Whatever direction the US takes, normalcy has disappeared.
Extremism always ends in tears.
The only questions are how bad things get, how long it takes for everything to unravel and whose tears are being shed.
The Truss government in the UK fell apart within seven weeks because it announced a radical Budget which rattled the markets. Even in that short time, enough damage was done to adversely affect people’s mortgages, threaten their pensions and undermine the health of the UK economy.
Now, let’s use our imaginations a little. What if Truss and Kwarteng had actually won a popular mandate for their agenda? And what if — buoyed by their success — they decided to take some magic mushrooms each morning on arrival at No 10 and No 11 Downing Street. We’re getting ever-so-slightly closer to the madness that is about to unfold in the USA. But only ever-so-slightly.
The forthcoming Trump presidency will take us so far down the freaking rabbit hole we’ll be half way to the Indian Ocean. And everybody — but everybody — is invited to the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
I’m not going to rehearse the sheer inappropriateness of Trump’s new appointments, because it’s been done comprehensively elsewhere, but the links below will help if you’re unfamiliar with the assorted March Hares and dozy dormice.
Mike Gaetz becomes the country’s chief law officer, while former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard takes charge of intelligence. Vaccine sceptic Robert Kennedy Jr is to oversee the nation’s health, as his illustrious father and uncle no doubt turn in their graves. Meanwhile, ex-soldier Pete Hegseth — previously best known as a Fox News anchor and the guy who can’t throw an axe — is going to be ordering five-star generals around.
Evangelical Christian Mike Huckabee, the new envoy to Israel, is someone who refuses to use the word ‘settlement’ or describe the West Bank as the West Bank, preferring the Biblical labels of Judea and Samaria.
And then, of course, there’s the role played by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. He, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur, has been put in charge of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency. (The acronym is a play on a cryptocurrency championed by the eccentric owner of X, SpaceX and Tesla. Effectively a memetic joke has been transformed into a public policy initiative.)
Musk and Ramaswamy will not hold formal offices that would require ratification or lead them to give up their extensive business interests. They are tasked with dismantling government from outside government.
So how is it all going to play out?
First of all, normalcy be damned.
Forget business as usual. Forget the rules of the game.
The data analyst and polling guru Nate Silver talks about the Democrats’ prospects for 2026 in the kind of upbeat way that assumes that we’re just about to enter another part of a regular electoral cycle akin George W Bush’s second term in 2004.
We’re not.
Trump and his eager-beaver appointees are actually going to push ahead with what they threaten.
They will attempt to demolish half the US government, break with every norm in international relations and start a programme of mass deportations of migrants. They will intimidate opponents, put pressure on the courts and indulge in endless inflammatory populist rhetoric.
The only question is how far they can get with this agenda before America descends into open conflict.
I’ve said before on X that Trump’s MAGA movement is closer to being fascist in orientation than many of the right-wing European parties that are actually descended from the parties of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. That’s because it’s a cult built around conspiracies and led by a charismatic figurehead, whose followers argue should have a free hand to do what the hell he likes.
If the governors of liberal states try to get in the way of the deportation programme, it will go on regardless, says Trump’s proposed Border Tsar, Tom Homan. And you can immediately see how this vexed migration issue is potentially a major domestic flashpoint.
Civil war? It still seems far-fetched, when we watch Biden and Trump’s cosy fireside chat in the Oval Office promising a seamless hand-over of power. But it’s worth remembering that in the 1950s, after the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation in the famous case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to stop African-American students entering a school in Little Rock. This stand-off was only resolved by President Eisenhower sending in the 101st Airborne Division to secure their safe passage.
There is more history of conflict between the states and federal government in the USA than many people in Europe imagine. And now history is set to unfold probably faster and certainly more erratically than at any time since the Declaration of Independence.
We shouldn’t ignore the likely conflict within the MAGA camp though and between the various cranks, ideologues and misfits who have been assembled by the Master of Mar-a-Lago. How long will it take for them to fall out with each other? Or to fall out of favour with the 47th President?
The ‘Great Elon Musk’ (as per Trump’s press release, making the appointment sound like Grand Moff Tarkin being seconded to the Death Star) isn’t content with being DOGE-meister-in-chief. He has been posting frequently and liberally on his social platform about all kinds of topics, including video content suggesting that NATO was responsible for provoking the war in Ukraine.
It is hard to imagine Marco Rubio and J D Vance taking kindly to Musk encroaching on their responsibilities or having much more of the President’s ear. And maybe, just maybe, this administration can self-combust before it does irreparable harm. We have to live in hope.
