The Unexpected Virtue of Chaos

Why It'll Probably Be Fine

President Trump Delivers His January 6th Speech in Front of the WH, January 6th, 2021

I realize that I’m probably the last person anyone would expect to be making the case that things will likely be fine—but here we are. Trump will be President of the United States in two months, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise, so it seems worthwhile to think about what exactly that means.

While quite a few political laws don’t seem to apply to Trump (blowing a microphone on stage would usually end a normal person’s campaign), there are still immutable laws even in his universe.

The first law is that taking action requires the use of political capital. There are only a finite number of things an administration can focus on at any one time, and pushing forward an initiative will require the acquiescence of GOP lawmakers who will almost certainly be thinking of their fates in the 2026 elections. Trump isn’t an autocrat¹ and he still needs to work within the factional politics of the GOP to get these things done.

He probably has the political capital to enact some form of tariffs, and some forms of deportations. He almost absolutely does not possess the ability to start up camps for 20 million people unless GOP representatives are willing to electorally throw themselves on their swords for him (and I doubt they’d do so).

I think abortion is a good example here. Trump’s campaign has spent the entire campaign running away from arguably the most impactful accomplishment of his first term. Getting the Supreme Court Justices in power was functionally his only real lasting accomplishment of his first term, and because of that conservatives managed to get rid of Roe v. Wade—and people fucking hate it.

That’s what I mean by political capital. Tariffs will blow apart the American economy if they’re actually implemented in the manner Trump wants—therefore there is an actual and real political cost to the GOP for implementing them. In an electoral democracy (as a general rule) you don’t seek to inflict pain on your own electorate because they’ll usually vote you out for that.

Similarly, there are unlikely to be many people who like the images flashing across their televisions of mothers and children being dragged out of their homes by ICE. Voters may like the idea in the abstract of getting rid of the illegal immigrants who are supposedly taking their jobs and homes—but they will almost certainly not like it when it’s actually real.

Voters learned a similar lesson during the pullout of American forces from Afghanistan. Despite loudly proclaiming how much they hated the U.S. presence overseas, they only meant that in theoretical terms. Being forced to witness what that meant in reality—desperate civilians plummeting to their deaths from the wheels of departing C-17s and U.S. troops dying in a suicide bombing attack—was viscerally unpopular.

The GOP and Trump know this, and they know that they cannot afford a similar disaster under their watch, and regardless of what Stephen Miller and his Hitler Youth want—it will probably be much more muted in reality. Similarly for Ukraine, I do suspect that at the end of the day, the potential embarrassment of the Russian military seizing Kharkiv is probably a deterrent to Trump abandoning Kyiv completely.

The second law of politics that Trump is almost certainly not immune from is that accomplishing grand plans takes patience, sustained leadership, and stability. Things that Trump was famously loathe to practice during his first Presidency.

Now could this change? Sure it could. I could also wake up tomorrow without a metaphysical need to consume nicotine every 30 seconds.

Going back to his first Presidency the only thing he actually accomplished was the Supreme Court Justices, and that was notable for the fact that it required almost no actual planning or consistency on his part. He just had to pick a name out of a hat and the Senate does the rest.

The rest of his administration veered wildly from attempting to buy Greenland, to pulling out of Syria (to then reverse that decision), to a summit with Kim Jong Un that went nowhere, to a wall that over four years had like 30 miles built, and a stop and start trade war with China that changed biweekly.

There are a million examples I could give here, but any single initiative that required a sincere commitment to accomplish wasn’t accomplished. The Trump WH was simply in too much of a state of constant chaos to ever get anything done.

Institutions do not just turn on a dime and start doing exactly what they want because you sent out a tweet at 3 am in the morning. Getting the machinery of government to work in the way you want it to—take for instance deporting 20 million people—requires having a unity of vision and energetic leadership to accomplish.

That’s simply not going to happen when your Chief of Staff is getting fired via Twitter because they pissed you off by having a different policy idea than you wanted. Systematically knifing every single person who has ever worked for you in the back may be how a reality show makes money, but it isn’t how a government functions.

There’s an impulse from a lot of people who think the chaos of his first term resulted in the constant friction between Trump and the “adults in the room” who limited his worst impulses. While there has been planning done to ensure his second term is staffed with “loyalists,” I also think a lot of people are misdiagnosing what went wrong.

It wasn’t that they were “adults in the room” that got them fired. It’s that they had plans and ideas that weren’t Trump’s ideas at that given moment in time. The people surrounding Trump now—Vance, Musk, RFK, Heritage, AFPI, Claremont, and various Wall Street execs—are no different.

They all represent various aspects of factions of the modern GOP, and all of them have their own agendas. These agendas might intersect with Trump’s mercurial agendas from time to time, but one by one they will find themselves taken out back and shot when they do something that upsets him.

Meanwhile—underneath the rotating cast of administrators—institutions will carry on as they always do. The various civil servants will continue to work the machinery of bureaucracy. Without any sort of unified vision of what exactly the Trump administration wants, there’s no reason to think that DHS will just unilaterally start roundups of people.

Not to mention, consumed by the whiplash of constant firings, who exactly would want to stick their head out to be the public face of a policy that would almost certainly be reviled by the general public? Knowing you’re going to be thrown to the wolves the second something goes wrong hardly instills confidence in wanting to lead a highly visible project.

I’d add that if the Democratic Party can retake the House in 2026—and I expect they will—Trump really only has two years wherein he can make any sort of lasting policies. With that narrow of a window, is there any reason to suspect that he’s going to come out the gate at 78 years old as a completely changed man who can get things done?

This isn’t to say there’s no danger here or anything. Trump ran a campaign that was built off an explicit vision of an autocratic America wherein he could deploy the military against his political enemies at his will. The worst of his policies if implemented would cause untold harm and destruction for our country.

He is still the person who attempted a coup, and the average statement he makes at his rallies should disqualify him from power.

It’s just that the task of governance is a serious business. It requires professionals who take their obligations seriously and are willing to pursue policies and initiatives for years at a time. There’s nothing I’ve seen so far that makes me think Trump 2.0 will be any different from the first time.

But it certainly isn’t a good thing that we’re playing roulette with the fate of our political community like this. We’ll probably get lucky this time. Hell, we’d probably still get lucky if Vance wins in 2028. But like any other gambling addict who’s tried using a martingale to outsmart the casino—minuscule odds of a catastrophe will come back to haunt you eventually.

1. Wanting to be something doesn’t make you that thing. I want to be Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner 2049 but I can’t find that coat no matter how hard I try.