The Article Is Under The Cut Because Paywalls Suck

nytimes.com

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

Bet

When Hitoshi enters the classroom, he steps into absolute pandemonium. For a quick second he fears that something serious happend and the adrenaline kicks in, only for him to realise that his classmates are excitedly talking, laughing with each other and all the tension leaves him in a rush.

Hitoshi gives himself a moment to take everything in before he walks up to Shoji, who keeps a bit to the side, away from what seems to be the thick of it.

"What's going on?" Hitoshi asks, still a little bit wary, because in the past excited classmates sometimes turned on him and even though he trusts class 2-A like he has never trusted another class before, some habits are hard to shake.

"They started a betting pool," Shoji tells him and he sounds so exasperated that Hitoshi chuckles.

"For what?"

"Hitoshi!" Denki cries out in that moment and before he knows what's happening, Hitoshi is swept up and dragged right into the middle of it all. "You're going to join!"

It's not a question, not really, and when Hitoshi's eyes fall onto the list laid out on a table, he sees that every single student has joined in.

Hitoshi sends a betrayed look over at Shoji, who shrugs completely unrepentant before Denki snatches his attention again.

"Come on, come on, come on, what's your bet?"

"On what? I don't even know what you're betting on," Hitoshi sighs out and he did not expect Midoriya to lean over the table, an excited glint in his eyes.

"The love lives of our teachers."

"Uhm," Hitoshi manages to get out as he shrinks back because that much enthusiasm is hard to take but he doesn't get far because Bakugo is suddenly at his back, crowding him in.

"You in or what, eyebags?" he demands to know and Hitoshi frowns.

"I still barely know what's going on," he exclaims. "Would it kill one of you to explain this properly?"

"This is an exercise in observational skills," Iida chimes in and Hitoshi guesses he had to justify his participation somehow because his name is right there on the list. "Based on our observations we bet on who of the teachers are romantically involved."

"You mean based on your wishful thinking," Hitoshi sighs out because fuck, if this doesn't sound like something Mina started, who has had regaled them with tales of budding romance between teachers all school year and he's proven right when Mina gives him her biggest smile.

Hitoshi wonders if he has to congratulate her for making this into something the entire class is suddenly involved in when before everyone would only roll their eyes at her.

"Based on observation," Iida reiterates with a huff, though he can't quite meet Hitoshi's eyes anymore.

"Sure," Hitoshi agrees, because already Uraraka and Midoriya are glaring at him and instead of upsetting Iida further, he leans forward to read over the paper.

There's a bunch of wild speculations on there and Hitoshi's eyebrows steadily climb higher.

"You don't seem convinced," Uraraka says after a moment, when Hitoshi stumbles over 'Aizawa and Vlad King' and he doesn't even try to school his face into something acceptable.

"This is so wrong," he says and immediately a solid wall of outcries slam into him. It takes him a moment to parse through the noise and when he realises that his classmates think he's against the betting itself, he raises his hands in defence but Midoriya is already all up in his face.

"It's perfectly alright to speculate on the romantic relationships of our teachers, because it's just speculation anyway and it doesn't harm anyone and—"

"I'm not against the betting itself," Hitoshi cuts him off and Midoriya stares at him, eyes wide and mouth open until Uraraka reaches over and closes it for him. "It's just—Aizawa and Vlad King, really?" Hitoshi asks and leans back over the list. "Mic and Midnight?"

"A valid choice," Denki cries out. "They both went to U.A. just a year apart and they are clearly comfortable with each other!"

Hitoshi presses his lips together.

"And Aizawa and Vlad King have this—tension," Uraraka adds. "Have you seen them glare at each other?"

"Yeah, because they do it constantly and it's born out of a genuine dislike for each other," Hitoshi mutters as he reaches for a pen.

If these are the relationships his classmates are betting on, then he's going to win the entire pool, easily. He quickly writes down his bet and leans back with a satisfied smirk.

"I'm in."

There's dead silence for a moment as his classmates take in his bet and then it's absolute chaos.

"No way—"

"This is crazy—"

"How would they—"

"They don't even—"

Everyone is talking over each other and Hitoshi wonders just how blind his classmates really have to be to not realize that his bet is the one that will win him the entire pot.

"Eraserhead and Present Mic? Are you fucking stupid?" Bakugo asks him eventually and Hitoshi just shrugs.

