Trump’s cabinet: Anarchy at the heart of it

Since 2015 my Israeli family, business partners and friends have been asking me about Donald Trump. Now that we can all see the results of his Iran war I thought it a good time to recap what I have always believed about our President and the people he surrounds himself with.

It’s been almost eleven years since Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced his presidential run. The country at large and its media are still struggling to understand what that meant.

Two recent pieces of evidence cast doubt on the Cabinet: one is Frank Bruni’s NY Times op-ed, “We are being governed by unserious people.” The other is representative Jamie Raskin recently speaking about Kash Patel: “The public has understood for a long time [he] is just not qualified for the job and is nothing but a political sycophant and flunky for Donald Trump.” Bruni goes down the laundry list of Trump’s cabinet, describing each one’s personal and policy failures.

These two are not alone in misunderstanding the Cabinet appointments. The Democrats and most of the media miss the point… which is that every one of Trump’s picks was assigned the job to degrade or dismantle their agency. Pam Bondi was chosen to dismantle the Justice Department, as was Lee Zeldin at the EPA, and RFK at Health and Welfare. For sure Pete Hegesmeth was assigned and relished the task of dismantling the Defense Department, even getting to rename it.

Since 2015, I have been pleading that to understand Trump and MAGA, one needs to go back to 1917 and how the Russian anarchists played a role in overthrowing the established political order. The deep state was not a term in use then; rather, it was Tsarist autocracy (or tsarskoye samoderzhaviye). But the goal then was the same as Trump’s, anarchy.

In 2015, when the coastal journalists sat in flyover state diners to interview Trump supporters, they reported back that the most common theme was Trump voters’ desire to “blow it up” and “drain the swamp.” Fine-tuning, or even radical reform, was not on their political minds. Utter and total destruction of the status quo was. The result was the shocking election of Trump—who, to say the least, ran an unconventional campaign, replete with previously-unheard-of statements about women, immigrants, and John McCain. Clearly the voters were eager to throw the baby of normalcy out with the bathwater of elementary candidate decorum.

As Trump has repeatedly lamented, his first term was hamstrung by his inexperience in Washington. In this governance miasma, he relied on establishment personnel to run his Cabinet. Seeing his anarchist, blow-it-up intentions, they formed a blocking brigade and withheld information from him, pleaded for moderation, or just ignored his wishes.

And what did that get Trump? A 2020 defeat brought back the wounded establishment, under Biden able to quickly replenish the swamp and glue back the pieces of statecraft. Lesson learned.

Next time, the gloves would come off and Trump would honor his word, presenting his voters with the dynamite they demanded. Cowering and in shock at Trump winning even the popular vote, the remains of the Republican establishment exhibited a profile of cowardness worthy of a rewrite of the original Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage.” One Senator, in voting for Trump’s manifestly anarchistic radical Cabinet picks, observed, “This is Trump’s Washington.”

From day one, each and every Secretary sought to dismantle their respective domains. It was not a refurbishment crew, but a demolition one. Some were more honest than others. Credit for forthrightness must go to Education secretary Linda McMahon, whose stated goal was to completely eliminate her agency.

In the House of Representatives, Trump had a cheering section reveling in the anarchy: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and even the Freedom Caucus’s Chip Roy envisioned a new world. The Russian anarchists of 1917 did not have chainsaws, only bombs, but Musk’s DOGE use of the chainsaw prop served the same effect.

Every single day brings new evidence the true goal of Trump’s governance is chaos. Trump’s statements make no sense in the first place, then are reversed a day later. Rationales for military actions are contradicted just hours later. Lawsuits get filed and courts have to reverse unintelligible policies.

All this anarchy is exhausting, and polls are now showing Trump approval ratings at a low water mark.

How we got here is the interesting part. It can be chalked up to one man and one broadcasting outlet: Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. They created the medium that incubated the belief that chaos was needed.

Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and Fox News bombed the airwaves 24/7 with the narrative that our government was irredeemably broken. That its incompetence was fatal. The continual hysteria from Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and the worst of all, Lou Dobbs, shifted the national consciousness by instilling a hopelessness—a despair that could only be lifted by radical action. Action so extreme that Trump, with hundreds of disqualifying traits, would seem a savior of the nation.

Today, more than a decade later, dozens of news sites bring me stories of Trump’s inanity, corruption, and incompetence. They mock the heads of the agencies with cute meme nicknames and point out their foibles. The Democrats send me daily text messages explaining some new outrage Trump and the GOP are perpetrating.

All of this is to be expected, but it does not address the underlying motivation of Trump’s Washington. The goal of anarchistic chaos has been achieved, and the president is reveling in it. The inchoate Trump “weave” is to anarchists what “om” is to yoga practitioners…harmonious sounds to their ears.

So until and unless we address that Trump is an anarchist (not a conservative or a right-wing politician), all that will happen is political sniping around the edges, as if “the midterms” could restore some form of national sanity. Highly unlikely in a country that wanted the Donald as its standard-bearer.

This is The Joker presidency—and America is Gotham. Israel is the witness. Doubtful it will be a full beneficiary.