Photo courtesy of Tom Hull.

1. The Blitz

Trump’s power grab during his first days was unprecedented, a blitzkrieg against federal bureaucracy, but also against institutions beyond government, especially law firms and universities. The intent was to destroy the very notion of civil service, replacing it with a ruthless political machine. The plan, both the staffing and deluge of executive orders, was largely announced in Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s wish list for seizing power over government, a document that Trump had disavowed during his campaign — but the execution was even more extreme, with the major addition of Elon Musk’s DOGE operation, which dispatched over a quarter million federal workers. The rest were given ideological directives, like removing all reference to climate change, or anything suggestive of “wokeness.” Racism was back, baby, with a vengeance.

Trump’s first 100 days were the most eventful of any since Franklin Roosevelt established the concept. But where Roosevelt single-handedly solved the banking crisis — probably the single most impressive feat of persuasion by any American president ever — and passed landmark legislation, Trump did it all by fiat. What is remarkable is how little resistance he faced. Democrats had no power base that they recognized. (Certainly not the people they had fled from in their 2024 donor hunt campaign.) Mass strikes were inconceivable. The Courts had been securely packed. Meanwhile, business was too busy figuring how to exploit the new landscape of bribes and favors, but what was already obvious to them was that public supplication was required.

2. Gestapo

Trump wanted a show of power, and what better way to show it than to commit violence against the helpless? Anti-immigration was Trump’s signature issue, so right out of the gate, he took ICE and turned them into a paramilitary gang, aiming to commit conspicuous violence with impunity against political targets — initially so-called “illegal immigrants,” but he made a point of sending his goons into cities he held grudges against, like Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis, where they were especially likely to attack American (but “liberal”) citizens. He followed this up with construction of concentration camps (like “Alligator Alcatraz”), and schemes to deport immigrants to third-party countries (like El Salvador and Uganda).

Meanwhile, he pardoned his supporters (starting with anyone involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection), and anyone else who deposited the right checks. And he thoroughly politicized the FBI and DOJ, trumping up charges to prosecute people he regarded as personal enemies. His goal was to establish the principle that violence is fine for people on his side, but free speech is criminal for anyone who opposes him. All this while he fulminated against “the left” (which included every known Democrat, except maybe John Fetterman), setting up the public for future purges, while continuing his tirades against the “fake media” (anyone who reports on what he’s actually doing).

3. Restocking the Swamp

Trump has created numerous channels for corruption, many quite unprecedented, throughout government and also through his businesses and person, while fostering a culture of corruption in business and around the world. The list of scams he has profited from, or otherwise converted into leverage, is mind-boggling. He found that he could, for example, file frivolous lawsuits against companies (especially ones with pending government business) and get them to settle for slightly sanitized bribes. He sued his own government for leaking his tax returns, and once his personal lawyer had become Attorney General he settled for creation of a large slush fund. The term “slush fund” became familiar: the largest one was the so-called Board of Peace, meant to reconstruct Gaza, which would remain under his personal control even if he left the presidency. Or maybe his scheme to control Venezuela’s oil after he deposed their elected president will turn out to be bigger?

By most estimates, he has more than doubled his personal wealth since returning to the presidency, with the biggest chunk coming from a crypto scheme — a fraud-driven industry he has been very supportive of. Meanwhile, his family has reaped billions, both from foreign investors in support of Jared Kushner’s diplomatic portfolio, and in government contracts awarded to his sons’ firms. Then there’s the question of who profits from insider information about swings in the price of oil, often triggered by his own acts. Sometimes he takes his vig in other forms, like getting CBS to cancel Stephen Colbert.

But the worst part of his corruption isn’t his own enrichment. Or even his betrayal of the public trust. It’s how such single-minded pursuit of graft infects the culture, including everyone who does business with the government. No longer do companies have to compete on quality and cost. Here they make deals based on proximity to power, where the people wind up losing twice: they pay for the bribes, but also for the value cheated out of what they buy. As long as Trump gets his cut, who is he to care?

4. Mafia Foreign Policies

Trump has fully embraced the notion that foreign policy is purely a context of power, mostly but not just military, and that its purpose is to extort tribute from other countries. His war against Iran is a prime example, but it is consistent with his other wars (e.g., against Venezuela, where he fancies stealing a fortune, and Somalia, which is pure spite), and his cynical indifference to Ukraine (good for US arms business, as long as Putin wants to keep fighting). His relationship with Netanyahu is perhaps more complex, but the cult of dominance and perpetual war, a mix of grift and gore, suits him perfectly.

Trump’s infatuation with tariffs is a costly but relatively low stakes example. He has no concept of using tariffs as part of a national economic policy, nor does he understand them as taxes. What he does understand is that he has the power to create them out of thin air, and once he does so, other people will pay him to make them go away. They’re his two favorite things in the world: whimsical power, and free money. But his tariffs have contributed to depressing the economy he fancied himself as supercharging, and to raising prices he had promised to lower. And they’ve done nothing to reduce America’s trade balance deficits, or to bring back manufacturing, or even mining.