"Just as valid as Aizawa and Vlad King, I would say," Hitoshi carelessly gives back but then grows serious. "But honestly, do none of you see it?"

Sure, Hitoshi has kind of a unique perspective, being personally trained by Aizawa but Aizawa and Yamada are hanging off each other every second they get a chance to and it's ridiculous that none of his classmates are seeing it.

"I just—them? Together? That doesn't make any sense at all," Uraraka thoughtfully says and everyone else nods along as well and Hitoshi questions their attentiveness to details.

"Then you don't have to worry about me winning the pool, right?" he says with a shrug and stuffs his hands into his pockets as he regards his classmates.

"I don't like how confident you are," Jirou finally says and Hitoshi gives her a winning smile.

"Shouldn't you be just as confident about your choice, though?"

It shuts her right up and thankfully, by the time the class seems to have gathered themselves again, it's time to take a seat because even though they are in their second year, Aizawa still regularly threatens them with expulsion over the smallest of things.

"Don't think this is over," Bakugo hisses before he sits down but Hitoshi isn't impressed.

His bet is a valid choice, no matter what anyone said, but with how high the betting pool already is, of course this would spark some friction. Well, Hitoshi is looking forward to winning this.

He patiently sits through his classes, takes notes and pays attention but by the time he finally meets Aizawa for their bi-weekly capture weapon training he's almost vibrating out of his skin.

Hitoshi had some time to think about this and while he's still absolutely certain that he's right about Aizawa and Yamada, he came to the realisation that maybe they are keeping their marriage a secret because of safety concerns.

Aizawa isn't very active as a hero anymore, but he was an underground hero for long enough that he made some enemies and even Yamada, for as well beloved as he is as a radio host and one of the more approachable heroes out there, has his enemies.

Still, Hitoshi will ask, and if they have to keep it a secret because of that then he'll content himself with knowing he was right. He can do without the money, as long as he gets the satisfaction out of it.

Hitoshi is more or less patiently waiting for Aizawa but he knows that he failed when Aizawa raises his eyebrow at him as soon as he spots him.

"Out with it, before it distracts you during training," he sighs out once he reached Hitoshi and Hitoshi excitedly bounces on the balls of his feet.

"How much of a secret is your marriage?" he outright asks and then sees his life flash before his eyes because Aizawa's eyes sharpen and suddenly he's being glared at.

"What," Aizawa flatly says and there's such a sense of danger in the air that the hairs at the back of Hitoshi's neck stand up.

"Uhm," Hitoshi intelligently says as he cringes back and he very much feels like prey, facing off against the deadliest predator there is.

"What did you say?" Aizawa demands to know when Hitoshi stays stupidly silent and Hitoshi swallows.

"I was just asking, you know—about your marriage. If it's a big secret," he finally awkwardly gets out and feels the air around them go even frostier.

"My what?" There's something cold and dangerous to the way Aizawa asks this and Hitoshi wishes his quirk was traveling back in time because then he'd never be so stupid as to ask Aizawa this.

"Marriage?" Hitoshi almost squeaks out and he's too scared to even care about how embarrassing that is.

"Explain yourself," Aizawa snaps out and Hitoshi starts to sweat.

This is not going well, not at all, and he thinks if he's being murdered over a stupid fucking betting pool then he's going to haunt class 2-A until the end of times.

"Class 2-A came up with this betting pool," he almost rushes out, desperate to explain himself and he doesn't know where he fucked up now when Aizawa tenses.

"Don't," he rushes out but before he's even done speaking, Yamada appears at his side, seemingly out of thin air and Aizawa groans.

"Did I hear something about a betting pool?" Yamada asks, excitedly bouncing on the balls of his feet and right about now Hitoshi wishes the ground could swallow him whole.

"You said the magic words," Aizawa grumbles out. "Good luck dealing with that now."

"Magic words?" Hitoshi wonders if maybe he ended up in a parallel universe, because none of this makes any sense anymore and he curses whoever came up with that stupid idea of the bet in the first place.

"Betting pool. I'm in. What are we betting on?"

"Your marriage," Hitoshi weakly says and Yamada sucks in a scandalised breath before he whirls around to Aizawa.

"You told him?!"

"No, but you just did," Aizawa wryly says, a small smile playing around his mouth and Hitoshi's mouth drops open.

"You were playing with me!" he accuses Aizawa who shrugs, completely unrepentant and no longer oozing murderous intent.

