Being both predictable and shocking has become a bit of a theme of the Trump team of late.
There is, of course, President Donald Trump’s tariff policy. Trump had been crystal clear about wanting across-the-board tariffs during the campaign. Shockingly, they have been implemented in a manner that appears extreme and incompetent even by previous Trump standards. As a result, the world is historically unsettled: One metric of global economic uncertainty shows higher levels of concern than at any point in the 21st century, worse than the 2008 financial crisis and even the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
Then there is last week’s news that Trump empowered Laura Loomer, a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and self-described "proud Islamophobe," to purge top government officials. The head of the National Security Agency, his top deputy, and six staffers on the National Security Council were all fired — seemingly at Loomer’s behest.
And then, there is the Department of Health and Human Services. The department started layoffs last Tuesday that are expected to hit about 10,000 workers. By the end of it, about a quarter of the department’s staff will have been cut amidst a worrying measles outbreak and the real risk of a bird flu pandemic.
Trump telegraphed these moves during the campaign — promising to root out the “the deep state” and vowing to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” at HHS. But they are shocking nonetheless.
Putting Laura Loomer, of all people, in charge of sensitive national security decisions is nothing short of astonishing. And the sheer scope of the HHS cuts, given the current public health challenges, that led my colleague Dylan Scott to describe it as “a catastrophe is unfolding.”
Of late, we seem to be seeing the Trump administration’s true and unvarnished face. It’s not that what happened over the past seven days was necessarily worse than what came before it — though the tariffs might well prove to be. Rather, it’s that recent events revealed the true scope and nature of our Trump problem — with even some of his supporters starting to openly worry that things have gone badly wrong.
Despite all of the administration’s early actions — from Trump’s political assault on universities to his decision to send innocent Venezuelans to a Salvadoran gulag — some people thought there still might be constraints on his policies.
Previous rounds of tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada did not lead Wall Street to panic — partly because they were moderated or walked back after implementation. Many conservatives alarmed by Trump’s policies reassured themselves that his national security team, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, hailed from the GOP’s more traditional internationalist wing.
Now there is panic even in these quarters.
Wall Street is horrified. Republican stalwarts like Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson are warning of dire economic and political consequences if Trump stays the course on tariffs. And as the Loomer developments demonstrate, the notion that the GOP national security “professionals” might check any of this is no longer credible.
The point is not merely to mock these people or say “I told you so.” Rather, it’s to illustrate that even those who willfully ignored early warning signs about Trump are starting to see what’s happening.
And what’s happening is this: government by mad king.
A mad king, in my sense, is not a literal king or merely a leader who makes bad decisions. Instead, it’s one who makes them based on reasons that are out of touch with reality, making sense only in their own mind. And it’s one who is able to do so with little-to-no constraint — thanks, in our case case, to the dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch.
Recent events show conclusively that Trump fits the definition.
And those events made the mad king problem so undeniable that even some of Trump’s allies on the right began to see it. Only two questions remain: What will happen this week, and how will the country — particularly key members of the Trump coalition — react?
