America’s Mad King

Last Monday, Donald Trump, seeking to fortify public support for his massive, across-the-board tariffs, posted: “The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).”

By Wednesday, Trump had caved. His witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies—his administration had imposed tariffs on an Australian territory that is home to no people but to many penguins—created a financial panic that risked devastating the American economy and triggering a global recession. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value evaporated in a matter of days.

A man who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public ran into the brick wall of reality. Misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren’t intimidated by the threats of the aging president.

Trump fought reality, and reality won.

WE’RE FEWER THAN 90 DAYS into Trump’s second term; many more collisions between the president and the real world will come. So what can we expect, based on what we’ve witnessed?

[Read: I should have seen this coming]

We won’t see qualities from Trump that we haven’t seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” a White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told The Washington Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

Trump is America’s Mad King.

Compounding the problem is that the president has surrounded himself with men and women who are utterly loyal to him, unwilling to challenge him, and certainly unable to contain him. (The praise lavished on Trump by the members of his Cabinet during their meetings would make even Kim Jong Un blush.)

On top of that, this is an administration filled with third-rate intellects, conspiracy theorists, and misfits. They aren’t qualified to manage Oak Hill, Alabama, or Monowi, Nebraska, let alone the federal government. Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions. Some examples:

• The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well.
• Trump’s press secretary said that the tariffs were not a negotiation—until Trump and his secretary of the Treasury said they were. His commerce secretary said there wasn’t any chance that the president would back off from his tariffs—until Trump backed off from his tariffs the following week. Last Friday, the administration announced that it would exempt iPhones, computers, and other electronic devices from the tariffs—and on Sunday, Trump announced that this did not count as a tariff exemption.   
• In his mania to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. One wit on social media said, “Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.”)
• Another order by Hegseth led to the removal of Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library but left copies of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, on the bookshelves.
• Hegseth, during a February press conference at the NATO headquarters, in Brussels, unilaterally conceded a major Ukrainian negotiating position before anyone had even met with the Russians. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he was “disturbed” by Hegseth’s comments, calling them a “rookie mistake.” The Mississippi Republican added that everyone knows that “you don’t say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won’t agree to.” Wicker added, “I don’t know who wrote the speech—it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”
• In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia’s totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda that “the overwhelming majority” of people in four Ukrainian regions that have been occupied and annexed by Russia want to be absorbed by Russia. (During the interview, Witkoff, a wealthy real-estate developer, struggled to remember the names of those Ukrainian regions.)   
• The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a Signal group chat that included senior Trump officials who were coordinating an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
• In its mass firing of federal workers, the Trump administration dismissed—and then had to rehire—people with highly sensitive jobs in the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for ensuring the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal. The people who ordered the firings had failed to grasp the nature of those responsibilities.
• Employees who were working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian-flu outbreak, which is decimating poultry flocks and spreading to humans, were fired. The Department of Agriculture scrambled to reverse the firings.
• The single biggest line item on the DOGE website claimed a savings of $8 billion from one canceled contract. The actual contract was worth $8 million, much of which had already been spent.
• The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism.
• Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated.
• The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting. Progress in cancer therapies such as cell-based immunotherapy is being threatened. Active clinical trials are being disrupted. Decades of research are being undermined.     
• Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year.
• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued some waivers for PEPFAR, but they are a mirage. The waivers have done very little to restore funding or provide distribution of medication. One expert told The Dispatch that aid groups that do qualify for waivers have been unable to draw down funds from the USAID payment system. “A waiver is kind of useless without the ability to have some cash flow,” Chambers Sharpe, who previously worked in the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator at the State Department, told The Dispatch. “You can’t ship a waiver to a clinic as an antiretroviral medicine.” There have been massive disruptions in HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services. Clinics continue to close, and people are beginning to die at an alarming rate.
• In February, an inspector general wrote that about a half billion dollars in food aid that had already been purchased was at risk of spoilage. That inspector general was fired the next day. In addition, the Trump administration has “dismissed the few remaining health officials who oversaw care for some of the world’s most vulnerable people: more than 500,000 children and more than 600,000 pregnant women with H.I.V. in low-income countries,” Apoorva Mandavilli reported earlier this month in The New York Times. “Expert teams that managed programs meant to prevent newborns from acquiring H.I.V. from their mothers and to provide treatment for infected children were eliminated last week in the chaotic reorganization of the Health and Human Services Department.”
• DOGE cut almost $900 million from the Department of Education’s effort to collect national statistics and track the progress of American students, eviscerating one of the genuinely valuable things the federal government has done in the area of education. The cuts threaten to leave us in the dark when it comes to determining school effectiveness, where gaps exist, and what works. Many of the projects being canceled were near completion, making the decision even more mind-bogglingly stupid.
• The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland man with protected legal status to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. (Later claims by the White House aide Stephen Miller that the deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was lawfully sent to El Salvador were undercut by the facts of the case and court rulings.) The judge presiding over the Abrego Garcia case, Paula Xinis, said on Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration. Xinis previously ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of El Salvador, and the Supreme Court upheld that portion of her order last week. “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done. Nothing,” Xinis said on Tuesday.
• According to their lawyers, some Venezuelan migrants are being falsely accused of gang membership and deported to that same prison in El Salvador based on their tattoos and high-end urban street wear. “In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his membership, but his lawyers claimed that the tattoo was in honor of the man’s favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” The New York Times reported. “Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.”
• Yesterday, federal judge James E. Boasberg said that he had found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for violating an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.

Boasberg said he would begin contempt proceedings, unless the administration found a way to give the men a way to exercise “their right to challenge their removability through a habeas proceeding,” even if they were to remain in El Salvador while they did so.

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Allowing political leaders to defy court judgments would make “a solemn mockery” of “the constitution itself.”

This kind of malicious incompetence is evident in almost everything Trump and those in his administration touch. You can be sure, too, that there are many more similar acts of ineptitude we don’t yet know about. And Trump still has more than 1,350 days to go.

THE SECOND TRUMP PRESIDENCY, more even than the first, will be defined by Trump’s authoritarian desires and his ineptitude. It might be that the latter impedes the former; ruthless efficiency can help in the dismantling of democratic institutions, but having an administration filled with freaks and fools can impede that effort and catalyze public disaffection and even resistance.

We’re already seeing that reflected in a handful of election results, in mass protests across the country, in focus groups and public-opinion polls, and in the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which provides a snapshot of the U.S. economy’s health. Early this month, we learned that index had hit its second-lowest reading since 1952, dragged down by fears of higher prices and unemployment. Expectations for inflation hit the highest level in 44 years.

But here’s the danger: Vindictive narcissists like Trump hold grudges and harbor resentments, blame everything on someone else, and weaponize information. They have a mean, even sadistic, side, belittling others to feel better about themselves and using, abusing, and discarding people.

[Read: How American can avoid becoming Russia]

Empathy is, to them, an alien quality. When they begin to feel like the walls are closing in; when their external validation, sense of superiority, and grandiosity are threatened; when they experience setbacks or humiliating public failures, they can approach what is known as “narcissistic collapse.” This can lead to intense feelings of rage and acts of aggression, to agitation, and to increased impulsivity and distortions of reality.

So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.

Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost. It didn’t have to be this way. There are 77,302,580 co-authors of this catastrophe. They have left a crimson stain on this Republic.