Two months into the second Trump administration, the United States is in pure chaos mode. Tens of thousands of workers are fired one week and forcibly rehired the next. Tariffs rise and fall based not on strategy but on one man’s ire. Deportations fly in the face of judicial orders, careening the country toward a constitutional crisis. The only constant is the volatility itself.
On paper, that may be surprising. A central premise of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he is an apex businessman. Same with Elon Musk. The elevator pitch: Through the sheer force of their combined savvy, America will be saved from “bankruptcy”—or worse. There aren’t many Harvard Business School case studies, though, that suggest maximum instability is the path to success.
There’s plenty of Occam’s razor at work here: The US is wobbling wildly because its president and de facto CEO are some combination of self-serving and inept. But in between and among the absurdities, something darker takes shape. Inherent in every chaotic act is a challenge. Every outrage is a test.
In the meantime, the uncertainty has international consequences. Tourism has plummeted, as potential visitors cancel their trips to a country increasingly, openly hostile to noncitizens. Europe is rearming itself in the face of a heightened potential for conflict, as Ukraine becomes the fulcrum on which decades of solidarity between the US and Europe may pivot. Allies have considered sharing less intelligence with their US counterparts, given the Trump administration’s increasingly cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin.
It’s a heel turn worthy of a WWE Monday Night RAW plotline. But the US is not in the business of selling spectacle. Its value lies in its reliability. Instead it is now erratic, unpredictable. It’s messy. International politics is a relationship business; Donald Trump seems intent on undermining America’s relationships at every turn. (Well, except toward Moscow.)
There’s the slash-and-burn approach to budgeting, a seeming race to create a minimally viable government. The operative part of a turnaround plan is the “plan” part. Firing as many people as possible as quickly as possible—without apparent consideration for actual skills or value that they bring to the role—does not qualify as a plan. It’s just more instability.
The good news is that many of those employees are being reinstated, as the gears of the judiciary have slowly begun to turn. But that reinstatement itself may prove temporary, depending on what higher courts say. And even if those workers do come back, how motivated will they be to stay now that they know how their employer views their worth?
More to the point, who would go work for the US government in its current state? Civil service doesn’t pay great, but at least you get to feel like you’re serving a higher calling with a side order of job security. The only callings being served right now are Donald Trump’s retribution tour and Elon Musk’s amateur hour AI jamboree. Eventually they’ll run out of SpaceX interns to hire.
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