Three Observations from the Midst of the Maelstrom

The anti-system realignment, a superpower commits suicide, and Trump’s risible Gaza gambit

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press upon arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on February 2, 2025, as he returns to the White House from Florida. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

I can already see that commenting on politics over the next four (or more?) years is going to be both an exhausting scramble and, in some sense, impossible. What I mean is that, if the Trump administration does four outrageous and possibly illegal or unconstitutional things on Monday, and I begin to do research about one of them on Tuesday for a post I will publish on Wednesday morning, but he’s done four more outrageous and possibly illegal or unconstitutional things on Tuesday and a couple more before noon on Wednesday, then my contribution to the conversation is already in some sense too late to matter.

Now, what I write in my Substack newsletter hardly matters anyway. But the same dynamic is playing out on a vastly greater scale at the country’s leading news organizations. If The New York Times assigns an op-ed for each of the four outrageous and possibly illegal or unconstitutional things that happened on Monday and they get filed and edited very quickly, they, too, won’t begin appearing until, at the earliest, some time on Tuesday—which will be several significant steps removed from the subject of those guest essays.

This intense pace of disruptive activity could even affect the functioning of the judicial branch of government. It appears, for example, that the Trump administration is in the process of destroying USAID, with a few of its activities folded into the State Department but most of them simply discontinued and its employees in countries all over the world recalled and placed on leave. What if a court rules early next week that the “process” followed by Elon Musk and his entourage of 20-something computer engineers may have broken federal laws in dissolving the agency? Won’t it already be too late? Could a judge order time itself to begin flowing backward so the agency can be reconstructed and held in suspended animation until the court can issue a full ruling on the matter a few months later? I don’t see how this would work, outside of science fiction that is.

I don’t know how often I’ll be reduced to doing something like this, but for this week at least, I’ve given up on the ambition of fastening onto just one thing to write about. There’s just too much chaos unfolding on too many fronts. So what I’ve written instead are three relatively brief observations, with each focused on one of dozens of worthy topics. I will attempt to write a more typical, wide-angle essay for early next week emphasizing just one thing. Time will tell which style of post will prove more fitting to the political maelstrom in which we now find ourselves.

Realignment Accomplished