Government-by-Shitpost

Trump 2.0’s dangerous hyperactivity makes the Constitution more important than ever

Elon Musk at CPAC.

We are less than two months into the second Trump term and we can already say a few things about the new administration.

This administration is unique in the history of the United States, and probably of government in general, in embodying Government-by-Shitpost. The administration’s messaging often feels like that of a group chat of edgy boys. Social status within the group chat is obtained by making funny comments and posting memes establishing once’s independence from and irreverence for social norms.

There is no reason to think there is any secret grand strategy or long-term thinking behind Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s day-to-day antics. Their all-over-the-place messaging in the unending stream of public statements, media appearances, executive actions, and Truth Social/X posts are almost certainly an honest reflection of their mercurial minds: What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). Quite possibly the administration’s two leading men have ADHD.

Government-by-Shitpost was foreshadowed during the transition period following Trump’s reelection in November. The president-elect began making bold expansionist claims—ironic or not?—about Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada.

Then Vivek Ramaswamy, tapped as Musk’s number 2 at the upcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), got into a Twitter-fight with the online nativist/identitarian right regarding white Americans’ lack of Asian-style tiger parenting and the need for skilled H-1B workers. Ramaswamy said white America needs less jocks and cheerleaders and more extremely credentialed strivers. Musk, whose companies rely heavily on Asian talent, decreed H-1Bs indispensable and called for purging “hateful, unrepentant racists” from the Republican Party. This seemed a victory for the merit-based globalism of the Tech Right over the nativist/identitarian right. On the other hand, Ramaswamy was shortly thereafter removed from Trump’s inner circle and any role in DOGE, although it is hard to say whether this was due to his online bungling or to some other personal slight.

After taking office, Trump was able to get almost all of his appointees through the Republican-controlled Senate: not only Peter Hegseth at Defense and Kash Patel as head of the FBI, but even RFK, Jr. at Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Trump’s rag-tag team makes for a heterogenous collection of old-school GOPers, personal loyalists, and maverick ideological figures with their own followings.

This signifies, for good or ill, just how unpredictable the new administration is: it is latently free of previous orthodoxies, whether of the Beltway establishment in general or of the Republican Party. Trump was always the high variance candidate. To the extent he sticks to orthodoxy, as in his support for Israel and Social Security, this is out of personal choice and strategic interest, not because he is constrained by colleagues or party. Trump is unshackled.

The predominant trait of the new administration has been its utterly erratic approach: a mixture of a constant daily flow of bombastic scattershot messaging on every topic imaginable and various policy actions often as far-reaching as they are abrupt.

Regarding the messaging, I believe this clip from Gladiator sums up 90% of Trump’s purposes:

So far as his public persona is concerned, Trump’s first power has been that of an entertainer. His rallies resemble stand-up acts as much as anything else. The mainstream media’s inability to understand this long empowered Trump: outraged reactions enabled him to totally monopolize attention while earning him yet more credit among his followers. This the Wrestlemania President, the real-life Dwayne Camacho, with an intuitive sense of what makes for unmissable television.

On the other hand, it can be hard to tell when Trump’s outlandish comments are meant seriously. I do not get the impression that his now many statements questioning the legitimacy of the Canadian state are simply meant as a joke.

Trump’s erratic and bombastic messaging is closely allied with his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants management style. As he said in The Art of the Deal:

Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.

There is no typical week in my life. …There’s rarely a day with fewer than fifty calls, and often it runs to over a hundred. In between, I have at least a dozen meetings. The majority occur on the spur of the moment, and few of them last longer than fifteen minutes. I rarely stop for lunch. I leave my office by six-thirty, but I frequently make calls from home until midnight, and all weekend long.

This approach may not be a bad thing if its spontaneity and openness leads to deals with other players, deals that might not be reached through more institutional and constrained approaches. In the actual unilateral wielding of executive power however, this is leading to an utterly erratic mode of governance.

Exibit A of erratic and brutal governance: DOGE

The post-Musk website of USAID (that’s it).

Erratic and brutal governance is most evident in Musk’s management of DOGE. Prior to the election, I had wondered what DOGE might constructively do, based on Musk’s stupendous successes and experience in business and technoscience. Lacking any real legal mandate, perhaps DOGE would be a committee to come up with effective recommendations to streamline and improve the American government. Very naïve and in-the-box thinking on my part!

Musk and Trump’s approach with DOGE has been much bolder and straightforward: just take a sledgehammer and smash whatever you can.

