Trump and Things Going Wrong

It's already starting. It's going to get much worse.

No one should underplay the importance of the attack on democracy in the US by Donald Trump and his allies. Nor should anyone downplay the policy extremism that remains unpopular and, most people believe, highly damaging. But beyond that - related, overlapping, but separate — is another stark truth. As one person put it:

The new party system is literally “people who have a vague idea about how anything, anything at all works” versus “everyone else.”

I’ve been saying that so many things are going to go wrong. Almost six months in, it’s already happening.

Just in the news this week?

• It’s still early; indeed, search and rescue operations are still ongoing. But there’s at least some evidence that when all is said and done, the administration will bear at least some of the responsibility for the disaster in Texas over the weekend. Even more likely is that the federal response has been unusually slow.

• The measles outbreak is already the worst in decades, and other formerly defeated diseases are making comebacks as well.

• It’s not just domestic policy failure. Some aid to Ukraine was temporarily turned off by the Defense Department contrary to US policy, perhaps because there does not seem to be any functioning national security process and so various officials are freelancing.

• Trump’s trade wars continue to be an ever-deepening mess.

• And that’s just for now, and that was in the news this week. Don’t forget about people who were deported based on administrative errors (in the administration’s own words), or the continuing questions about air-traffic control shortages, and more.

Mistakes. I’m not counting the damage done, for example, by the elimination of USAID. Or the inhumane treatment of deportation targets in the new Florida detention camp. Those count too, of course, but I’m talking here mainly about incompetence, not deliberate policy choices.¹

To be sure: It’s complicated. What we’re going to find is that it’s very difficult to have strong confidence in specific causal links between administration actions. That’s certainly the case with the warning system in Texas, which seems to have been a multi-stage breakdown and lack of preparation, with changes at the federal level this year only a part of increasing risks.

Or the measles outbreak. It began, after all, before Trump even took office. We can certainly blame Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and various Trump supporters who jumped on the bandwagon over the last few years for their share in reducing vaccination rates. Still, second-term Trump didn’t cause the outbreak. However, almost six months in, the administration has basically ignored the problem, and that they can be blamed for — even if it is, again, hard to know exactly what would have changed had they acted differently.

In some ways and for some purposes, getting these relationships right is important. But the bottom line is that even if it’s always going to be difficult to break it down, what’s happening and what’s going to happen is going to include a whole lot of harm to the nation. The combination of a president who is terrible at his job, a poorly run White House, a cabinet and other top executive branch nominees chosen for their ability to flatter the president and never oppose him, and a depleted bureaucracy? The risks are obvious, and constant.

A lot of this is just Trump, who is unusually bad at all of this. Some is the extremely ideological approach of some of the key administration figures; pragmatism gets a bad name, but it’s an extremely valuable reality check that this White House doesn’t seem to have.

And some appears to be inherent in authoritarian attitudes. Yes, it’s basically a myth that citizens of a republic carefully monitor government actions and policy outcomes and vote accordingly. What is true however is that most politicians in democracies act as if they are at least somewhat constrained by public opinion and therefore wind up acting as if they had strong incentives to keeping voters happy. Kings and dictators, including those who imagine themselves as such, have much weaker incentives for producing good policy outcomes — or for avoiding disasters.

I wish I could tell you that Trump and his party will be punished electorally as things go wrong. I do have confidence that damaging the economy will hurt the incumbent party. But for the rest…it’s hard to know. Voters have very short attention spans. Partisans interpret events through their biases. It takes a lot for events other than the economy and war to break through. Of course, Trump is already unpopular; perhaps it doesn’t matter exactly why.

But whatever the electoral consequences, the consequences for the nation are apt to be brutal. And it seems likely that is already kicking in, with not even six months gone.

1. Others might score these things differently; is destroying FEMA a deliberate and extreme policy choice, or is FEMA’s slow response in Texas a bureaucratic foul-up? Or both? One way or another, both of those things are going on.