It’s the Fall That’s Gonna Kill You

The second Trump administration turns American governance into an act of collective self-harm

US President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One upon arrival at Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida on February 19, 2025. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

One month down, 47 to go.

I wrote hundreds of columns for The Week during the first Trump administration. An enduring theme of that writing was that we were living under a mad king. The essays described a government run by a delusional, impulsive, abusive, inveterate liar. Forced by my job to attend to every tweet, every threat, every act of presidential gaslighting, I ended up feeling a little like a specimen confined to a lab run by a deranged, sociopathic scientist overseeing an extended experiment involving intentional psychic abuse of the research subject. I was able to endure it largely because it also felt like the background structures of American government, though sometimes appearing to buckle, were holding as they struggled to contain the chaotic energy emanating from the Oval Office.

So far, at least, the experience of the second Trump administration is dramatically different. The sense of chaos radiating out from one deranged man has been replaced by a feeling of multifront, frenzied activity directed toward the goal of system-wide disruption. The singular focus on Trump has broadened to encompass the entirety of the administration, with the Ketamine-fueled tech-mogul Elon Musk vying with the president for maximal attention, but with a large cast of characters taking their turns on the stage, every one of them reinforcing a deeply illiberal right-populist energy.

Over the past month, I’ve come to believe the Trump administration is working to transform American liberal democracy into a competitive authoritarian regime. This post will be a first, awkward attempt to describe the vaguely hallucinatory experience of living through that transformation in real time. I’ve written it for the sake of advancing my own (and my subscribers’) understanding in the present—but even more so for the sake of posterity. There should be a record of what it felt like to live through a time of intense political destabilization, disintegration, and self-inflicted damage.

Over the Falls in a Barrel

The image that keeps popping into my head over the last month is one of riding swiftly downstream in a barrel, its speed and direction out of our control. As we glide past dangerous, protruding rocks, a massive drop looms somewhere ahead, its deafening roar growing slowly louder with each passing day. I know there will come a point in the journey when the current will rapidly accelerate, just before the final plunge over the edge into a blackly uncertain fate. How far off are the falls? How far down is the drop? What awaits us at the bottom? A deadly boulder field? A deep pool of water to cushion us when we land? There’s no way to know and so nothing to be done but to give in to the inexorable current and hope and pray for the best.

To shift metaphors, if Trump 1.0 felt like trying to ride a bucking bronco for four exhausting, dizzying years, Trump 2.0 feels like standing passively by while a massive and merciless machine relentlessly mows down everything in its path.

The president is attempting to rule by decree—sorry, by “executive order.” The courts are trying, fitfully, to slow him down, but they appear to be struggling to find their footing and even keep up with the blizzard of activity. Whether Trump will accept having his energy and ambition subdued by the Supreme Court remains a question the administration very much wants to keep open as a looming threat of possible defiance.

Congress, with both houses controlled by the president’s party, has embraced the easy (if humiliating) comforts of impotence. The Democrats, meanwhile, seem stunned, their default risk-aversion overwhelmed and left stupefied by daily acts of their opponent’s remorseless destruction. And the voters? After a month of presidential power grabs, frenzied activity on multiple fronts, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cronies blindly hacking away at the federal workforce, and the president and his team shivving our European allies (more on that in a bit), Trump’s aggregate approval rating is … just a smidgen lower than it was on the afternoon of January 20.