FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

In my last post, I discussed how, if Donald Trump is an authoritarian, he’s the worst authoritarian we’ve ever heard of. But he may be the best pirate: He is, in fact, taking what he wants and giving nothing back. The result is unlikely to be a successful authoritarian takeover – no matter how much he may try – but chaos and decay. In this post, we’ll explore why that’s a feature of Trumpism, not a bug.

• The vast majority of Trump supporters voted for him – and continue to support him – because they want to tear down the U.S. and the world as they exist today. This includes even leading MAGA intellectuals, who used to believe in American institutions until they started losing elections.

• Being destructive and nihilistic doesn’t make you very good at running things or building strong systems and structures. That interferes with being effective authoritarians.

• As I’ve always argued, this is made possible by a technological and social milieu that favors deconstructing everything; the epitome of this is blockchain.

• Sure, Trump sees blockchain as a way to make billions while bleeding the public dry. But it’s more than that – it’s the ultimate state-destroying technology: kind of an unusual pursuit for a head of state.

Those who voted Trump into office knew what they were voting for – not only because Trump has been very explicit about his program, especially in running for his current term. Every last bit of what we’re now experiencing was expressly promised: Don’t let anyone who supported him in 2024, and especially not Republican elected officials, tell you in the future that they didn’t expect, well, “that.”

Everything that Donald Trump has promised, and continues to promise and deliver, is exactly what his supporters – who still make up roughly two-fifths of the voting public – want and still want. These are a large – arguably, the largest – bloc of Americans, who feel that everything about American life in this last generation or two has unfairly turned against them. I don’t think they’re particularly wrong: The slow shift from an industrial to a digital economy has led to the destruction of most jobs, or at least the relative income levels, upon which these individuals relied, resulting in growing disparities in income with which a democratic society cannot long survive. This is a global phenomenon, but has been especially acute in the United States, and has been compounded by both conservative and neo-liberal policies stretching from Reagan through Obama. (Yes, even Barack Obama.)

And, as in most uprisings, whether on the left or the right, the revolutionaries’ greatest anger is reserved not for the real aristocracy, but for those closer at hand who make for the more easily-imagined daily oppressors: the upper middleclass. Trump and his billionaire Cabinet raiding the public weal for their own welfare: Who cares? People with professional degrees making $200,000 a year and backing DEI programs: Yeah, that’s who’s making out like bandits and keeping real Americans down….

It isn’t just disfranchised working class voters, however, who decided that enough had gone wrong that it’s better to tear down every institution of modern American life – especially those uppity doctors and teachers and news reporters and similar cosmopolites – and start over. The right-wing opinion elite – and, yes, they are just as elite as the “liberal elite” against which they have whipped up the masses – is equally apoplectic at what they believe has become of this country. So much so that one of the intellectual leaders of that elite, now a major policy advisor within the Trump Administration, wrote a famous and influential article in 2016 arguing that the U.S. is in such bad shape, and would descend into such a (one imagines) lesbian Communist anti-Christian gulag state were Hillary Clinton elected, that the country needed to do as the passengers on United Flight 93 on 9-11: Rush the cockpit. Grab the wheel. Crash the plane, if need be (by which was meant: elect Trump). It’s better than the alternative.

I read more right-wing than liberal or left-wing publications these days – they’re, frankly, much more deeply reasoned and argued – and, to this day, even with all that Trump has done, conservative thought leaders, the folks who used to believe in American institutions until they started losing elections, still are in terror as to what America has become over the last sixty years and still want to crash the plane. That’s Trump’s job – and, in him, they certainly found the right man for the job.

Ten years ago this month, I returned from Cape Town, where I had been asked to speak, improbably, to a conference of African campaign operatives about the role and importance of issues and policy in political campaigns. Of course, I’m about the only person who believes that anymore, but it was very early in the Republican presidential contest, so I argued that – contrary to what every other observer thought (because, well, that’s what I do) – the one candidate running on a clear policy agenda was Donald Trump. That didn’t mean he had a detailed policy book – he didn’t – but he was propounding an agenda that friend and foe alike clearly understood, and which he has executed as president. This has been even more true the second time around.

There are two problems with this agenda:

• The first is conception – as I said, its animating idea is chaos and destruction.

