The Shenanigans of Donald Trump

One of the most vibrant young professional communities in Washington, D.C. is the Adams Morgan neighborhood. If you walk into any Adams Morgan bar, chances are that the first person you meet works on the Hill or the White House. The next person you meet is probably in the military, and the next person is in consulting. There is also always the one pretentious dude who works in intelligence and can’t reveal his employer.

The beating heart of Adams Morgan is 18th Street, where congressional staffers and software engineers get plastered and roam carefree until 2 A.M. For many, including me, it’s a perfect balance of grime and hard work; it’s almost like the glamorous blister of D.C.

On top of this city on a hill is an Irish pub called “Shenanigans.” And every Friday and Saturday, they have a ritual called “Power Hour.” It’s where, for just ten dollars, you can drink as much as you can from 8:00 – 10:00 P.M. This sounds appealing until you realize the difficulty of walking three yards. As the night progresses, everybody jams into a narrow, three-yard-wide wooden chasm. Soon, a bar that can reasonably accommodate 50 people will be teaming up with nearly 150. This gradual cluster of bodies is probably why the Pacific is warming — as you can feel the sweat and breathing of the drunk stranger push against you.

Yet, the appeal is that the more you drink and become numb to your surroundings, the more it seems like a jovial mosh pit and not the reason why you gave up alcohol for Lent.

In any case, this sweltering, over-populated fire hazard is how I view Trump’s second term.

Trump’s dramatic return to the White House precipitated this incomprehensible fire hose to the political establishment. Many people I know who work in executive agencies do not know if they have a job right now, and every tourist attraction in DC has irate protesters. The stock market and our international relations are falling while Congress takes a backseat in the legislative process.

In every sense, this is a fire hazard.

Yet, even though Trump has dominated the political scene and dinner conversation for nearly a decade now, I don’t think people still understand his appeal. And that cuts both ways: for people who do understand his appeal, I don’t think those people understand his repulsion.

There is no denying our politics has become reactionary to the point where who started the playground tussle is hard to track now. A Republican House majority lambastes an incumbent Democratic president who himself is lambasting his Republican predecessor, who lambasted his Democratic predecessor, and so on. Partisanship begets partisanship, and that seems to be the reductive explanation up until recently.

Trump actually hit on this point in his State of the Union Address. He made fun of the Democrats by saying that even if he cured some illness, they still would not support him. That may be true, but once again, it cuts both ways. If a Democrat or somebody in the media does something worth applauding, I doubt Trump is crossing partisan lines to put his ego aside.

To be clear, I don’t want to make it sound like Trump and the Democrats are equal parties to bitter, reactionary politics. They’re not. By taking a decisive wreaking ball to our institutions and their guardrails, Trump has taken it to a greater extreme. Ever since he took office, he has kept touting that the American people have given him a mandate to do X, Y, and Z. Now, explaining why 77 million people voted for Trump is not simple. One of the great follies of newly elected presidents is misinterpreting electoral victories as indisputable mandates for policy changes. In large part, that’s why Bush Jr. got torched in the 2006 midterms.

However, Trump’s appeal has always been that he is the grand middle finger to the establishment. There is a growing distrust for our institutions and their intentions — which was evident in the mounting distrust of the health apparatus’s credibility during COVID-19. Some of that skepticism may have been warranted, but some people took it to the extreme by attributing nefarious schemes behind vaccine distribution. So in response, Trump nominated RFK Jr., an environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic, to spearhead national health policy. This is emblematic of the guiding principle of this administration: they recognize but overcorrect an ill to their detriment.

Pete Hegseth and this latest group chat leak is emblematic of this as well. I won’t belabor repeated criticisms of negligence, carelessness, and incompetence — all of which are valid and why Hegseth should resign. Yet, he also represents an overcorrection to the perceived ills in the military, namely the wokeness or lack of “warrior ethos” in our soldiers.

Again, even extending an olive branch in saying that some of that is merited, that still falls short of what matters most in a defense secretary. How does Hegseth’s previous decade-long experience as a national guardsman and infantry soldier prepare him to strategize a military buildup in the Taiwan Strait? Or, as seen in this latest scandal, how equipped is he to handle national security information that is paramount to defeating our greatest adversaries? This is especially important when intelligence leaks threaten the safety of on-the-ground intelligence officers or if they could potentially embolden enemies.

Now, I don’t believe this is simply a miscalculated overcorrection. I think Trump is pushing the limits of his office to derive populist and favorable outcomes in legally specious ways. And when the courts try to curb this expansion of power, he lambastes them as activists and calls for their impeachment, advancing a cynical and erroneous abuse of his office. To put it plainly, he is using the veil of populist movements to knock down the very institutions that separate him from an autocrat. My point, however, in giving him the benefit of the doubt by claiming this is all just miscalculated overcorrections is to show that even at its baseline, this governing principle still breeds incompetence.

Lastly, anyone who has written op-eds in the past well knows the amount of drafts they’ve had to discard because their topic is no longer salient. When I first started writing this article during Trump’s inauguration, I began studying 20 hours a week for the LSAT, so I didn’t have time to write. Yet, with the plane crashes, stock market tumbles, perilous attacks on the judiciary, a gross realization of the unitary executive, and now this embarrassing leak, I always found new justifications to start writing this article again.

And that’s the point: with this administration, its chaos is always salient.

Regimes that eliminate dissent and limiting principles always collapse like a dying star. There will come a time when even Trump’s most loyal defenders will find themselves the latest subjects of Trump’s ire. Just ask Trump’s first vice president and cabinet.

Yet, sobriety always follows the drunken mosh pit. And hopefully, we will recognize the need to rebuild.