Welcome to your weekly Winner & Loser horn-of-plenty. This is your look at the people behind the chaos.
There was a phrase used to describe Trump’s early strategy — Ezra Klein used it all the time: Muzzle velocity. On January 20th, Trump’s bad ideas came out of the administration like shot from a shotgun. It meant that none of us on the left, center left, center, or center right had any hope of keeping up.
The first 100 days was chaos in all realms. DOGE. Executive orders. Lawsuits. Kidnappings. Illegal flights to foreign gulags. The absolute evisceration of the agencies and programs that kept us — and the world — safe and healthy.
I remember saying, I can’t believe it’s only been a hundred days. I’m still saying some version of that. I can’t believe we’re not even in the fourth quarter of his second first year in office.
The problem with muzzle velocity as a way to describe the past eight months is that shotgun blasts, well, they happen and then they’re over. The little BBs find their mark or they fall back to Earth. But every single day of Trump’s second term has featured an acceleration in the chaos.
A more apt way to describe what’s happening is The Fascist Big Bang.
After the actual Big Bang, astronomers always assumed that the universe would eventually slow down its outward expansion and, over billions and billions of years, compress itself neatly back into its tiny embryo. But it’s not doing that. The universe’s expansion is actually accelerating, which surprised astronomers because — at least on the surface — that sorta breaks the laws of physics.
Similarly, Trump is breaking the laws of American political physics in the way that all Fascist Big Bangs do. So far, there is no equal but opposite force in place to slow him down. At the current trajectory, our Democracy will never put its pieces neatly back together. Chaos will not return to order.