"And you let me. We need to work on how you react under pressure," Aizawa decides and Hitoshi pouts, before Yamada waves his hands in front of their faces.

"Okay, time-out, what the hell is going on?"

"Aizawa is being mean to me," Hitoshi gives back, because that is what he took away from that and it actually gets Aizawa to smile.

"And you're being a baby," he shoots right back and Hitoshi wonders if this is why he knew Aizawa and Yamada are married, because Aizawa is so much less of a teacher with him sometimes.

"Helloooooo, am I going to get a real answer here or what?" Yamada whines out and Hitoshi glares at Aizawa before he turns to Yamada.

"My classmates have this betting pool going on of which teachers are in a romantic relationship," Hitoshi starts with and he's pretty sure he doesn't like the sparkle in Yamada's eyes.

"Aaaaaaand? How many bet on Shou and Vlad?" he asks and Hitoshi groans.

"Too many." He wrinkles his nose at the reminder because he still can't understand why anyone would mistake their animosity for romantic interest.

"I knew it," Yamada laughs. "It's all the tension, you know. The students are usually too sexually frustrated to realise that their tension is not sexual."

"Bah," Hitoshi says with feeling and Yamada laughs again.

"And who did you bet on?"

"You two of course," Hitoshi instantly replies. "Though with the reaction I got I started to realise that maybe your marriage isn't something you're parading around and so I came here to ask Aizawa just how secret it actually is."

"How did you know about it? From what just happened, I gather I confirmed it for you?"

"It's just your—everything." Hitoshi gestures at Aizawa and Yamada. "I think it's incredibly obvious, but I've already been proven wrong today, so before I put my foot into my mouth any further, I wanted to check in with you about that."

"And to win the pool?" Aizawa drawls out and Hitoshi shrugs, unrepentant.

"I mean, that maybe too? It's a lot of money. Everyone is in on it and Yaoyorozu, Iida and Todoroki barely have any understanding of what a reasonable bet is."

"What would we get out of it?" Aizawa wants to know and there's the same sparkle in his eyes that was in Yamada's before.

Hitoshi starts to wonder if these two being married is actually a danger to society.

"I could take you out to that one cat café you like?" Hitoshi offers, even though he damn well knows that between the two of them they have enough money to outright buy the café if they really wanted to. "And maybe the satisfaction of seeing your students lose their shit over that particular revelation?" Hitoshi says after a moment of consideration and when Yamada's face positively lights up, Hitoshi knows he's won.

"Deal."

It's Aizawa who speaks first and he gives Hitoshi his most unhinged grin. Hitoshi has seen students cover under that grin in fear but he matches it with one of his own, already thinking about all the things he can buy himself with the money he's about to make.

"This is going to be amazing," Yamada delightedly says and claps his hands together in excitement. "I never got him to reveal our marriage to the students, not even for shock value, so thank you, Hitoshi!"

Yamada pulls him into a sideway hug and then proceeds to squeeze the breath out of him and instead of helping him Aizawa just rolls his eyes.

"You know how noisy the students can get. Excuse me for not wanting them all up in our business."

"Well, you allow Toshi-chan all up in our business," Yamada immediately gives back and to Hitoshi's absolute shock, he sees Aizawa blush before he ducks his head, hiding in the capture weapon.

"That's different," he grumbles and Yamada laughs again.

"Sure it is," Yamada says and then leans down and whispers to Hitoshi: "That means you're as good as adopted."

It's stupid, and just a joke, Hitoshi knows that, but he still speaks without thinking.

"My caseworker didn't mention that during the last check-in."

Yamada freezes and Aizawa sucks in a surprised breath and before Hitoshi can scramble to salvage the situation, he's being crushed to Yamada's chest again, though this time it's much more comfortable.

Not that Hitoshi would ever admit to that.

"Alright, there's our topic for when we visit the cat café," Yamada decides and Hitoshi thinks he must be joking but the look that passes between Yamada and Aizawa speaks a very different language.

"How do you want to do this?" Aizawa asks, and Hitoshi gets the distinct impression that he's trying to compose himself, which has never happened before.

Hitoshi shrugs as best as he can, with Yamada's arm still firmly around him.

"Maybe tomorrow? I mean, it's up to you how you want to break it to them anyway so—"

"Oh, I have an idea," Yamada says with a devious glint in his eye and Aizawa goes pale.

