Photo: TIME
Less than three months after Donald Trump returned to the White House, the United States is already in the midst of a political, economic and moral collapse. In an article in The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, a former adviser to three Republican administrations, called the current president nothing less than “the mad king of America” – and dissected his second administration to the bone.
Trump began with a “grand tariff hike” – calling on Americans to “not be weak, not be stupid, and not be panicky” – and within days, he effectively crashed the stock market. In response to the absurd, ill-conceived tariff policy, which even covered uninhabited Australian territories, investors pulled trillions of dollars out of the market. Threats, disinformation and hysteria on social media could not overcome reality.
“Trump faced reality – and reality won,” Wehner writes.
In his second term, Trump became even more impulsive, vengeful and anarchic. He surrounded himself with unconditionally loyal but incompetent people – from marginalised individuals to conspirators and just plain ignorant.
A series of disasters that have already become a reality:
- Tariffs are introduced and cancelled without logic: the administration first excludes iPhones and computers, then claims that it is not an exception.
- Secretary of Defence Pete Hagseth issues orders that lead to the removal of Enola Gay’s B-29 photos and the censorship of Maya Angelou’s memoir – but Mein Kampf remains in Navy libraries.
- Hegseth also “surrenders” Ukraine’s negotiating position at a press conference in Brussels before the meetings with Russia have even taken place.
- Special Representative Steve Vitkoff repeats the Kremlin’s propaganda that Ukrainians “want to be part of Russia”, barely mentioning the names of the occupied regions.
- The Atlantic reports that the editor-in-chief was mistakenly added to a chat room with senior officials who coordinated the airstrike on Yemen.
- The administration has fired employees responsible for nuclear safety, bird flu, and PEPFAR, the most successful global HIV/AIDS programme launched by Bush.
Incompetence is combined with sadism
The administration’s decisions have resulted in deaths in clinics for HIV-positive pregnant women, disruption of biomedical research, including cancer treatment, deportations of people with legal status in El Salvador based on tattoos or clothing, and disregard for Supreme Court rulings.
Judge James Boasberg said he was ready to initiate criminal proceedings against the administration for willful disobedience of court orders, particularly in cases of illegal deportations. The government has not complied with the orders even after the Supreme Court’s intervention.
“The Constitution does not tolerate disrespect for the court – especially from those who have sworn to uphold it,” the judge said.
Destruction of education, healthcare and public administration
Programmes to collect educational statistics were cut by $900 million. Critical clinical trials have been cancelled. The CDC is ordered to keep quiet about the link between the measles outbreak and vaccine refusal.
And this is just the beginning. Trump still has more than 1,350 days in office.
All of this is not just a manifestation of political immorality. It is a systemic threat to American institutions that combines authoritarian ambition with managerial ineptitude. Wehner emphasises: “Trump and his team are not strategists, but freaks, incompetents, and vengeful narcissists who are destroying democracy from within.
With the Consumer Confidence Index at a record low, unemployment rising and inflationary panic, the country is sinking deeper into a sense of mistrust, fear and anger. But there is hope:
“Many Americans will not go down without a fight. I hope and expect them to win. But it will be a painful victory. And it shouldn’t have been,” Wehner concludes.
77 million votes – so many people, according to the author, became “co-authors of this catastrophe”. And it is they who own the stain that cannot be washed off the American republic.
