With the recap over, it’s time to talk about the narrowing horizon of the near-term future under Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the shambolic pirate ship of a coalition around them.
The tariff saga continues, the fog of delusional fantasia growing thicker by the hour. Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal summarized the irreversible harm Trump has already inflicted to America’s economic position. “If Trump rescinds the tariffs, we can go back to a world where countries around the world are worried about Trump imposing tariffs again, making them reluctant to enter into any kind of commercial or defense deal.” America, as one Brazilian expat noted, resembles an emerging market country with “sudden announcements changing everything…overwhelming uncertainty…sheer vertigo and whiplash.”
Even partial reprieve is temporary. Whatever relief from self-inflicted disaster the President grants today can be taken away tomorrow. As Alan Elrod recently wrote, you cannot take the full measure of everything that has happened over the last few months — and everything that may happen in the future — without concluding that the country has gone mad. It is utterly irrational to look at, say, RFK Jr’s Lysenko-like eradication of US public health infrastructure or expansionist designs on Greenland without concluding that the administration is incompetent and dangerous.
Trump’s presidency is a political bubble divorced from ground truth and rooted in irrational expectations. However, it is also impossible to understand the Trump bubble without delving into the mindset — or shall we say, “grindset” — behind those irrational expectations.
Why did Trump’s business backers ignore his repeated promises to unleash massive tariffs? Donald Trump’s image as a successful businessman is an media mirage, a test tube baby of advertising and television. He is also very much a product of a business culture with an uneven at best relationship to critical thinking. Reading business school professor Andre Spicer’s polemic Business bullshit is a sobering experience, beginning with its opening 1984 anecdote of Pacific Bell hiring a management consultant whose ideas were quite literally derived from a strange Russian mystic.
The company turned to a well-known organisational development specialist, Charles Krone, who set about designing a management-training programme to transform the way people thought, talked and behaved. The programme was based on the ideas of the 20th-century Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. According to Gurdjieff, most of us spend our days mired in “waking sleep”, and it is only by shedding ingrained habits of thinking that we can liberate our inner potential… The company planned to spend $147m (£111m) putting their employees through the new training programme, which came to be known as Kroning. Over the course of 10 two-day sessions, staff were instructed in new concepts, such as “the law of three” (a “thinking framework that helps us identify the quality of mental energy we have”), and discovered the importance of “alignment”, “intentionality” and “end-state visions”. This new vocabulary was designed to awake employees from their bureaucratic doze and open their eyes to a new higher-level consciousness.
Employees were heavily pressured to buy into “Kroning” and anyone that questioned it was forced out. As Spicer argued elsewhere, one’s ability to suspend critical thinking can be an important pre-requisite for success. But there isn’t anything completely novel about this. Academia, journalism, and even the military have similar pathologies. Elon Musk is far more representative of the problem. Why did he, like so many other technology tycoons and technology-adjacent personalities, back someone (Trump) so utterly indifferent and hostile to science and engineering? Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit.
Musk is a symbol of an economy where putting a dancing man dressed like a robot on stage commands polite deference instead of brutal mockery, a long history of broken promises has zero reputational costs, and the destructive mismanagement of a company is politely ignored. “Fake it until you make it,” as they say. Musk’s peers wax poetic about giving birth to a machine God and entertain any number of other bizarre and even cultic beliefs that command significant status and resources. These kinds of beliefs are, or perhaps were, the engine driving the economy that Musk’s President is destroying.
Whether or not you actually put stock in these things is besides the point. The only thing that matters is that the line goes up. You do not need to believe in anything at all except the fact that other people believe. It is, as James Duesterberg wrote, a “funny sort of nihilism that believes in nothing except belief itself.” The nihilism Duesterberg chronicles is the prelude to the crisis that Trump’s tariffs has ushered in, and is suggestive of the challenge of resolving it. Pricing in the President’s inability to take stock of material reality is difficult when one has done the same for so long.
Many powerful people — in business, politics, technology, and other spheres — subjected themselves to voluntary lobotomization. They ignored every sign of Trump’s unfitness for office and determination to follow through with stupid and destructive actions. They preferred to imagine Trump as the canny dealmaker television had created, not the man who had to be repeatedly manipulated by his subordinates to stave off catastrophe. They manufactured rationales for Trump when nothing coherent could justify his choices.
And when none of that sufficed, they told themselves that some adult would surely step in to fix the matter. Even though all such “adults” from Trump’s first term were purged. You cannot enable a political environment in which someone can get elected spreading rumors about immigrants eating pets and talk about “adulthood” in any meaningful sense. As Georgetown philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò said on social media, “a society that wants to keep its basic functioning has to discourage lying. Rewarding it instead is suicidal.”
Now, many of Trump’s enablers are waking up. They see that there is little standing in between the President and oblivion. And what they have seen cannot be unseen. But they are still unwilling to recognize the devilish nature of the situation they have facilitated. Trump’s madness — on the tariffs, his destruction of the federal government, and the isolation of America from its allies — is the inevitable result of passive and active support that will be difficult to overcome.
The Democrats are in the minority, and the two most significant institutions capable of stopping Trump are the very same elites who are most responsible for empowering them. The Republican party is a rubber stamp, and the Supreme Court has legalized his lawlessness. Even though Trump’s base may balk at follies like taking Greenland, their support for the President has not wavered. Trump’s chaotic and dysfunctional administration is too weak to exercise meaningful control over its own behavior but is too strong — as of yet — to be overruled.
The bubble bursts when enough people visibly break ranks and apply pressure. Even if they want someone else to bear the risk of crossing a thin-skinned and vindictive chief executive. It is the dim recognition of how difficult and burdensome it will be to act on the knowledge that Trump is serious about “crashing this plane with no survivors” that motivates those who still cling to the hope of him coming to his senses. We are getting closer to the political margin call that stops the music, but there is still more insanity on the horizon.