Trumpism Is Forever

“Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg famously ordered his employees at Facebook. His thought wasn’t original. “Inaction is death,” Benito Mussolini wrote nearly a century earlier. “Fascism is action in which doctrine is immanent.” Do first, think later—or perhaps not at all.

Clearly, the Trump Administration subscribes to rapid-fire governance. Not a day passes without some dramatic statement, shocking policy pronouncement or reversal, or a half-dozen of them. It’s not boring. Post-Biden, a White House that said and did things isn’t nothing. Whether and when the thrill ride yields to exhaustion remains to be seen.

The inspiration for the aggressive style of Trump’s second term derives from the George W. Bush years, when an anonymous White House official (reputed to be Karl Rove, who denied it) was quoted in The New York Times saying: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Triumph of the will, to coin a phrase. Bullies can bomb fishermen, kidnap the Venezuelan president, steal Gaza…who’s going to stop them, the Times editorial board?

The rub is, someone—dissident Republicans, the press, SCOTUS, street protests, something—would stop them, eventually. Which is where the second essential ingredient of the regime comes into play: Zuck’s breakneck speed, Il Duce’s cult of action. By the time your enemies begin to respond to today’s and tomorrow’s and the next day’s reality-creations, you’re on to new ones. What just happened and what is happening now is what people care about. Our overloaded brains can’t process last month’s outrages and the new shocks and the imminent horrors. New stuff gets thought about more than old stuff.

Authorized by a pile of executive orders and enabled by Democratic disarray, as well as a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, President Trump’s manic aggression has resulted in a year of policy changes whose number and sweep arguably match the scale of FDR’s first 100 days. He fired hundreds of thousands of federal employees through DOGE, declared war against DEI, transformed ICE from an immigration enforcement agency into a personal anonymous goon squad bigger and better-armed than most national armies, normalized paramilitaries and assassinations of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, abolished EPA regulations of greenhouse emissions and fuel efficiency for automobiles, launched a multifront trade war against scores of other countries, gutted the Affordable Care Act—I could go on, but you’re living it.

Trump’s agenda is as radical as Roosevelt’s. FDR told the American people they were entitled to basic social safety guarantees from their government; Reagan said we weren’t; Trump told us to be afraid, that it isn’t our government at all.

Democratic voters fantasize that President Newsom or Buttigieg or whoever will hit a hard reset on January 20, 2029, returning to the status quo ante Trumpus, but continuity is the norm. French revolutionaries moved into Louis XVI’s palaces, the Bolsheviks snatched the Czar’s digs and Joe Biden kept Trump’s Space Force and de facto tax hikes on homeowners living in Democratic states. Governments come and go, but their works endure.

Even the Nazis, a regime so thoroughly destroyed and discredited that it’s still illegal to display a swastika in Germany, live on through their works. No postwar German government suggested demolishing the autobahn or dismantling such Nazi-affiliated businesses as BASF, Hugo Boss, Allianz, BMW, Audi, VW, Porsche, Bayer or Mercedes-Benz. Aside from the remarkable fact that Germany was allowed to remain a nation-state, reunited and to assume a dominant position in the European Union (one of Hitler’s ideas), the 70 million-plus people killed by the Nazis, and the 400 million or more theoretical people who would otherwise have been descended from them, represent the ultimate fait accompli. The Nazis lost. Yet they’re still with us.

However his presidency ends, we will be living with Trump’s works long after he’s gone. Democrats will look more favorably upon an imperial presidency and more expansive presidential power once it’s their White House. Trump’s wars will become theirs. Turning their ideas and policy prescriptions into law will take precedence over knocking down Trump’s triumphal arches and scraping his name off public buildings. Democrats certainly won’t invite the undocumented immigrants deported by Trump to return to the United States.

Inertia wins.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)