Few people seem to realize this, because it’s so rarely practiced, but there is an art to foreign policy, which is to get nations (or their leaders, anyway) to help themselves by helping each other. It’s no surprise that Trump, who can’t care for any interest but his own, doesn’t see this, and doesn’t have a clue how to practice it. Nor does he feel any need: people keep telling him he’s the most powerful man in the world, so he simply expects everyone else kiss his feet. The only thing worse than abusing power is abusing power you don’t actually have. Iran is an example of this, but he’s on thin ice elsewhere. So far he’s been lucky that other nations find it easier to humor him than to break with America.

5. Leaving His Mark

His unprecedented and unique obsession with naming things after himself goes deeper than his considerable vanity: he seeks what Israelis call “facts on the ground” (markers that become virtually impossible to erase or dismantle), and he seeks to trivialize the opposition he provokes by making it personal. He thinks he can dismiss anyone who objects as suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), while by any previous understanding of the word, Trump is the one who is deranged.

I sometimes wonder if he isn’t encouraged in this effort by his staff, who figure his interests here are relatively harmless compared to him weighing in on serious issues. It’s like a toy you’d give a toddler to keep him from burning down the house, although with Trump it’s hard to gauge what is really safe. It also works as camouflage, keeping the media and late-night comics preoccupied with stupid shit when they could be reporting on war, the economy, and/or dementia. But by the time he’s done, most Americans are going to want to wipe the slate clean. That may be easier than resurrecting government service, quelling corporate crime, making peace, restoring freedom of speech, securing justice, and the rest of my list, but it’s a lot of work that shouldn’t have been necessary, and we’re likely to be surprised by how deep the shit stains seep in.

6. Opportunity Costs

As we attempt to run out the clock, it becomes increasingly clear that much of the long-term damage that America incurred in electing him president will be “opportunity costs”: things that we didn’t do because we were so preoccupied with dealing with this horrendous asshole. Climate clange has long been a prime example, at least since the 1990s — why didn’t Clinton let Gore run with this, instead of assigning him to count paper clips (what he called “reinventing government”)? But there are many more examples, like inequality, world conflicts, environment, trade, technology, mostly things that policy doesn’t control but has to cope with. Trump has no comprehension of such matters, and no trust in people who do, which means that as long as he is president, no serious efforts can be made to solve or even to moderate their effect. Where he does wade in, it’s often simply to make maters worse — such as his efforts to undo Biden’s renewable energy focus, to block vaccination programs, and to green-light “superintelligence.”

One of his costs I’m not particularly worried about is the national debt, which is has unnecessarily inflated just to profit his friends. Unlike my debt or your debt, it’s just an imaginary number, but it holds enough sway over people’s thinking that we’ll be arguing over it endlessly. And it will be used to show that we can’t do things that clearly need doing. And this will persuade many people, because much of what we’ve been trained to believe about how the world works simply isn’t true. There is nothing wrong with our world that I can’t imagine fairly simple solutions to, but they depend on our ability to develop social cohesion and solidarity that is not only lacking but has been systematically demolished by decades of propaganda. And it’s not just Republicans that believe that shit. Most Democrats buy into much of it as well. They believe that a strong military keeps us free. (When the US was founded, a standing military was regarded as a sign of and path to tyranny.) They believe that more cops and prisons protect us from crime. They believe that the market will instantly provide everything we need, at a fair price (even though it is highly monopolized, and fraud is rampant). They believed that a rich asshole who wasn’t afraid to say embarrassing things could be trusted to fix all our problems. The number of people who still believe that one is shrinking fast, but it’s still substantial. We have a long ways to go to extricate ourselves from this nonsense.

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The only silver lining I see in all of this is that Trump has clarified the issues and stakes in ways that are hard to ignore. His purge of the Republican Party has turned them into an obvious enemy of most Americans, as well as of the rest of the world. They are such an obvious target, it should be possible to marginalize them politically.

His wins have also thoroughly discredited the high-flying pro-business wing of the Democratic Party, forcing them to rethink allegiances. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll eagerly turn to the left, but I’ve long maintained that the answers are on the left, so they’ll have to move in that direction. That’s because the sort of minor tweaks Clinton and Obama half-heartedly pursued are no longer close to adequate for addressing the problems that Trump has so exacerbated (and in some cases created from whole cloth).

But that’s my perennial optimism talking. A landslide election of Democrats next week may function as a tourniquet, slowing if not quite stopping the bleed out inflicted by Trump and his whole administration. But without some serious understanding of what’s happened, and why, any sort of recovery is going to be a fitful process. The Biden interregnum should be a cautionary tale in this regard: you have to deliver results, but more importantly, you have to explain why what you’re attempting will help. And you will have to overcome entrenched economic interests to do so.

This first appeared on Tom Hull’s Notes on Everyday Life Substack page.