While DOGE has targeted many government agencies, the case of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which I follow closely as part of my work of global health policy monitoring, is perhaps most emblematic, because Musk’s defunding ambitions there have been the most ambitious and successful.

USAID is a venerable agency which has been a key component of U.S. soft power since the 1960s. It had a budget of $40 billion used for all sorts of programs, including life-saving ones on vaccination, HIV/AIDS (including the celebrated President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR), malaria, and reproductive health.

Musk is making USAID “efficient” the same way he did Twitter: by firing 95% of staff and cutting over 80% of aid programs. The scale and swiftness of the changes are breath-taking: an estimated 50,000 Americans and 100,000 foreigners have lost their jobs at USAID and partner organizations.

USAID is not being shut down in any kind of thoughtful way or with any consideration of broader outcomes. For instance, I suspect in his heart of hearts Musk supports family planning and birth control efforts in the Global South. All the same he has cut $377 million in funding to the UN family planning agency. The cuts also include interrupting ongoing clinical trials testing new treatments against diseases, meaning taxpayer money already invested in medical research is to be wasted.

The shutdown has not taken account of broader administration or U.S. interests, let alone the lives of foreigners. For instance, even the most stone-hearted America-Firsters can see that letting people die of AIDS to claw back a few bucks is a bad look. Thus Secretary of State Marco Rubio has issued “waivers” to preserve some lifesaving programs, but there is no clarity on these, announcements go back and forth on what is or is not preserved, and bottom line most everything is disrupted. The results are predictably deadly.

Musk’s hyperactivity has led to a flurry of lawsuits. There is no indication either Trump or Musk care about constitutionality. While the president as head of the executive branch has broad authority on how to undertake activities on foreign policy, the dismantling of a congressionally-approved agency and refusal to disburse its funds would seem a clear insult to the legislative branch and its prerogatives. The conservative-majority Supreme Court has tentatively ruled that USAID funding must be deblocked, although the decision leaves specific orders to the lower courts.

Whatever their legality, DOGE’s actions on USAID have been characteristically abrupt and heavy-handed. There has been no discussion as to what the U.S. government should prioritize. There is no overarching set of principles or philosophy of government. There has been no attempt to take time to investigate where the actual waste is and build consensus, even among Republicans, to defund particular programs with a vision in mind and thinking about how to manage the consequences. Instead, we have had unannounced and capricious smashing across the board. Whatever the courts rule and whatever ultimately emerges, there will have been a tremendous amount of disruption.

An organization like DOGE could have done valuable work. There is no doubt that all government bodies tend to accumulate inefficiencies and misallocation of resources over time. By nature, government bodies are politically correct, meaning resources are allocated according to lowest-common-denominator consensus, and there are no direct consequences of failure comparable to a business losing customers. Periodic, if painful, draining of the swamp may sometimes be the only way to eliminate the accumulation of waste, whether by a Reagan, a Thatcher, or a Milei. Even the approach of shutting down an agency and rebuilding from the ground up can be defensible, although doing this kind of experiment with one involved in keeping people alive seems sociopathic.

The trouble with Musk’s fiscal libertarianism, which seems to be a new passion of his, is that Trumpian populism is committed to preserving the big drivers of America’s budget deficits and looming fiscal crisis: Social Security and Medicare. That means Musk is limited to going after bodies of lesser fiscal importance but who cannot defend themselves politically, such as USAID.

The shutting down of USAID will save some taxpayer money. However, the agency’s budget of $40 billion is a rounding error so far as the federal deficit is concerned ($1,800 billion in 2024). Because USAID’s direct beneficiaries are overwhelmingly foreigners, this makes the agency a politically safe target for elimination, no matter how essential or cost-effective some of its programs were (or what their benefits to Americans were, such as limiting the international spread of diseases).

More generally, a government agency is not a social media platform. Due to the scalable and virtual nature of digital, one can drastically reduce overhead at a tech company and potentially be able to maintain service. After Musk took over and fired 80% of Twitter staff, I found the platform had a lot more spam and sexbots (sexually explicit fake accounts). For a while, the latter made up maybe half my interactions on X. Nonetheless, long-term the platform seems to have been performing about as well with much less overhead (putting aside the various contestable decisions Musk has made, e.g. throttling links). To take the same approach to real-life agencies with actual operations simply means to shut them down, not make them more “efficient,” at least until the agency is rebuilt (on which eventuality Musk has given no indications).

