What The Hell America!

The big question for Trump is, what has it all amounted to? If we take the goals the president and his allies have outlined seriously — curbing US debt and government waste, bringing down prices, ending wars, restoring US domestic industry for the betterment of the “forgotten” American, and restoring American “greatness” on the world stage — then the results so far have been lackluster.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has failed miserably at actually cutting spending or finding waste, with US spending actually having increased from last year, and DOGE having cut a mere fraction of what he had first promised, making what could only generously be called a nick in the mountain of US debt, and its savings more or less canceled out by the costs involved in carrying out the mass firings alone. It has instead been a vehicle for the billionaire megadonor’s self-dealing, eliminating regulators he clashed with, letting himself off the hook for government fines, and opening up federal contracting opportunities for his firms.

In some cases, Trump is actually adding waste and fraud to federal spending. The president is planning to, for the first time, push the notoriously wasteful Pentagon budget past the trillion-dollar mark. He is dramatically upping government payments for the Medicare Advantage program, which has for years been rampantly defrauded by private insurance companies who see it as a bottomless feeding trough.

Prices for everything from groceries and health care to electricity bills and housing costs are as high as they were when Biden was in office, if not higher, with few steps taken to bring them down besides the mass deportations Trump told voters would solve all the nation’s ills. In fact, Trump’s tariffs are set to make prices for almost everything much, much higher, while his dismantling of federal agencies is undermining efforts to take on corporate price gouging.

Speaking of the tariffs, Trump’s trade policies might be the biggest failure of this period, given that they are the part of his agenda where he might have done some tangible good. Instead, as has been outlined at length, the president’s tariffs have fallen short on its own terms.

They have failed to produce even a single new trade deal; they have already plunged the largely pro-Trump farming sector into crisis; they are already causing job losses and edging the country toward an economic crisis; and they have, together with Trump and his officials’ other behavior on the world stage, served as a devastating self-inflicted blow to US global power and a boon to China and other rivals. Worst of all, they are hindering, not advancing, the revival of US manufacturing. While Trump has succeeded in forcing Apple to pull iPhone production out of China, it hasn’t moved its operations to the United States, but simply off-shored it to a third country, India.

In fact, the chaotic, less-than-strategic way they have been rolled out has not just turned US public opinion against tariffs, but is turning Americans back into free traders. The biggest thing that transformational right-wing leaders like Ronald Reagan achieved was a long-term shift in public opinion in favor of free trade that even his liberal opponents went along with.

But if the pattern of Trump’s first hundred days continues, his second term, like his first, will have the opposite effect, potentially pushing the country into a more liberal, even progressive direction. Across numerous polls, Trump is underwater on public approval on everything from trade, the economy, and inflation — a grim accomplishment for a president who has always counted on his strong economic approval rating — to foreign policy, health care, and immigration.

The last one is particularly notable, since it remains Trump’s strongest issue. Yet the public is clearly not impressed with how the president has tackled immigration, making the poster children of his immigration enforcement not gang members and other violent criminals, but a series of permanent residents, sympathetic visa holders from friendly countries, a father of three legally in the country, and even a two-year-old American citizen. If the public comes to associate Trump’s mass deportation program with the banishment of US citizens, free speech crackdowns, and the removal of lawful immigrants, his first three months may lay the foundation for another leftward shift on immigration policy.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy, Trump has so far failed to be the “peacemaker” that he announced he wanted to be. After a promising start, putting the kind of pressure on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Biden had refused to do to produce a cease-fire in Gaza, Trump closes his first hundred days increasingly looking like his predecessor, only worse: giving in to Netanyahu and allowing him to resume his killing on an even bigger scale, restarting an even bigger and more wasteful (and unconstitutional) war on Yemen, drifting toward a conflict with China that would parallel Biden’s own Ukraine debacle, and inching toward war with Iran thanks to both Israeli leadership and his own internal saboteurs.

But this is all based on the idea that Trump and his team’s public rhetoric reflects the actual aims and intentions of those running the administration.

If we take at face value, say, the claim that Trump’s mass cost-cutting plan is about curbing government spending, cutting debt, and rooting out waste, then it has been an abject failure. But if we understand that rhetoric as political cover for what it really is — namely, an ideological crusade and ruling-class project to dismantle the modern American state driven by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, anti-government zealot Russell Vought — then it has been a roaring triumph.

Destroying the essential government functions that keep corporate power in check and make modern life hum, it turns out, doesn’t need a generational political shift or a durable, years-long political consensus. It doesn’t need management of public opinion or even competence. All it needs is speed, people ready to break things, and a leader who will let them. Though Trump’s cuts, carried out by Musk and DOGE, have proven toxically unpopular, even if the president drastically changed course now or the courts reined him in, it would be too late to undo the damage that’s been done.

Some of that damage is already being felt, as Social Security recipients are declared dead or forced to sit on the phone for hours, and predatory firms are left off the hook. But much of it won’t be felt or properly understood for months or even years, as aviation regulation is left understaffed, food and drug testing stops, cybersecurity protecting people’s most private information is undermined, and tax collection, postal deliveries, and the research and development that makes medical miracles and other scientific breakthroughs possible are all crippled. If mass layoffs stopped now, the nearly 300,000 federal workers fired — and counting — are a monumental loss of institutional knowledge that will not come back, and may not even be eventually replaced, now that job seekers know government employment may last only as long as the next election.

That this is weakening Trump and undermining what is meant to be his larger political project — both by making him ever more unpopular, and by hollowing out the offices responsible for doling out manufacturing subsidies and for negotiating down drug prices, for instance — doesn’t matter. For ideologues like Vought, who see Trump’s presidency as a vehicle to advance the unpopular goals they could never get through the actual democratic process, this has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that has done in three months what they spent decades failing to do through Congress.

You could say the same thing for issue areas like health care or foreign policy. The dissonance between the president’s rhetoric and the actual, increasingly awry direction that policy is going on those fronts is only a failure if you assume the results are undesirable to those in charge of it. But the fact that the United States is slowly being dragged into multiple disastrous potential wars is just fine with the people Trump appointed to run his foreign policy, almost all of whom are long-standing Washington war hawks.

These are the real winners of Trump’s first hundred days. The president himself might be in the doldrums and only sinking lower; those segments of his coalition who hoped they could turn the GOP and conservatism into a genuine force for populist, working-class politics might be bitterly disappointed. But those parts of the old-guard Republican establishment who hate government and love endless war seem to be getting exactly what they wanted out of it.