Trump breaks things only to pretend he is fixing them.
‘T he whole aim of practical politics,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
A century later, we have entered the era of government by hobgoblin. The nation looks on as our president creates imaginary crises that — you guessed it — only he can solve. President Donald Trump continues to be the guy in the neighborhood who smashes storefront windows and then begs glass-repair shops to support him because of his economic stimulus plan.
Of course, in the run-up to the 2024 election, America had genuine issues that needed addressing. Customers at McDonald’s shouldn’t have to pay for their Filet-O-Fish meals using an installment plan. Illegal immigration at the southern border was a humanitarian catastrophe. Grievance culture had run amok.
Had Donald Trump stuck to these primary concerns, he would be swimming in goodwill. Instead, he has chosen to invent bizarre crises and pretend to fix them, as though his currently decent approval ratings were guaranteed to last.
Prior to the election, what American believed the limited political capital enjoyed by the president should be used to rename the Gulf of Mexico? Was having to say the name of our neighbor to the south too painful when referencing a body of water? Was barring a major media organization from White House press events because its reporters wouldn’t use the Gulf of America’s preferred pronouns something families gathered around kitchen tables to discuss?
Little did the people who voted for Trump because they wanted lower grocery prices realize that the president would pick a fight with Canada over becoming America’s 51st state. They likely didn’t predict that Trump would inexplicably start — and then cancel, but who knows what’s next — a trade war with America’s strongest economic allies. Trump is trying to undermine trade agreements with disastrous tariffs so he can claim he is strong-arming other countries into bending to his will, even though most of their tariff-avoidance plans are projects they had already undertaken.
Just years ago, it would have been insane for any president, Republican or Democratic, to question the efficacy of tried-and-true, safe, and life-saving vaccines — especially a president whose greatest achievement during his first term was funding research that quickly resulted in a vaccine that saved millions of lives during a pandemic.
Yet Trump has decided to throw a human hand grenade into a system that has kept us measles- and polio-free for decades. His unconscionable appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services has now cracked open the vaccine issue in ways that will undoubtedly make more Americans sick. But having a Kennedy bend the knee to him was just too much for Trump to resist.
Who knew that one of America’s most pressing issues was that there were too many inspectors general rooting out fraud and corruption in the federal government? How many voters in 2024 were demanding that the new president offer a quid pro quo to New York City’s Democratic mayor, dangling the prospect of dropped criminal charges in front of him so that he would do the president’s bidding on illegal immigration? Who cast a ballot hoping Trump would threaten to take Greenland or the Panama Canal by force? Is there anyone out there nodding in vigorous agreement that the Kennedy Center, the arts and culture center in the nation’s capital, should be run by Donald Trump?
Even Trump’s useful initiatives are being bungled by neophytes who have no idea what they’re doing. The president handed off his government-cutting project to Elon Musk, whose lack of knowledge of how government works has been embarrassing on an almost hourly basis.
In the past week, Musk fired hundreds of federal employees who worked on the security of America’s nuclear weapons, then scrambled to hire them back. Musk claimed there was fraud in Social Security because 150-year-old people were getting checks, not understanding that a quirk in the computer language used by the Social Security Administration defaulted some dates to 1875. The administration even accidentally installed a new temporary head of the FBI — oops!
Undoubtedly, America’s bureaucracy needs scaling back — foreign aid, for example, is rarely useful. One recent study by the Government Accountability Office estimates that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion per year because of fraud — maybe give them a call?
But Musk has become, in the comedian John Mulaney’s vivid phrase, a horse in a hospital, galloping through the halls and haphazardly crashing into things in a place where he doesn’t belong.
The nation, by now accustomed to the chief executive providing entertainment rather than steady leadership, will continue to watch the spectacle of bizarre, outlandish developments coming from the White House. Beats Netflix. Trump will continue to invent fake controversies to divert attention from his actual scandals. In the meantime, if Trump is trying to prove that the government is incompetent, he is doing a sensational job.