Trump Does Rule the World. And We Might Not Survive Him.
16 months into Trump 2.0, we have disease, poverty, war, and terror. He and his family have plundered the globe for cash, and some Americans think he's doing a great job. What's wrong with them?
By now there is a settled etiquette of looking away. The dinner-party version is “I have stopped reading the news.” The therapy version is “boundaries.” The social-media version is the algorithm pruned of politics. The country has agreed to a kind of national pretending. What follows is what we are pretending not to see.
Picture the scene at Mar-a-Lago on the night of January 2, 2026. The white-and-gold ballroom is humming with the usual mix of hedge fund princelings, OAN talent, and Florida divorcees in Oscar de la Renta. Out by the pool, the president is being briefed on the precise minute his Delta Force commandos will fast-rope onto a Caracas compound to extract a sitting head of state. He approved the operation before Christmas. By 4:30 the next morning Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator who once danced at his own televised rallies, will be on a plane bound for Manhattan federal court. About seventy-five people will die in the process. Trump will tell the cameras the United States will now “run” Venezuela. He will mean it in the way a Trump means anything, which is to say, he will mean the oil.
This is the operating mode now, and the most disorienting thing is how completely the country has stopped being startled by it. The capture of Maduro was the headline event of the new year and ran for perhaps a single news cycle before being elbowed aside by the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens shot by federal agents on the icy streets of Minneapolis during something called Operation Metro Surge. Good was a 37-year-old mother of three. Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Stephen Miller called Pretti, on the day he died, a “domestic terrorist.” The video showed an agent disarming him moments before agents in a semicircle opened fire. The FBI subsequently intervened to kill the state-level investigation into the officer who shot Good, and DHS physically blocked Minnesota state investigators from accessing the second crime scene until a judge ordered them admitted. Trump, with his curious flair for the half-confessional aside, later called Pretti an “agitator” whose “stock has gone way down.” The thing about this presidency is that you cannot say it has lost its capacity to shock, because shock implies a baseline, and the baseline is gone.
The legal architecture, for what it is worth, is in active collapse. The Venezuela operation was conducted without congressional authorization, as was the June 2025 strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as is the second Iran campaign that began February 28 and remains in fragile suspension, with a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire repeatedly violated, a separate aerial campaign in the Strait of Hormuz still under way since March, and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports (called, in the manner of a Stallone sequel, Operation Economic Fury) still in effect. The Cuba oil embargo, declared in January 2026, has produced precisely what was intended: blackouts running 22 hours a day in Havana, an energy minister announcing the country is out of diesel, families cooking over wood fires. The United Nations called it the first effective U.S. blockade of Cuba since the Missile Crisis. The administration insists, with a smirk, that since no vessels have technically been boarded under the Cuba authority itself (just under the adjacent Venezuela and Iran authorities), it is not a blockade. It is, in the parlance of regime change since regime change was invented, just sanctions.
What gives the whole machine its peculiar Trumpian gilding is the family enterprise running underneath it. The Trumps have, by Wall Street Journal accounting, cashed out at least $1.2 billion in real dollars from World Liberty Financial alone, the DeFi venture in which a Trump-controlled entity holds 70 percent of the company that captures 75 percent of token revenue. There are two memecoins, his and hers, each of which initially soared and then cratered (Melania’s has lost more than 99 percent of its value), but the structural genius is that the family will eventually receive 80 percent of the official Trump memecoin’s supply regardless. The retail buyers are decorative. In May 2025 Trump hosted a private dinner at his Virginia golf club for the top 220 holders of his memecoin, and the price obligingly spiked 56 percent on the announcement. Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto entrepreneur whose SEC charges were dropped after Trump took office, was one of the largest WLFI investors. None of this is concealed. It is, in fact, advertised.
Beyond the crypto sits the wider Trump bazaar. Amazon paid $40 million to license a Melania documentary (directed by the disgraced Brett Ratner, in his first major project since the 2017 allegations he denies); the first lady is believed to have pocketed $28 million of that. Jeff Bezos, having dined with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago, was eager to turn the page. Then there is the gold T1 phone, announced last June by Don Jr. and Eric in a press event at Trump Tower, with $100 deposits taken from roughly 600,000 of the faithful. Eleven months on, not one has shipped. The original “Made in USA” language vanished from the website, replaced by the less actionable “designed with American values in mind.” The terms and conditions were quietly rewritten in April to specify that the deposit grants only a “conditional opportunity” to buy the device if it ever materializes. Trump Mobile says, this week, that the phones will finally ship. We shall see. The truly Trumpian touch is that the marks are not victims; they are believers. The relationship is sacramental.
The pettiness register is being kept by the Justice Department, which in three weeks last fall produced three indictments of named Trump enemies. James Comey, indicted for lying to Congress. Letitia James, who successfully sued the Trump Organization for fraud, indicted for bank fraud. John Bolton, indicted (most substantively, it must be said) for classified document mishandling after Trump had stripped his security detail despite a known Iranian assassination threat against him. The Comey prosecution was being run by Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump defense lawyer with zero prior prosecutorial experience, installed at the Eastern District of Virginia after Trump fired the prior U.S. Attorney for expressing internal doubts. Adam Schiff is under investigation for insurance fraud. Jerome Powell, who declined to cut interest rates on Trump’s preferred schedule, is under criminal investigation for testimony about Fed building renovations. As Atlantic prose stylings go, it is hard to improve on Tom Nichols’s observation: we have had presidents with tempers and grievances, and we have had this one.