• The second is execution: It turns out that people who hate something and have no real experience with it aren’t very good at running it.

My favorite supposedly-by-Yogi-Berra quote is: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not.” For the Trump Administration, they’re one and the same. Adam Serwer coined the now-famous phrase, “The cruelty is the point.” I think it’s worse than that: The chaos is the point.

The – pardon the pun – signal example of the Trump Administration is the live pre-disclosure of US war plans to a journalist inadvertently invited onto Pete Hegseth’s Yemeni bombing chat group. If you can’t avoid such imbecilic screwups while overseeing a precision military operation (complete with an emoji surfeit that would embarrass a teenager), you probably can’t carry out other operations involving destruction and mayhem that don’t involve the world’s greatest military.

In fact, the point is well-made by the recent operation in Venezuela: The Pentagon apparently spent around six months planning this raid in tremendous detail, and then went out and executed it as perfectly as one would hope and expect of the world’s greatest military. But, as it turns out, in six months of detailed planning, the rest of the Administration outside the military professionals spent close to zero time thinking about what would happen with Venezuela – whether the regime would change, what that might mean for the country’s people, what the impact would be on U.S. international relations, whether even the oil dollars imagined by the President actually could be effectively realized and how – the day after our forces did their job. And, nearly three weeks later, they still don’t know.

For another example, take the Administration’s early plans to send thousands of immigrants to live in tents in Guantanamo. Fits right with their general approach, right? And this was a top priority initially – although the odds are that even you, dear well-informed reader, haven’t heard about it. Why? Because it was an utter failure. They couldn’t even procure the tents, let alone arrange the flights. The Administration lacked the management capability to achieve its aims. (Their response, of course, has been to fire anyone in the Pentagon with a record of competence – as if that will improve performance.)

The same management incompetence – despite the jack-booted veneer – is apparent in the operations of ICE.

Is this an unprecedented effort to “normalize” a fully-militarized society and intimidate dissent into silence? Yes – don’t take my word for it, just ask the former president of the Heritage Society, which drafted the Administration’s blueprint, Project 2025, who promised that the takeover would be “bloodless” only so long as those who disagreed submitted without objection, more-or-less as ICE agents have now been telling dissenters in referencing Renee Good’s killing. But, in both conception and execution, it’s playing out more like in Somalia today (ironically enough) than Nazi Germany.

As we discussed last time, that’s how it’s intended to be by Trumpism’s greatest intellectuals – repression ala Hobbes, not Hitler. Even here, it’s SNAFU’d – just like the Signal chat. The Administration is recruiting a massive surge of new ICE agents in communities near military bases, through recent gun purchases, and the like – gee, almost as if they’re looking for those eager to use force against “enemies foreign and domestic”….

They deploy these recruits without training, and have told them in effect that they are beyond the law (and the Supreme Court has reinforced that message). Needless to say, that is creating foreseeable violence. Some have compared this to Kent State – but the Kent State shootings were essentially planned specifically in advance (Nixon originally wanted it to be at Yale) to send a message that dissent would not be tolerated. ICE’s violence may be intended to send the same message, but it is unplanned – “mere anarchy,” as Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, “loosed upon the world.”

At the same time, because they’re rushing to fill so many ICE slots in order to meet made-up enforcement quotas, many of the ICE hires can’t meet the job’s physical requirements – cosplay Call of Duty warriors who, apparently, can’t do pushups. But don’t take The Atlantic’s word for it – take it from the ICEmen themselves. They suddenly announced they were done with their mission in Chicago and moved on to … New Orleans … but they’re coming back in the Spring. Why? What’s changing in Chicago’s immigration situation between December and April? Well, how about the weather? Yeah: Real tough guys. (Unfortunately for them, because Trump hates both Tim Walz and Somalis they got sent back in record numbers to even more frigid Minneapolis.)

Right now, the Trump Administration is recruiting private military contractors to try to pump the oil and maintain order in Venezuela – because it turns out that the big oil companies won’t, despite Trump’s thoughts on the subject without doing his homework pre-invasion. Maintaining order and a functioning economy are important to Trump – in Venezuela – so he’s hiring pros. Minneapolis, not so much. Let that comparison sink in: The para-militarized objective in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities is not do the job well, or they wouldn’t be doing it as they’re doing it, with the forces they’re doing it with.

