the capture of Nicolas Maduro? The question presupposes there is a policy guiding U.S. action, and an administrative capacity equal to the demands of executing the policy.

But what if there is no settled aim, no policy – only a desire to exercise and display the power of personal command?

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln, in the first speech he ever gave, warned of those whose ambitions cannot be satisfied by mere service in constitutional offices – by being one more governor or president in an endless succession of forgettable “public servants.” Lincoln warned of the one who so thirsts and burns for distinction that he will trade fame for infamy by destroying the Constitution.

The end of Trump’s story and the story of America during Trump remains to be written. But as Lincoln knew, even as a young man, when the love of power is greater than any other love, the story does not end well. America needs a new policy regime, and Trumpism may inform it. But Trump himself cannot.