Then there is the suing. Trump sued the IRS in January for $10 billion over a 2019 leak of his tax returns, by a contractor already serving five years for the leak. The defendant is the federal government. The federal government is run by Trump. The judge, Kathleen Williams, asked both sides to please explain how this is an actual lawsuit. The current settlement plan, as reported this week, is for the DOJ (helmed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, whom Trump publicly thanks for “keeping me out of jail”) to create a $1.7 billion “weaponization” fund drawn from the Treasury Judgment Fund. Trump will appoint and remove the commissioners at will. Pardoned January 6 defendants will be eligible. Entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from claiming. The Roy Cohn protégé has, at long last, found his Roy Cohn.
The institutions chosen for ritual humiliation tell their own story. The white-shoe law firms representing Hillary Clinton (Perkins Coie), Robert Mueller’s old shop (WilmerHale), Andrew Weissmann’s (Jenner & Block), and Dominion’s (Susman Godfrey) were issued executive orders stripping their lawyers of clearances and federal building access. The four firms sued and won, in unanimous rulings; Judge Beryl Howell called the orders an “unprecedented attack” that “casts a chilling harm of blizzard proportion across the entire legal profession.” But nine other firms (Paul Weiss, Skadden, Latham, Kirkland & Ellis, Milbank, Simpson Thacher, A&O Shearman, Cadwalader, Willkie Farr) had already bent the knee, collectively committing nearly $1 billion in pro bono work to White House causes. The universities followed the same template. Columbia paid $221 million in July and agreed to place its Middle East studies department under “academic receivership,” a phrase last in fashion under Mussolini. Brown paid $50 million. Cornell, $60 million. Northwestern, $75 million. Harvard, alone in refusing, lost $2.2 billion in research funding before a federal judge ordered it restored; Trump now demands $1 billion as the price of peace. The Columbia law professor David Pozen, with the lapidary precision of a man writing for the law review, called it “regulation by dealmaking” that “gives legal form to an extortion scheme.”
The late-night hosts are being picked off one by one. Colbert was canceled by CBS in July 2025, days after he called Paramount’s $16 million Trump settlement a “big fat bribe,” while Paramount was awaiting FCC approval of its Skydance merger. (The merger was approved.) David Letterman, who invented that program, said flatly that CBS was lying about the financial pretext. Kimmel was briefly yanked off the air by ABC in September after his Charlie Kirk monologue and a phone call from FCC Chair Brendan Carr to its affiliates. He is back, for now. Trump’s own Executive Order 14149, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” prohibits exactly the conduct his FCC chair is engaging in, which would be funny if it were not the official position of the United States government.
The cabinet roll call, sixteen months in, reads like the cast notes of a long-running soap. Pam Bondi was fired April 2 after fourteen months as attorney general, reportedly because she had not prosecuted the president’s enemies fast enough, though the Epstein files denouement did not help. The Comey and James indictments she did manage to wring out were dismissed by a federal judge who ruled the U.S. attorney installed to bring them, the former Trump aide Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully serving; two subsequent grand juries refused to re-indict Letitia James on the same charges. Bondi was replaced in acting capacity by Todd Blanche, the president’s own former criminal defense lawyer, who therefore now simultaneously runs the Justice Department and presides over the proposed $1.7 billion settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the president’s own Treasury. Within weeks of taking over, Blanche had Comey re-indicted in North Carolina on charges of threatening the president, over a beach photo of seashells arranged to read “86 47.” The circle has tightened to a single point.
Kristi Noem was fired a month earlier, on March 5, after Minneapolis and after a $220 million border-security advertising campaign that featured the secretary herself on horseback near Mount Rushmore (the contracts went to a Republican consulting shop tied to senior DHS officials, and the president told reporters he had no idea any of it was happening). Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican and former undefeated MMA fighter whom Trump enjoys watching on television, was confirmed 54-45 on March 23 and sworn in the next day, on the theory that what the country requires now is a more capable administrator of the same agenda.
Pete Hegseth, somehow, is still running the Pentagon, after a confirmation he secured by publicly pledging that he would not touch “a drop of alcohol” (his ex-wife had told the FBI he “drinks more often than he doesn’t”; his Fox News colleagues said he came on air smelling of it). His chief of staff Ricky Buria spent the year telling Pentagon colleagues that he and the secretary slipped past Hegseth’s security detail at the Ritz-Carlton in hats and sunglasses to go out drinking; the prevailing internal view is that Buria was making the story up to flush out leakers, which is the more flattering interpretation. The Pentagon inspector general found separately that Hegseth violated security protocol and endangered U.S. troops by sharing Yemen strike plans on Signal in a chat that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. He ordered a follow-up strike on a Caribbean drug boat with the instruction, per The Washington Post, to “kill everybody.”