To the extent DOGE’s activities have a logic, I see two components:

1. Trump and Musk are exploring how much of the federal government they can dismantle. An exercise in flexing their muscles and pushing boundaries: move fast, break things, “and just see what develops.”

2. Institutions may be targeted for using taxpayer dollars to promote progressive values such as DEI, “gender ideology,” etc., at least in some programs. No surprise then that the Department of Education is being targeted.

While it is natural enough for a conservative president to shut down such spending, it is a huge disservice to such institutions and the people who work there to suggest that is all they do and to shut down activities across the board. What is perhaps surprising for a techie like Musk is that DOGE is also slashing federal research for science. Of all the things governments spend money on, one would think basic science would be among the most valuable.

Exhibit B of erratic and brutal governance: Tariffs

I have less to say on tariffs as I don’t follow these developments as closely. Nonetheless, it has been almost (tragi)comical to observe how unstable the administration’s talk and actions on tariffs have been. Tariffs are threatened against certain countries (especially Mexico and Canada), then not put in place at the last minute, then after another rhetorical cycle are put in place but then withdrawn later that day, or kept in place, or then removed again once the victim country retaliates with their own tariffs, and so on. Just keeping track of the day-to-day flip-flops is confusing enough.

Popularity of Canadian political parties.

Especially noteworthy are the tariffs on Canada, a culturally close country, longstanding ally, and uniquely interdependent economic partner. There is no intelligible reason for these tariffs except bullying (now former) Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and, as Trump says, annexation. The tariffs’ effect may be to save Canada’s flailing Liberals, as Canadians rally around the flag and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre becomes tainted by association with Trumpian populism.

There is no clarity as to whether the various tariffs are primarily meant as a negotiating tool to obtain other concessions or as a new normal for a permanently more protectionist American economy (like the China tariffs of Trump’s first term). Wall Street was initially bullish about a second Trump term, given his first term track record (sans COVID) and commitments to cheap energy (“Drill, baby, drill!”), deregulation, and tax cuts. The sheer instability and scale of Trump’s tariffs, as well as his vague talk of an economic “transition” to some unspecified endstate, have spooked the markets. The contrast with Trump’s first term could not be clearer.

One would think if anything can discipline Trump, it would be the need for economic success. Certainly this was a central concern of his first term. But it is quite unclear whether he can be disciplined.

What next?

There is much more that could be said on this administration and its willingness to gratuitously alienate everyone and perhaps especially allies. But bottom line the next four years in U.S. politics are likely to be very disruptive and everyone affected has to decide how to respond.

American liberals must think hard about how to improve their electoral competitiveness. They must discipline their coalition. It is often surreal to see what Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would say about illegal immigration or LGBT issues in the 2008 election, statements which would basically make them outcasts among today’s Democrats. Besides being too late to acknowledge President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, biological nihilism—such as letting biological males in women’s sports—and tacit acceptance of illegal immigration are probably the two Democratic own-goals that have done the most make Trump’s second win possible.

Europeans and other historic American allies should not assume that the chaos and noise of U.S. politics, or their eventual revulsion towards Trumpism, mean that American power is necessarily declining. At least assuming Trump doesn’t spontaneously tank the economy—which admittedly is within the realm of possibility. While the Great Stagnation engulfs the Global North, it is not a coincidence that the U.S. share of the G7 economy has grown stupendously since the 1990s. Europeans must seriously and unsentimentally think about this fact and what can be done to foster their demographic, economic, and technological growth—at least if they want to be relevant in the future and be able to get out of America’s postwar shadow.

Men like Trump must be constrained by America’s institutions if the country is to survive and prosper. Hence American conservatives must hold to the Constitution and its principles, especially checks and balances. Attachment to the Constitution and the principles of the Founding are often considered downright quaint in right-wing circles these days. I would affirm however that these encapsulate a great deal of Anglo-American wisdom from a time when the Western world was on the ascendant. Whatever their imperfections, the Founders’ institutions and principles did lay the basis for America’s future greatness.

For those on the right who think the Constitution is irrelevant, I would say freedom of speech, freedom of association, immigration enforcement, the defense of American citizens, merit, and limited and popular self-government all remain relevant for conservatives. These are constitutional battles worth fighting. As during his first term, I hope Trump will appoint, and Republicans in the Senate will only accept, justices who sincerely care about the Constitution’s meaning. The appointment of any MAGA judges to the Supreme Court, defined only by personal loyalty to the president, would mark the beginning of America’s descent into legal nihilism and disavowal of the country’s very foundations.