NO ONE EVER WENT BROKE BETTING ON THE DEEP STATE:

First, populism finds its voice by pushing against the boundaries of acceptable opinion. But in the process it often embraces bigotries and extremisms that in turn color the reception of its policies.

In this case, it's Trump's original "Muslim ban" forays (and the clash-of-civilizations rhetoric of his inner circle) that has shaped how his freeze has been received. His defenders may protest that most Islamic-majority countries are not affected, that any counterterrorism policy will disproportionately affect Muslims, and that the White House order draws on a list of countries that President Obama targeted for (much more modest) visa restrictions. All of this is true, but still ... Donald Trump ran for president calling for a temporary ban on Muslims. Once he crossed that line (and many others), it became inevitable that any move like this would be seen as a second-best path to religious discrimination, and resisted fiercely and understandably on those grounds.

Second, having campaigned against elites and experts and all their pomps and works, populists imagine that their zeal can carry all before it, that proceduralism and institutional knowledge are for losers and toadies and men with soft hands, and that a few guys in the White House can execute a major overhaul of a delicate system without bureaucratic patience or rhetorical finesse.

This assumption is deeply mistaken, for reasons evident this weekend -- in the chaotic scenes at airports, the spectacle of people already in transit being turned away, the crazy attempt to apply the ban to permanent residents, the absence of obvious carve-outs and exceptions, the failure to get adequate buy-in or advice from cabinet officials, and the blowback from Trump's political allies as well as his opponents.

Then, finally, because populism thrives on its willingness to shatter norms, it tends to treat this chaos and blowback as a kind of vindication -- a sign that it's on the right track, that its boldness is meeting inevitable resistance from the failed orthodoxies of the past, and so on through a self-comforting litany. That makes it hard for populists to course correct, because they get stuck in a "the worse the better" loop, reassuring themselves that they're making progress when actually they're cratering.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, the ascent of populism also creates an unusual level of solidarity among elites, who feel moved to resist on a scale that they wouldn't if similar policies were pursued by normal political actors. Thus Trump, not even two weeks into his presidency, has already faced unusual pushback from the intelligence community, the Justice Department, the State Department and other regions of the bureaucracy, even as the media-entertainment complex unites against him on a scale unseen even in previous Republican administrations, and the Democratic Party is pressured into scorched-earth opposition before policy negotiations are even joined. 

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