"We're in school, Hizashi. Those are our students. It better be an appropriate idea."

"It's an idea alright," Yamada says with a wink and then pats Hitoshi's head before he's gone as quickly as he arrived.

"Does he have a secondary teleportation quirk?" Hitoshi mutters and Aizawa sighs.

"He just has way too much energy, so he moves faster than we expect," he explains and then fixes Hitoshi with a look.

"You know that we don't have to talk about anything at the café, right?"

"It'd be mighty awkward, just sitting there in silence," Hitoshi says, bashfully rubbing the back of his neck. "But you don't have to bring it up again. I understand that it was a—joke. Spur of the moment thing. Whatever."

"It wasn't," Aizawa firmly says and clasps Hitoshi's shoulder. "It really wasn't any of that. But maybe sleep over it for a night and then tomorrow we can talk more."

"So you're going to break it to the class tomorrow?"

"You think Hizashi is going to waste a single second?"

"Good point."

Aizawa gives him another smile, this one much softer than the one before and because Hitoshi has no idea how to deal with that right now, he straightens up and asks "What about training?"

Thankfully Aizawa allows the change of topic and sends Hitoshi out for a run, to warm up. Things go blessedly back to normal after that, but Hitoshi still can't get his mind off what Aizawa and Yamada maybe might have hinted at.

Tomorrow can't come fast enough.

~*~*~

Hitoshi is sitting in his seat, almost vibrating in place with how excited he is for the lesson to start because knowing Yamada, he's going to do a big, grand gesture and Hitoshi has half a mind getting his phone out to film the reaction of his classmates but he refrains. If only barely so.

Aizawa has just taken his place at the front desk when the door is being shoved open and Yamada steps in. His presence is incredibly loud somehow and the entire class goes dead silent, curiously looking at Yamada and trying to figure out what he's here for.

Hitoshi has to bite back a smile.

Yamada looks at each student for a moment before he turns to Aizawa, who has an air of absolute defeat about him and Hitoshi can't help it, he does reach for his phone.

It feels as if Yamada gives him just enough time to set up the recording before he starts to stalk over to Aizawa, who doesn't move away, so either he knows it's inevitable, whatever Yamada has planned, or he's in on it.

Hitoshi watches how Yamada fists his hands in the front of Aizawa's jumpsuit when he reaches him and he hears a surprised gasp from Yaoyorozu and sees how Bakugo and Kirishima tense as if they have to jump Yamada to defend Aizawa.

Yamada briefly looks over to Hitoshi and winks at him, before he whirls Aizawa around, dips him and kisses him in a way that is definitely inappropriate for a classroom.

Half the class jumps up, shouting out their surprise and they only get louder when Aizawa slings his arms around Yamada's shoulders and reciprocates the kiss more than enthusiastically.

It goes on for long enough that Hitoshi's cheeks start to burn and when Yamada finally rights Aizawa again, he glares at all of them with his quirk, before he turns back around to Yamada.

"Happy anniversary, babe," Aizawa says, his voice much more gravelly than they are used to and it's absolute pandemonium in the class from that moment on.

Yamada gives them all a blinding smile before he vanishes again and going by the glare Aizawa sends after him, that wasn't part of the plan.

Hitoshi sees Aizawa take a few deep breaths before he faces the classroom again and when he yells out a "Silence!" Hitoshi ends the recording before he hides his phone away again. "If you breathe a word of this to anyone, I will expel you," Aizawa says and Hitoshi knows that he means it, too.

As soon as he's done talking nineteen arms shoot up and Aizawa visibly pleads for patience before he says "You get five minutes to discuss between yourselves. If anyone talks to me about my personal life, I'll expel you. If you talk to Mic about his personal life, I'll expel you. Time starts now."

The class stays frozen for a moment before nineteen heads turn around to Hitoshi.

"You!" Bakugo yells out and Hitoshi grins.

He does love proving people wrong and with the added bonus of all the money he just made, it sure is shaping up to be a good day.

(It turns into the best day when Aizawa and Yamada reiterate their point that adoption is very much on the table if Hitoshi should want it once they are at the café and Hitoshi does not cry when they reveal that they already talked to Hitoshi's caseworker and got the necessary paperwork ready. Hitoshi has no clue yet if it really is their anniversary, but he knows that it's always going to be a very special day to him.)

61 notes View Post

crustyguybodylotion

2 months ago