The Shields Are Down, Mr. President

It’s my favorite “Star Trek” moment:

Shields are down, captain! We can’t take another hit!

In what seems like every movie or episode, whenever a federation starship is engaged in battle, its deflector shields are being raised or dropped or damaged by enemy fire to some oddly specific level (47 percent, say). It’s the stuff of high drama, when risk meets strategy to force a life-or-death decision. When shields are down, will the captain surrender, call for a shipwide evacuation or launch an ingenious counterattack?

I do not claim full Trekkie status, but I’ve been thinking about those shields as I watch President Trump’s second term. Trump seems to have his own set of deflector shields: his cabinet secretaries and other top officials, whom he uses to absorb some of the blowback from his most contentious policies.

Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, is a shield for the Trump administration’s brutal, sometimes fatal, immigration enforcement. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is the face of the president’s efforts to exact prosecutorial vengeance upon his antagonists and to bypass such punishment for his allies. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, embodies the administration’s crusade against diversity programs and its faux tough-guy persona. And Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, is the administration’s “tariff dealmaker in chief,” as The New Yorker put it, the implementer of the president’s stubbornly unpopular trade policies.

When the shields are at reasonable strength, they can keep taking fire, and the ship of state continues flying. But when the shields are battered and begin to malfunction, the entire enterprise is exposed. And right now, a lot of Trump’s shields seem to be faltering at once.

Cosplaying with cowboy hats and bulletproof vests, Noem oversees and defends the excesses of ICE and the border patrol, personifying all that has gone wrong with the Department of Homeland Security. The Wall Street Journal recently published an embarrassing exposé, which featured Noem feuding with senior officials and obsessing over her television appearances; and this week The Intercept reported that a story Noem has told repeatedly about an immigrant cannibal who began eating himself on a deportation flight was fabricated, citing federal law enforcement sources. The knives are out for Noem, not only from Democrats hoping to impeach her but from within the administration itself.

At the Justice Department, Bondi has done precisely as the president has demanded — investigating or indicting his political enemies, whether they are members of Congress, prosecutors, a former F.B.I. director or another official who served in Trump’s first administration. Yet the saga of the Epstein files hovers over her. In a spectacularly combative House hearing this month, Bondi refused to turn and face victims of Epstein’s who were present and apologize to them, and she derided members of the Judiciary Committee as “a failed politician” in one case and a “washed-up loser lawyer” in another. While the Justice Department can’t hire enough prosecutors willing to pursue her partisan agenda, Bondi melts down on live television.

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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.”  @CarlosNYT

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