A Chaos President

Jeb Bush was right

In 2016, Jeb Bush delivered one of his famous zingers. “Donald Trump…he’s a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” This zinger was interspersed with Mike Tyson-level rhetorical body shots, sounding the alarm about how Trump’s travel ban would be counterproductive by hindering engagement with the Kurds! With devastating rhetorical takedowns like that, you almost wonder why he didn’t win!

But Jeb Bush was obviously right. While everyone made fun of him, he absolutely nailed Trump. Trump was a chaos candidate, and especially this time around, he’s been a chaos president.

On his first day in the White House, he signed a blitz of horrifying executive orders. These had sweeping ramifications, many of doubtful legality. One, for instance, shut off nearly all foreign aid. He then enhanced this policy by having Elon Musk and his team of ten-year-olds over at DOGE axe most USAID programs.

This government purge was done sporadically and, as the wiser Bush forecast, chaotically. The cuts to PEPFAR, for instance, killed many thousands of people, like 10-year-old Peter Donde, who died of HIV after his medical supply was abruptly cut off by the ghouls in Washington. They killed Achol Deng by abruptly cutting off her access to lifesaving treatment. The PEPFAR program was the best thing the government has done in my lifetime—it saved tens of millions of lives at the cost of just a few dollars per American. One paper even concluded that the recent cuts to foreign aid would kill tens of millions of people in the coming decades.

And yet the psychopaths in the present administration concluded that PEPFAR was one of the programs that had to be axed. They were too callous to take even a moment to consider the consequences of abruptly annihilating government aid.

A former vivisectionist who later came to regret his life’s work once said:

This book is dedicated to the many animals whom I tortured and killed in the name of science. If there is a hell, I will spend it forever looking into their eyes.

It’s hard to read a quote like that without thinking of the heartless bastards in the DOGE department, as well as the rest of the Trump administration, who cut off aid to horribly sick children.

But the Trump administration has not just been a grotesque display in cruelty. It’s also been, in the few short months since it began, an unprecedented advance in authoritarianism. Trump has flirted with running for a third term, and it’s hard to take that as a joke when he attempted a coup, and the Republican party just went along with it.

Rather than just go after illegals, the Trump administration has targeted legal immigrants who express views critical of Israel. Whatever you think about Israel, this is a clear breach of free speech. For those defending it, imagine how you’d feel if the Biden administration began deporting anyone who advocated the lab leak theory. He’s also chucked people into terrifying Salvadoran dungeons, without due process, even if they have yet to be convicted of a crime. This includes an innocent gay makeup artist, who is now likely to be raped and brutalized in a hellish prison because the Trump administration has a policy of ignoring due process. It also includes a legal asylum seeker, who was deported after going through every step legally.

Trump’s tariff policy that’s on one day, off the next, is disastrous. Even if you think tariffs are a good idea, markets thrive on stability. A rogue president imposing tariffs on a whim, before walking them back impulsively, isn’t good for the economy. If the aim of tariffs is to bring back manufacturing, how the hell are manufacturing facilities going to reopen in the United States if they haven’t the faintest clue what tariffs will exist next week? And why are manufacturing stocks down?

Or consider Signalgate, where high ranking administration officials accidentally added hostile journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to their group chat where they were discussing war plans. And while this was far from the worst thing the administration has done, it demonstrates the fecklessness and disregard for procedure of the present administration. They are governing like a monkey on cocaine, with no regard for existing norms or procedures.

Drew Pavlou

calls them MAGA maoists and he’s not wrong—they govern with the fervor of a revolutionary.

Obama was accused of hating norms. In hindsight, this charge was laughable coming from those who made it. One cannot say that Obama disrespected speech and the constitution while cheering on a guy who wants to run for a third term, imposes illegal tariffs, sends people to Salvadoran gulags without due process, and detains people in ICE facilities for constitutionally protected speech.

The legal theory espoused by the present administration is that anyone who expresses foreign policy views that Marco Rubio doesn’t like represents a threat to the foreign policy interests of the United States and can therefore be deported. When even monarchists who openly advocate limitless executive authority are decrying the cruelty and the lawlessness of the Trump administration, something has gone deeply wrong.

At every level, the Trump administration has shown wackiness and incompetence with devastating ramifications. DOGE, for instance, is likely to increase the deficit, because Elon has idiotically axed many of the tax collectors. IRS agents return more in revenue than they cost; cutting them is a recipe for much larger deficits.

But the Trump administration does not care. They have no principles. Just loyalty to Trump, thuggery, and malevolence. Trump is behaving like a tinpot dictator across the board. The party of Lincoln and Reagan has become a party devoid of ideology. We have morons running the show, who are not careful, who do not think before they act. Cost-benefit analyses play no role in the actions of the current administration. They have become completely untethered from both truth and morality.

I was not a fan of the first Trump administration. But at least it was mostly staffed by genuinely competent people. The first Trump administration at the very least was not run by braindead clowns. All the remnants of the first Trump administration are gone, replaced by the morons currently running things.

When Jeb Bush warned that Trump would be a chaos president, few listened. It felt like a weak jab—much less effective than the ones that Trump was lobbing. But it turns out that having a chaos president is the worst thing. Having a president totally untethered from reality, who breaches norms at the drop of a hat, whose cruelty and callousness knows no end, is quite dangerous. Past presidents may have had alarming ideology, but they were far less dangerous than the man in the white house today, who approaches every problem in the worst ways. Deep incompetence and near omnipotence make a frightening combination.

The least competent people imaginable are the ones making the laws. The clowns are in charge now. And the dark carnival has just begun.