I Was Wrong About Donald Trump

In More Ways Than One

In a previous post, I laid out my refusal to vote for Donald Trump and the reasons why I felt that way. I stayed that course and remained committed to generally not voting, a sentiment which as of now I probably feel even more strongly than I did before the election. My basic calculus was that the first Trump administration was a lot of noise without much substance, achieving little other than tax cuts (which are nice, but way down on my list of priorities), while Trump himself was (and still is) unacceptably weak on the issues I care most about.

In light of everything that’s been happening since Trump was inaugurated (it hasn’t even been a month yet… wow), I can say that I was wrong about one of these things, but not the other. Donald Trump has engaged in an exercise of executive power that is absolutely unprecedented in modern times. Maybe if we went back to LBJ or FDR we could find another President who was at least this audacious, but probably not since. Since coming into office for the second time, Donald Trump’s overall behavior has been to essentially try and rule the nation via executive fiat, issuing whatever orders he feels like and daring his opponents to try and do anything about it.

If you’re a Trumper, you’re probably over the moon about this. Finally you’re getting the real change and decisive action that you’ve been desperately wishing for this whole time—you had to wait eight plus years for it since Trump first came down the golden escalator, but it’s finally here! I do think there is an element of righteous vengeance to this development. The left has spent decades expanding executive authority, twisting legal interpretations to fit their purposes, running roughshod over any reasonable objections, in many cases outright ignoring the Constitution, etc. The left has an entire legal theory of the Constitution as a “living document” which is purpose-built to let them do whatever they want with no care what any laws actually say or don’t say.

They have behaved in this way, they have done it brazenly, and they have gotten away with it for generations—ever since WWII, if not even before then. In hindsight, Donald Trump’s first election seems like a warning shot that this trend would not be sustainable forever. The left did not heed the warning. The Biden administration doubled down and tripled down on this attitude, and so now the warning shot has become an actual return volley. The way that Donald Trump is conducting his administration right now is largely a case of turnabout being fair play. If you fight dirty and just keep fighting dirty in every iteration of the fight, obviously your enemy will learn to do the same.

I think that I could be happy about the state of things if this were the case and it were largely limited to the plethora of (admittedly significant) issues that actually got Donald Trump elected—the left’s poor governance and general lunacy on inflation, immigration, crime, DEI/trannyshit, etc. What I do not like is that Donald Trump has gone much further than this and essentially declared war on the federal government itself, handing it over to Elon Musk to abuse and destroy as he sees fit. Again, if you are a Trumper, you are probably happy about that development too. You probably think that the entire federal government is evil, all federal workers are corrupt woke losers, and basically the whole thing should burn to the ground.

Of course, there is corruption, and plenty of federal workers are woke losers, and all of that. But a highly flawed state is still, well, the state—our state, the one we have to live under, whether we like it or not. I believe it is remarkably short-sighted to simply nuke the entire edifice out of spite. Make no mistake, that is what Elon Musk is doing. He has not hidden his intentions at all. The moves he is making will not merely reduce waste or somehow result in “efficiency”—if he gets everything that he is pushing for, federal agencies will thrown into utter chaos and left as hollow, impotent shells of their former selves. It would be one thing if this treatment were to be limited to particularly deserving entities such as USAID, but it is not. The hammer is being dropped everywhere, on every corner of the federal workforce.

What incentives will that create? Who will the power players be when the dust settles in that situation? Well, if the other branches of government fail to resist this push, power will lie primarily with Trump and Elon Musk. Whatever things they favor, the government will be allowed to do, and little else. State capacity will be greatly diminished and the general political stability of the nation will become precarious (even more precarious than it perhaps already is). If Elon Musk were to be dictator for life, at least then you could have some predictability based on what Elon Musk likes, but we won’t even have that.

Instead, we have elections for President every four years, and it is not reasonable to expect that a Democrat will never get into the White House again. All of this is setting the stage for an even more extreme pendulum swing when that inevitably happens. The stage will be set for massive regime-change levels of upheaval every four to eight years. Uncertainty would pervade every aspect of life as people are perpetually unsure which tribe will get its hands on the executive branch’s gigantic levers every four years. This is an obvious recipe for political instability, and eventually civil conflict, constitutional crisis, and/or outright state collapse.

It is not sustainable for the consequences of losing elections to become more and more severe every time that one is lost. At some point, one side will correctly calculate that the costs of ceding power in an election are simply too high, and outright refuse to do so. Perhaps we got a whiff of this with January 6, but really, that was just a play-pretend trial run, if anything. We can and did weather that incident—but we can’t weather a situation where more serious attempts to retain power become commonplace and expected at every turn. Obviously, elections in general will lose legitimacy at that point.

Unprecedented political strife and perhaps the breakup of the nation would be in the cards then. Now, I have previously expressed support for the idea of breaking up the United States, and I retain that sentiment—but with the caveat that we at least try to do it in an orderly fashion, with both “sides” agreeing that it’s for the best. That is not what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are working towards, not even remotely. An “involuntary” breakup forced by escalating political instability would be chaotic, destructive, and probably to the detriment of everyone. That is where things would head in a situation where both sides feel that they must fight to the death over control of the federal government.

So, what’s the alternative, you might ask? What exactly is it that I want? Would I rather have Kamala Harris as President than Elon Musk? Well no, obviously not. I would have preferred Donald Trump to Elon Musk, and frankly I would have preferred Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump. But that is neither here nor there. The basic reason Donald Trump came back into power is that people wanted things to go back to normal. Joe Biden came into power in 2020 with that being the promise—elect me, and things will go back to normal. He fell through on that promise and so people have decided to give Trump another shot. So far, it is unclear whether Donald Trump will get us back to normal either. It seems to me like he probably won’t.

In my opinion, he should have taken decisive action on the issues I named above, the ones that caused people to support him in the first place—but without appointing Elon Musk to run the entire federal government (and attempt to destroy it). This would have been the move in order to try and get us back to a place of relative sanity and stability, an opportunity to de-escalate and make some degree of peace with the establishment and the left. No more DEI, no more illegal immigration, no more criminals running rampant, etc.—and in exchange the rest of life can continue mostly as it did before. A winding-down of the Great Awokening.

This would have created strong incentives for other political actors to accept Trump’s administration as legitimate and normalize his movement, allowing them to cede ground on issues that they were losing anyways and save some face without their core interests being threatened. Instead, by declaring war on the establishment in general, the opportunity for any kind of equilibrium has probably already been lost. Escalation incentivizes escalation—now Trump’s opponents will be seeking any possible opportunity for retaliation, and they are right to do so given their position.

We will see where things go from here. I am a perpetual pessimist, and I admit to having that cognitive bias. But more generally my assumption is that anyone who hasn’t proven themselves to truly hold my values will inevitably betray them. I think this is an entirely reasonable assumption to make about human beings and that Donald Trump (and Elon Musk even more so) belong in that category. It is easy to feel good about things right now, but I remain wary of what will happen when Democrats inevitably win an election again. One reason I did not want to vote for Trump was the way in which whatever good he managed to do in his first term was immediately reversed and then some by Biden—as of now, it seems certain that this will be the case once again at some point in the relatively near future.