Kash Patel, his counterpart at the FBI, was the subject of an April Atlantic piece citing more than two dozen sources describing “obvious intoxication” at private clubs in Washington and Las Vegas, early-morning meetings repeatedly rescheduled while he recovered, and one occasion on which his security detail, unable to wake him behind locked doors, requested “breaching equipment” typically used by tactical teams. Patel has sued The Atlantic for $250 million. He was filmed in February chugging beer with the Team USA hockey players in their Olympic locker room. At a Senate Appropriations hearing this week, asked whether he had episodes of excessive drinking, he accused Senator Chris Van Hollen of “drinking margaritas with felons” and gamely agreed to take a drinking test alongside him.
Stephen Miller is still in the West Wing, where he has written or edited most of the executive orders Trump has signed, including the birthright-citizenship order, the travel bans, the DEI directives, and the architecture of the mass deportation regime that produced Operation Metro Surge and the killings in Minneapolis. He runs a daily 10 a.m. interagency call, Saturdays included, on which he yells at career ICE and DHS officials for failing to meet his arrest quota of three thousand immigrants per day. His side project, America First Legal, which he co-founded in 2021, has spent the term filing federal complaints against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Target, and a long list of others over their DEI policies, on the theory that programs designed to address the country’s history of discrimination are themselves discrimination, and that the actual aggrieved party in America is the white men. The 2019 Breitbart emails, in which he recommended The Camp of the Saints (a 1973 French novel about Europe being overrun by dark-skinned refugees, long a touchstone on the white nationalist right), turned out not to be disqualifying. They turned out to be the resume.
RFK Jr. is still running HHS, where in his first year he fired all seventeen members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, the ACIP, and replaced them with handpicked anti-vaccine voices (a federal judge in March ruled the revamp unlawful and invalidated their votes to drop the hepatitis B birth dose and the COVID booster). Six vaccines have been removed from routine use on the federal schedule. Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine official and head of its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, resigned in March 2025 citing Kennedy’s promotion of misinformation; the agency has since blocked publication of safety studies on COVID and shingles vaccines conducted by its own scientists.
The consequences are not theoretical. The 2025 U.S. measles case count of about 2,281 was the highest in a single year since 1991. The first quarter of 2026 alone has logged roughly 1,600 more. The Pan American Health Organization had scheduled an April 13 review of America’s measles elimination status, the first such review in twenty-six years; at Kennedy’s request it has been postponed to November, conveniently after the midterm elections.
The regime continues to run, simultaneously, ICE deployments in American cities, prosecutions of named enemies, two undeclared wars, a regional blockade, the dismantling of USAID, the gutting of PEPFAR (the deaths from which will accrue silently for years), and the choreographed accommodations with Orbán, Putin, and Netanyahu. The international order is being remade in the image of Mar-a-Lago, where a maître d’ decides who gets the good banquette and a developer decides whether your tower gets a permit. The Gilded Age comparison has been worn smooth from use. The more accurate analogy is the Borgia papacy. There, too, the family enterprise was indistinguishable from the office, the violence was an expression of the brand, and the loyalty test was the only credential that mattered, until the day it stopped being enough. Two and a half years feels both very short and very long. We are going to find out which.
But that “we” is doing a great deal of work, and the question of who “we” actually are is the one we have agreed not to ask. Not what is wrong with him, but what is wrong with the seventy-seven million people who voted for this, who woke up the morning after Maduro’s capture and felt patriotic, who watched the video of Pretti dying in the street and read in it not horror but a kind of vindication. These are not abstractions. They are people we know. The cousin who forwarded the Charlie Kirk memorial post. The neighbor who hung the flag with the silhouette and the rifles. The uncle who said at Thanksgiving that the tariffs were short-term pain. The colleague who explained, kindly, that the country needed to be “shaken up.” The donor who wrote the check and called it patriotism. The pastor who told the congregation God had a plan. The friend from college who said she just “didn’t care for Kamala.”
The polite consensus for the past decade has been that these people are reachable, that they have been misled, that with the right amount of empathy and the right podcast we will all eventually arrive together in some middle ground that has been waiting for us all along. The polite consensus has been wrong, and it is more wrong every year, and at some point the willingness to keep performing it stops being a virtue and starts being a kind of complicity. What is being done is being done because tens of millions of Americans vote for it, watch for it, donate for it, and stay silent about it. The country is not in this place because of one man. It is in this place because tens of millions of Americans took a long, careful look at him, in 2016, in 2020, and again in 2024, and decided yes not once but twice. The question is no longer what is wrong with him. The question is what is wrong with them. And we have to start asking it.
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What's wrong with them🤔 you ask? could it be that their like Trump, a bunch of bigots, of racists, of white nationalists, who simply love and adore what the cruelty and the facit of greed, exemplified by their God and what he does for them and that is hurt people not like themselves, either that and or, their brainwashed and braindead
I suppose you think Sleepy Joe did a great job. Our country is in much better shape under Trump. As they say, love it or leave it!