“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” — Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
Ordinarily it’s best to let current events fade into the rear-view mirror before looking for a storyline. However, I think we could all agree that these aren’t ordinary times. It’s been a tumultuous first fourteen months of Donald Trump’s second term. Let’s take an early look at where we stand.
Coming in, Trump was intent not to repeat the record high turnover in the Cabinet and senior aides of his first term. To that end he emphasized loyalty; let competency be damned. This led to very uneven cabinet. Some, like Marco Rubio, had appropriate backgrounds. Others, like Pete Hegseth, had a meandering path to, at best, minimum credibility. And still others, like Kristi Noem, had no path, meandering or otherwise. The best predictor for his second term team might very well have been appearance count on Fox and Friends.
It matters. Trump is famously disinterested in governing, and Congress even more so. This leaves decision making to the cabinet, senior aides and Project 2025. Results have proven problematic, for instance RFK Jr pushing his contrarian stances on vaccines into actionable mandates.
An early executive order was the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk. The theory was that the world’s richest man must be good at everything. In reality? Not so much. More solid ground is that capitalists are good at business, and Elon Musk is ultimately in the Elon Musk business.
DOGE terminated over 300,000 federal employees. Mostly bureaucrats. You know — the boring 9-to-5ers that actually knew how things work. And since Musk and Trump lack both empathy and the nuance, they abandoned any concept of soft power, eliminating USAID. This led to an estimated 600,000 deaths worldwide and created a vacuum in third world influence that China is more than capable, and more than happy, to fill.
Along came ICE. Trump had messaging success in his first term with immigration (“I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall”) and doubled down in his second term. Barry Goldwater once said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” but it turns out Americans have little stomach for extremism, for any reason. As ICE quickly migrated from their mission of deporting the worst of the worst and onto aggressive, violent techniques, Americans lost their taste.
Certainly, the country agrees to deporting the worst of the worst. A better discussion point might be: when does an undocumented alien become a net positive for the US? Who do you think is picking our fruit? Who is cleaning our hospitals? Who is taking care of our elderly in nursing homes? Mightn’t a statute of limitations serve a purpose here?
Then, Iran.
America has a long and storied tradition of starting wars based on faulty intelligence (“Remember the Maine!”) but this war scoffed at that paradigm and skipped the step of presenting intelligence, faulty or otherwise, altogether. But as Trump says, “that’s how it is.” As long as Israel is happy, that’s the main thing.
Only time will tell how this will work out, but history tells us we’re not good at this. Vietnam is a communist state; twenty years in Afghanistan and the Taliban was in charge at the start and is in charge now. Heck, Korea is still technically at war. But this time it will be different. Just remember, in 1947 Eisenhower said, “War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly.”
Me? I can’t believe I got all the way to that last paragraph before the word folly found its way into the discussion.
Of course, this brief summary doesn’t nearly do justice to Trump’s first fourteen months. No mention of Ukraine and his odd kowtowing to Putin; no Trump family corruption; no tariffs; no Greenland; Epstein files; no mention of the precipice the 2026 midterm election finds its self on.
Donald Trump thrives on chaos and when challenged he rachets the chaos up. It’s a strategy that has worked well for decades and there’s no reason to think he’ll abandon it any time soon.
I’ll leave the last take to Randy Newman:
Just a few words in defense of our country
Whose time at the top could be coming to an end
We don’t want your love, respect at this point is pretty much out of the question
Times like these, we sure could use a friend