As Elizabeth Tsurkov wrote last week in a disturbing essay in The Atlantic about her kidnapping and captivity in Iraq, “Under such regimes, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. The purpose is to deter resistance, but … [h]istory suggests that the proficient cruelty of such regimes is unable to compensate for the stupidity and incompetence of their cadres.”

That now appears to be the model for the U.S. government.

This is who’s running the wanna-be-authoritarian takeover of America: People who accidentally patch in reporters (and, one has to presume, at some point the Chinese and Russians) to top-secret operations. Who summon the military from all over the world for what suggested to many something straight out of Seven Days in May but turned out to be a lecture by Pete Hegseth on, basically, looking like Pete Hegseth. A vigilante praetorian guard that can’t pass physicals or stand the cold.

Meanwhile, they’re blowing up the Constitution, the world order, democracy, human rights, the economy (remember the tariff levels computed using illogical math?). They’re good at knowing what they want to destroy; they’re less good at what comes next. Or even caring about that.

You may not buy the comparison I made last time between Trump and Mao; a good friend of mine with a master’s in foreign relations, concentrating in comparative communist studies, certainly did not, contending that Mao was less intentionally chaotic than indecisive between being a revolutionary and a state-builder. I’m not sure that it’s a matter of intent – most dysfunctional people I know don’t intend to be dysfunctional, they just are, and leave a trail of dysfunction in their wake. I happened to catch a program on NPR this weekend about Venezuela — from Simon Bolivar to Hugo Chavez — that wound up observing that successful revolutionaries typically are better at tearing down what exists than conceiving or building a replacement. Whatever the psychology of it, that is certainly Trump’s modus vivendi.

What matters, though, are not the generations-old daddy issues of an angry and limited old man; it’s that this is what half our fellow Americans want today: as I’ve been arguing from the beginning, not the realization of authoritarianism, as most opponents fear – which would require the capability actually to erect strong state structures – but rather the destruction.

Everything I’ve predicted over the years about the Trump Era has found its clearest distillation in the obsession that took over the entire Trump family, including the pater familias, between Trump’s re-election and his inaugural: crypto currency.

Almost all discussion of Trump and crypto focuses on the corruption and self-enrichment aspects. These are serious – perhaps the most serious episode of public corruption in American (if not world) history.

But that’s nothing, in my view, compared to the substantive issue. I want to note here that I believe that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are in fact the future. At present, they’re largely mechanisms for criminal activity and unregulated speculation – both bad enough for a stable society. But, in the long-term, as these kinks are eventually worked out (as I believe they will be), crypto is a far graver threat to the existence of government as we know it. Not only will this technology make it easier to subvert law enforcement, as now, but it eventually will destroy the de facto state monopoly on money-creation, which today is perhaps more important than the state’s Weberian monopoly of force. This will tend to undermine “government” as an institution worldwide (in fact, that was the idea behind its invention) – but nowhere more so than in the U.S., which derives tremendous power and money from its position as creator of the world’s only real reserve currency.

Of course, Trump has publicly stated his disinterest in the dollar’s status as the global reserve, although that was more out of simple ignorance of basic economics. But that eventually has merged with Trump’s real talent, which is spotting a market for disruption in which he can exacerbate and arbitrage the chaos. As a result, we now have a Leader of the Free World who has made more money in the last year than all but a handful of people have made in a lifetime, off of, and tied his and his family’s future to, something the intent – and likely result – of which is to destroy global governance and, most of all, the government of the very country of which he is Head of State. I don’t know about you, but sounds like something of a conflict to me.

But, again the ultimate point of this venture isn’t the corruption – although that’s a part of it – it’s the destruction.

And so, I come back again to the ending of Kurosawa’s Ran.

The once-powerful kingdom lies in smoldering ruins thanks to the perfidy of Lady Kaede, essentially an enemy operative installed at the highest rung of power. Even as one of the few remaining patriotic generals moves to slice off her head, she remains placid and serene amongst the carnage: She has fulfilled her purpose. Ran, in Japanese, means “chaos.”

Trump, too, has fulfilled his purpose.

What comes next is anyone’s guess – although I’ve got a couple, which we’ll discuss next time….